I would reproduce this painting by Juan Gris if I could, since it gives quite a good idea of the view from my current atelier on the Bay of All Saints. I like this atelier very much and I am tempted to think I should acquire a similar one here, if I could.
I taught this course on Cubist poetry last semester and I now realize it has utterly changed my writing style. I used to write in a lapidary, but linear way. Now I cover the whole canvas quickly, and then go back to add additional layers.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Me, I just kind of wander around, flaneur style, picking up this and that.
Which is the best way, really, and when done well, has rigor people don’t realize.
I might be under the influence of Jennifer, too. Notice how she goes over and over things, and they get deeper over the months.
It was school and time constraints that taught me to be so linear.
Well, Jennifer is a scholar. I am not.
And I am relearning that it is OK to be a scholar … after all this time being shamed for it (if I was seen to be one) or being told I couldn’t be one (girls, you know).
I saw something about writing dissertations today and they kept saying finish, finish, finish (although they also said cite everything). I think I’ve been pushed ahead too much, and unnecessarily — I was never slow/behind/lazy and so on.
I think it was rebellion against that finish finish finish don’t think don’t explore that put me on strike. Too much encouragement to be a factory, but without a sense of self: I don’t mind writing and publishing a lot, and having lots of deadlines and things, and not having every piece contain the universe or even my best work, but I do mind producing for someone else’s ego and having an editor other than myself on my shoulder 100% of the time.
I find it really luxurious to really do scholarship, and also to really think about writing in a serious-but-flaneuresque type of way. I had that external editor on my shoulder for so long.
I might be under the influence of Jennifer, too. Notice how she goes over and over things, and they get deeper over the months.
They get deeper, but they also get simpler. So, now I can very clearly see how the logic of shamanism is interlinked. “Facing death” frees the ego from its social and ideological contraints, which enables it to recapitulate the past in such a way that one transcends not only one’s psychological limitations (eg. the unconscious habit of deference to authority, which would have been hard to resist as a child in the thrall of adults), but one also gets to make oneself anew, by accessing the lava-like heat and creative power of the “lizard brain”. Furthermore, by retracing one’s early developmental processes, but now with a more mature mind, one is able to understand that evasive notion of “human nature” so much better. Like I said, one particularly understands the little, unconscious deferential tendencies one has developed, as so one overcomes them by virtue of seeing more clearly the damage they do. So the whole of shamanism has a simple internal logic involving:
1. gaining internal freedom by facing death
2. “recapitulation” — involving the dissolution of weak aspects of the character structure and regeneration along stronger lines.
3. knowledge of self and how human identity is formed.
These are all logically (specifically, psychologically) interlinked, and straightforward.
Gets simpler, yes.
On shamanic regression, I really think I had done it before, but naively let Reeducation in on that.
I really think I need to do it again and I think this Brazilian town is a power point for it.
Hm.
Never create a bridge between you and others of a lower level of consciousness. Never do it. You have to realise that they are feeders who cannot create their own spontaneity or joy in existence, and so troll around trying to feed off those of us who can. The most common way they do this is by trying to trick you into explaining yourself. Once you begin to do that, they can start to feed.
Jen,
You really need to get out, girl, and let down the guard. What I am reading in you is recycled Ayn Rand individualism gone berserk. You have let an academic, un-real world ideology take possession of you, and define your view on reality. Part of the problem with the academic, book-smart iuntelligentsia is that few to no people in the real world are listening to them. Just so long as they condign themselves to do-not-touch-me ideological pronunciamentos, clogged with indigestible and boringly tedious analyses of reality, anyone who has better things to do than listen to us stops listening to us. And there we stand, stuck with our ideologies all alone. Nothing solved. We have convinced ourselves that we are (still) smarter than anyone else on the block.
Jen, the world is on fire and the neocon fools who gave us Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the meltdown of the US economy are still calling the shots.Yes, ma’am, we in the US have a new Prez, but the same guys are still in charge, be they in the Treasury Office, in Bank of America, in the NYSE, or in the health insurance community. I would advise all purported intellectuals and literary guides for the unwashed multitude to get off your hobby horses learned in the seminar room, and talk about the real villains, the real issues which are facing people today. People who are being foreclosed from their residences, who don’t have meaningful health insurance, who are trapped in the lower depths of working poverty, whose only options are to go off and fight in pointless wars and be mailed home in pine boxes. That is reality. God!! That is what we should be talking about.
Mark, on this blog please do not make offensive personal remarks to people as you do here. Please note as well that my name is not Doc, nor is Jennifer’s Jen. I am warning you — you have some troll like qualities, I already don’t publish many of your comments, and I am considering banning you from this site.
Paragraph one is ridiculous. Paragraph two, fine, but it’s not the topic of this post. There are a lot of other posts, on this blog and elsewhere, about the current political situation.
Hello Mark!
Who are you? You are very interested in Ayn Rand, are you my fellowmelad?
I have never read her myself. Do you recommend that I do?
Do you live in America?
What is life like there?
How are you getting along, old buddy?
(I realise that we have never met, not even online, but somehow we seem like old friends!)
“Never create a bridge between you and others of a lower level of consciousness. Never do it. You have to realise that they are feeders who cannot create their own spontaneity or joy in existence, and so troll around trying to feed off those of us who can. The most common way they do this is by trying to trick you into explaining yourself. Once you begin to do that, they can start to feed.”
Quite right. I repeatedly think that all they need is a hand up, and it really isn’t true — those who just need a hand up are a different set.
It’s very funny, but as I advance with this shamanism thing, the more I see that most people attack through projection. The interpellate you as the thing they need you to be, which is often a punching bag of some sort. Before I knew myself as well as I did now, I used to think there might be something in the projections — that these others might have been seeing something in me more keenly than I could recognise it in myself. However, thorough shamanist recapitulation makes it very very clear what you are and what you are not. Above all, it empties you, in a way, so that whilst understanding the various manifestations of yourself — how you have been interpellated to play certain roles in the past — you don’t actually identify with even who you actually were, back then. It is as if you can see the emptiness behind the apparent concreteness of it all.
This, in turn, means that there is no need to walk around stiffly, as if you had to protect a certain kind of identity against the onslaught of others. Instead, you realise that any and all identities are just images in various people’s minds, giving the impression of something existing in a way that is misleading.
For, how could I possibly be the product of somebody else’s interpellation, fixed in time and space by their perception, when I am in fact broader and deeper than that?
What others see does not actually exist — at least not as they see it — and even if I were to will myself into having a more concrete, enduring and “real” existence than the one I now have, I would be unable to give myself the narrowness and the predictability that others might expect from me. That narrowness and easy-identifiability belongs to the world of illusion and projections. I’m not there. I’m behind the screen, the illusion, and my natural exhuberance will take me far away from scene of the narrow illusion at any time.
I think people who talk about “letting down your guard” have no concept of how natural and relaxing it is to experience the world in a shamanised way.
What’s odd is that this for some reason is why I’ve always been so comfortable in Brazil.
Not at the very first, of course: precisely because this is the place in which I had the most intense experience of being projected into, ever.
I was blindingly angry about it at the time and came to the only possible conclusion: I, any form of the actual I, could not be seen.
I then escaped from everyone I initially knew: changed graduate advisors and neighborhoods, and refused to take seriously anyone except these three friends I had made because they didn’t do the projection thing for one entire year.
Then I realized that the majority of people here don’t deal in projection at all, at least not that they let you see (which is good enough for me).
It still works: I get here and instantly start feeling normal. This may be an effect of national, class, and race privilege — I am sure that plays a part — but I think it’s a superficial one; I think a lot of these people really are shamanized somehow.
*
On letting your guard down — I find mine is down too much, at least in most states and countries. My expectations of people are too high, I don’t expect all the weird projections and things they do.
However here, I do find that dropping guard actually gives greater strength.
I’m glad you’re finding some reprieve in Brazil. There are some cultures that project less than others for sure. Those who are more tolerant of what is in Western culture pejoratively known as “irrationality” tend to own their irrationality more, so there is less need to project. They may not be shamanised as such, but their underlying spirit is nonetheless shamanistic.
What I consider about the term, “letting down one’s guard” is that it pertains to a way of thinking that an ego-oriented position is the only possible one. This is untrue.
So long as I am well-balanced on the inside — that is I have no need to project or to succumb to projections in order to make myself tangible, real and palpable to the public — I am perfectly well defended without having any guard position whatsoever. One does not need to defend oneself from a punch that is already bound to miss. One can escape projections simply by being oneself.
This means, I think, that one must be oneself all the time. I think the cultures in which you have to keep your guard up are the ones which require you not to be yourself. Here I think a lot of people actually hide a lot of who they are, or choose not to share it — but that’s not the same as not being it.
The first time I seriously encountered a situation like that that I couldn’t get away from was my first academic job. My friend, slightly more experienced, confirmed that it was because “they really want your blood, and they won’t stop until they get some.”
One should be oneself all the time, but it is very important to evaluate people concerning the levels of intimacy that they deserve. My point is not to be the one to extend the levels of intimacy unless the other person has actually concretely proven that they deserve it. It mustn’t be on the basis of blackmail, cajoling, loneliness, experimentation (unless one really knows that it is dangerous experimentation) or anything else, apart from the fact of the person having proven their worthiness.
This is the only way to get things back on an aristocratic footing and away from the influence of lizard brain.
These things are all true, and I’ve done it to cajole.
I’ve also had it forced out of me — not blackmailed, forced — and I wonder in those situations if there’s any escape possible except actual escape (i.e. leave situation entirely).
I’m thinking about these bourgeois college jobs and what they require of you in terms of intimacy and identity.
I think some jobs are insidious. It is as if there is a deliberate project instigated by everyone within the system to break down your defences, so as to make you somehow a body without any executive power — effectively without a mind. I am sure that this it to make you exploitable at the maximum level. In this case what you are being exploited for is your capacity to emit emotion, decontextualised and without personal meaning. Others, who have lost the capacity to experience emotion, feed on this.
But what we are talking about, so far as I can tell, is the state of society/culture in general. Zizek is very, very wrong that gender is no longer an important or key issue. He is immune from gender discrimination just because he is male, and he naturalises gender discrimination, I suspect, because Lacan does. Could I be as bombastic as he is and speak so openly and with such public reward? It is certainly within me to do so, but women being themselves in this way attracts too much negativity, rather than positive reactions.
This negativity towards women, that keeps them out of public life, except in insignificant ways is also pragmatic. How can they become the body that emits emotions for others to feed off, if they are speaking freely and spontaneously for themselves?
Very good points!!!
Related — a friend says you can choose not to be projected into/not to internalize. He may be right but what I see him actually doing is just being sort of … stolid, like a guy. I am not sure.
*****
(The most dysfunctional thing I do, for sure, is accept roles people insist I take on with the idea that they’ll then see it was a bad idea and release me, and learn. This is deeply messed up.)
There is one fundamental which determines whether or not you can choose not to be projected into. Do you have an independent source of income, apart from the situation that seems intent on blackmailing you? If so, then accommodating the projection is not a matter of survival and you can resist it easily. But if refusing the projection means that one jeopardises one’s capacity to survive by earning a living, then one will find it almost impossible to refuse the projection. One will internalise it for sure.
There’s the key!