… a series of lessons in how to perfect absolute sadism toward oneself, particularly one’s intellectual self.
No right to exist / to be who one was.
No right to enjoy life.
No right to think.
No right to trust one’s perceptions.
Academic and professional success reencoded as failure.
No right to power in one’s own life.
A requirement to feel all pain as sharply as possible, to exacerbate it, to not move on from it, so as to prove to Reeducation that one could in fact “feel.”
I still struggle with these things every day, particularly every academic day, and I have to write them down to look at them so I can see how ridiculous they are. Especially in Maringouin — Reeducation’s territory, where its values lie — I still have trouble remembering that one really can relax and enjoy life and go ahead and do things like a person, and is not required to question oneself, criticize oneself and second guess oneself all the time. One is truly not.
*
When not to be a professor: when the conditions in which you are to be one, are antithetical to being one. When the environment is abusive and you do not have strong enough means of protection and relief. (Is academia like a cult, and if so, are the military, the medical profession, and so on not?) Yet I like my project and some of my classes and several aspects of my life.
*
I would be happier if I worked harder. The reason I have not worked harder since Reeducation is that I feel guilty about my interest in work — this did not please Reeducation — and because I am afraid. I am afraid because in Reeducation to work and be interested in work triggered abuse. I also learned in Reeducation to be much more viciously abusive toward myself than I had ever been — and to “disrespect” my work. So it is always scary to be working, and hard to start working, because I am afraid of the price in self abuse I may have to pay for this.
The triple bind. Guilt about work because I am interested in something that hurts Reeducation so. Guilt about not getting enough done. Guilt toward myself for mistreating myself.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I do feel that my martial arts training gives me some advantage in that kind of thing, about fear, anyway. It is effectively training to operate under fear and under pressure as if the fear and pressure were very minimal. I’m not sure that this is entirely normalising, though. It’s a solution. To push oneself in this way sometimes makes the mind and body recoil afterwards: “What is it you did to me?” But it is always the better solution than not pushing oneself, I find.
However, this is not about sadism — it is about mastery and pleasure.
AH, but in Reeducation you can’t have mastery or pleasure — you have to be a torture victim!
I am one of those who really should carry cyanide tablets around in case of arrest and deportation to the gulag — I think torture would drive me insane even before it started, and I wouldn’t recover. This isn’t fear like fear of a battle or something normal like that. It’s about superbly fine-tuned extreme intolerable torture. The only way to deal is to figure out how to turn it off, since it’s essentially self generated. That’s what the blog is for — turning off Reeducation, piece by piece … (actually this post is a few months older than some that have just come up in real time).
Because it’s really Reeducation that is the opponent … not the work.
AH, but in Reeducation you can’t have mastery or pleasure — you have to be a torture victim!
Yes. And I think there is something to be said for the negative attitudes that many have towards boxing and suchlike, that they presume it to be some kind of crypto-masochism (or sadism).
Here is what it really is.
Yes — I figured this all out about boxing because of discussions around the former Cassius Clay but that piece makes me think I should consider boxing.
I find that the intensity of the sport makes me put everything else into context. I don’t do full contact and I don’t recommend it either, unless you are athletic and/or young. Really what you want from the sport is a mental workout.
Mental workout, that’s what I do ceramics for. I was seriously thinking boxing could be a useful form of yoga. It is very unlike anything I’ve ever thought I would or could do.
Why would it be like yoga?
It has a level of intensity that yoga doesn’t have. If you give it your everything, you feel like you’re in a giant washing machine, with various bits getting scrambled, and then becoming unscrambled once you cease.
The thing on academia being like a cult (I don’t think it is, all that much, from my present experience), reminds me a bit of sections form the black insider:
“The Faculty itself is small when seen from the outside; but inside it is stupendously labyrinthine with its infinite ramifications or little nooks of rooms, some of which are bricked up to isolate forever the rotten corpses within. […]
“The people in the house are all refugees in one way or another; exiles from the war out there. Wanderers from some unknown trouble. All pilgrims at the shrine of the plague. The place stinks of psychological wounds, which gives it a human fragrance.” (p 25)
Yes, Borges + what a friend used to say: we (in graduate school) were the “walking wounded.”
On Reeducation — the other thing that occurs to me about it is that with all the ideas about scripting behavior, all the self questioning, and so on, it put a huge layer of [fog] between oneself and just living. In this way it mirrored addiction — this sort of blanket that took up time, distorted things, made life hard.
Reading the point of view of the Satanic Reds, again, and realising that these are old writings that speak largely from intuition (which is fine) but that there are errors of a culturally specific sort, and errors of generalisation and of category error — attributing evil, in one case, to people who are simple — I still think that one, underlying point they make is worth remembering. It’s that those who are not functioning well do like the busy work of trying to improve themselves. The rest of us are prone to spontaneous deviations. But the so called “evil” people are winning, or have won. Now they’ve got us all to try to be as unnatural as they are, or we simply won’t be able to earn money for ourselves.
Those who *aren’t* functioning well doing *busy work* — that’s it!
Yoga – physical/mental practice. But boxing would be different, yes, which is of interest.
You need a certain amount of physicality for it. It’s more like squash. Take it on if you want a challenge.
I’m interested in getting physicality from it. I am not saying I am actually starting at any particular time! But I think it or something like it would be good for me. A great workout, and precise, and an activity wherein it is not *wrong* to actually attack and defend openly (unlike the regular passive aggressive world we are forced to inhabit most of the time).
Yes, it is necessary to be very precise. The thing is you could learn so much from boxing that it will take you right out of the zone of middle class sticky white morality, altogether. And during the middle stages of this process, before you have developed even more complex boxing techniques pertaining to the quality of mind that does not relay its tactics, you could find that the gap between the two ways of thinking makes you worried.
And also this (which echos a comment in moderation somewhere)…
Something you said about the danger others see in your originality, plus something related to my research on the Cassandra complex, yesterday, and quite a few experiences, too, leads me to an interesting conclusion.
It seems to me that typically Western society teaches people to confuse intellectual intuition (pattern recognition) with one of the worst stereotypical attributes of “femininity” — hysteria.
I realised this a bit yesterday in discovering one 1970s clinical interpretation of the “Cassandra Complex” that was expressed in terms of how some women might react to living with a very “Appolinarian” man – ie one who is not inclined to express affection, but to remain in a mode of hyper-rationality. The explanation said that women with this complex could manifest some “hysterical symptoms”.
So this is interesting enough, and I think very Western. When Marechera talks about his Cassandra complex, he is talking about his well developed intuition — a very mature, and schooled intuition, and NOT at all the state of being vaguely and confusedly “anxious about the future” (this second take on the Cassandra complex is Kleinian).
But do you see what conventional Western thinking has done? It has reduced the faculty of intuition — the prime mechanism behind original intellectual thought — to “feeling”/”hysteria” and “anxiety”.
No wonder all good Westerners want to see intuition hounded out of the house!
And really it explains a lot of male reactions to me when they fall into stereotyped modes of thinking about women and about intuition. It’s NOT a particularly feminine or feeling attribute at all, and those who expect, that because I express myself in intuitive ways — that is, I generate hypotheses — that I am somehow vulnerable and sensitive, will generally find their tenderest feelings hurt by me (since I am not very sensitive, or easily swaying or very feeling oriented at all).
Yes, I’ve got good intuition and logic, a useful combination actually, and these were called panic — although had I been a field general and gotten to use them in combination with some actual military training, they’d have called me a battlefield genius. 😉
One of the things about me — I don’t express anything approximating panic, even when most people would do. So it is very transparent to me that if I am considered to be, let us say, in the mode of panicking, or expressing some irrational state of mind, this is a projection of the westerners concerned.
I think my depth of understanding of this has very much to do with the way I was brought up, in a culture of stoicism, where nobody was ever treated as if they were panicking (although, perhaps they were panicking, who knows?)
But not being treated as if you were panicking means that panicking is not an option. I do not see the world in those terms.
In addition: another key misunderstanding by, of, and from Reeducation was about plasticity and flexibility. It assumed rigidity and would lecture about having to become more flexible. But if you tell an already flexible and plastic person to get yet more flexible and plastic you can turn them into jelly.
Yes. So it is a projection of the needs of very different others.
I remember when my father used to come by and shout something like “you are afraid of everything”, and it made me wonder what it exactly he was afraid of, and how it was he came to be afraid of everything. I certainly wasn’t afraid of everything, just very, very miffed, at the way society had treated me. But he? He was afraid of everything — he told me so.
Also, I think that with the standard “one size fits all” ideology that pertains to treating the proletariat in any sense — whether with medicine, with psychological counselling, or with education — it is very difficult for people in general to understand that we are all at different developmental stages, in different parts of our lives, and that we all speak the language of those developmental stages.
I, for one, have found it very difficult to be able to find language that conveys this discovery. It seems my use of language becomes quite inconsistent when I try to relate how one passes through different levels and uses “hard” and “soft” in different ways.
For instance, to BE ABLE to take a “soft” approach is one of the indications of a higher level of skill in martial arts. Similarly, one must go towards becoming more fluid once one has mastered the more direct and “hard” techniques of training. To go towards liquidity before one has become hard is to abort one’s own developmental process.
Well I can feel athleticism coming on. Part of acquiescing to Reeducation meant trying to lose power, and one of the things I did was essentially stop working out. I’ve gotten older in the meantime, too, and it really is amazing how much power I’ve lost.
But I’ve been working out this week and it is similarly amazing how much more power and mental space you can get in a short amount of time.
Apparently in the fall I am going to learn to shoot. It seems that to do this you have to work with breath.
a powerful body is a good feeling to have.
Just getting back here after not having very good internet connections lately. Just watch Sotomayor. There is a wonderful model for serious women.
Welcome home, Hattie! I wish I’d had a chance to watch the hearings — I have heard they were very instructive in that way. I’ll have to find them in some archive, because I am sure I would learn a lot by watching.