draft chapter eleven: my father's memoir
Many influences were those of my early life. I kept coming up against that my name depended on who knew who I was. For example my step father would say that my name was Peter Francis foster Armstrong, and that was because I was adopted - the foster part. The point is that young kids need stability. They need to know what they can rely on. Don't tell them stuff they can't rely on. It's no use to them at all. Then, my father decided I ought to go to boarding school, a very English habit, although not exactly Rhodesian. Boarding school is a bad place for people who are insecure. Every single kid in there hated it. They coped by becoming very aggressive and beating up anyone weaker. I looked around for something to give me a feeling of permanence and all that seemed permanent was my depression. I clung to my depression.
Achieving permanence of some sort became my philosophy for a while. I became very gloomy. If I felt lost, I would just revert to my sadness. When you're at boarding school, you're getting knocked around all the time. It's not hard to find something to be sad about. Just being left at the boarding school, away from home, wasn't a good feeling. Even at home, I felt I couldn't rely on my parents. They were both unpredictable. My father could be very hurtful. He was a bit messed up. My mother would suddenly start beating the hell out of me. I can only guess she was feeling uptight. She'd had a hard life. When she remarried, and I don't think it was a very happy marriage. Dad insisted on taking control and he was a very negative person, pedantic, perfectionist and fastidious. He was verbally abusive. Mum used to hit.
After school, I would walk around our garden. We had five acres. My parents had put a lot of work into the garden and it sort of contained their personalities in the garden. I noticed that as I walked around, I'd come across the water pump, pumping water out the ground. As I looked at it, I would remember all the agony they'd undergone to put it in there, and in a way the water pump became filled with their personalities. If I wanted to relate to my parents, I would look at the water pump. Since I found I could get stability from objects, in a trivial way, I took to stealing. I would help myself to sticks of a chalk as I wanted those colours.
In boarding school you had to have a rest every afternoon. From our lunch, which would be about two o'clock, you had to go lie on your bed,and no talking was allowed. You had to be there until three o'clock, at which time a bell would go and you could get up and do your thing. I read books. I actually remember the day I realised I could read. The teacher was away and I was sent to another classroom. I sat down with a book and I went though all the processes of sounding out the words in my mind, and slowly began to make sense off all the words. When I got to the end of the first story, I was excited. The mystery of the disappearing cat. From then on, I started to read.
I learned to link certain situations with experiences I had. If the story involved Christmas, I visualised my family at christmas and built the story around it. For me, reading was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. If the story was too exciting, I'd get all wound up, because I'd become part of it. Almost every story became exciting. By the time I was ten or twelve, I thought I could fly a plane, since every time I read a book about flight attendant Bigglesworth, I would envision myself flying all these planes. By contrast, arithmetic was absolutely awful, because if couldn't visualise myself in it. In a book about a world war two guy who escaped in italy, he was shot. In my mind, I made it so real, that I woke up with vomit down my side.
When I was about eight my parents next off some place and left me for about four hours. While they were gone, I suddenly saw flames on top of a hill next to us. These flames were twice the height of a house. The only time I'd seen smoke coming off from anything was a train. When my mother came back, I told her there was a train going over the top of the hill. It was a bush fire, but it could have been a train, as I used to hear train noises at times. There was plenty to cause fear.
I was sent to bed at eight and the noises would start. One was a steam train in the distance. Our house was an amateur building job with a thatched roof. The thatch was laid on wires. There were lots of geckos. During the night, the temperature changed and the wires would strum like guitar strings.
Gyn ecology & the nature of advanced society
I would say that my biology has given me a particular induction into pain to which many, particularly males, will not be privy. I have, for a long time, been aware of extreme violence as an unavoidable part of life. Violence has long been established as the baseline of my capacity to experience the world. I've learned, as it were, to take my gulps of air from life quickly, because ultimately one is submerged in pain beyond belief. The oral contraceptive pill stemmed this for a while. I learned, however, that Nature is vengeful.
Without any form of chemical contraception, I'm at the mercy of Nature. Initially, she creeps up on you with a sensation of tingling in your finger tips and toes. Then the intensity increases until there is the effect of an electric current running through your body. Muscles, especially those used recently, start to contract and expand. One feels like a long distance running having already covered 20 kilometers in difficult terrain. Sweat gathers on one's forehead. At first the body feels warm and then it starts to shiver. The moving in and out of the tides causes an increasing feeling of nausea. One is about to throw up, but this throwing up won't stop the sensation of a knife jabbed deeply into one's lower intestines. One sits on a toilet and the ripples in one's system causes an easy evacuation of the load. But still the pain becomes more intense.
One tries to steady the mind, in between electrocutions, by not thinking painful thoughts. Negative memories trigger spasms throughout the body, that reverberate back and forth. One tolerates only neutral ideas -- no revenge; no aggression. Every moment every fraction of a thought seems to fracture and open to reveal its contents. Even the thoughts one had not been aware of thinking seem to reveal themselves in this way. The spasms will have their way, and eating becomes impossible on the first day. One may venture forth with caution on the second day, but this is hardly to be advised.
One wakes up after a feverish sleep to notice whether the analgesics are still partially working. Reviving from sleep means one must continue to labor with one's death wishes. The sensation of lying on a bed of nails does not let up. The next day, one's hair looks dry and stressed and one's complexion chalky.
****
This is what it was like growing up in a society where women's health issues were not taken seriously. Nature was considered to be something that took care of itself. In the late seventies and early eighties, the birth control pill had been invented, but it was not offered as a solution to the female dilemma of being stabbed and electrocuted periodically. Our culture was, in many ways, backwards.
****
More recently, Nature was creeping up -- again. My bodily chemistry had changed, and the oral hormones I was taken proved to be less efficacious in providing pain management.
Since I was losing my stealthy battle against Nature, despite using all the tricks accumulated in my book, I opted for an implanted contraption. This would give me a steady supply of hormones direct to my uterus, where it could sap them up.
To have an IUD implanted is like tolerating the investigation of your body by a huge alien robot. It's not comfortable and everything about this alien seems huge. The final step of the implantation was like touching a hot stove and being sharply burned by it. After three seconds, the pain went away. I sat up and felt euphoric right away. That night I felt the hormones pumping. Their effect, in addition to the oral contraception already in my system, made me feel high.
****
My experience so far, two weeks down the track, is that I don't feel any more a sense of Nature's machinations.: that creeping up, the ecstasy of stealing time before she struck again. I don't need to play so many games in order to preserve my sanity.
****
Also, for the first time, I'm observing other women in a different light. I used to think that dressing prettily was a sign of great frivolity in the light of Nature's violence, when we would do better to set up military encampments against our impending doom.
I'm less dark, these days.
REALPOLITIK
My political position is realist. That means I'm not on the right, I'm on the left. Over the years, I've learned that morally defined political positions and positions on identity are expressions of the neuroses of individuals and groups. You can give such advocates of change rather a wide berth and watch them fizzle out. The views of those who proclaim that identities of one sort need to compensate identities of another sort are based in Judeo-Christian notions of soul purification. Purifying one's soul, however you go about it, is not a realistic political solution to political dilemmas.
That just means you've got religion.
That just means you've got religion.
shamanic doubling / minus the morning
This conceptualization of shamanic "magic" elucidates ways that a shaman may utilize his psyche for achieving particular ends. It goes to the "magic" side of shamanism -- but it rests also, as it were, on that side of things, where shifts of consciousness pertain. It might be argued, and quite reasonably so, that this shamanic "magic" has nothing to do with reality. Reality, as it were, abides on the non-magic side of things, by definition. Reality is that place, the range of experiences and the condition of being where things do not change "magically".
One would have to have this magic become dialectical, right to the point where it was influencing and altering reality itself, for shamanic magic to be genuinely efficacious.
The "magic" on the one side of things acts as the suggestion of a change, as the will for a change, yet if it does not change reality itself, it remains only will and desire.
I will say that the barrier -- the bridge -- between the realm of what is and the realm of the spirit can and must be crossed. At the same time, one does not do so without sacrificing to the gods, without the release of strong emotion that comes from a searing of the flesh. Without emotion being released through pain, the bridge is not crossed "as spirit".
Shamanic magic involves a doubling -- where the body remains on one side of the gulf and the mind as spirit crosses stealthily over the bridge. Such doubling is required for the shamanic project. A sacrifice of who one is in the concrete and fixed sense is therefore always necessary if one is to obtain shamanic doubling.
Thus, there is the need for a shamanic wounding, to release the force of emotion that would enable one to "cross the bridge". One sacrifices a part of oneself, a part of one's identity, actually, although the sum quotient of the experience of sacrifice is some degree of physical and mental pain.
As the pain releases emotional energy that had long been held in place by normal psychological mechanisms of repression, one's character structure becomes liquid again -- liquid and fluid enough to cross 'as spirit" over the bridge, so long as one wills to do so and has the guts.
And so one crosses, and returns in due course from this journey, with a different range of conceptions of the world and a different sense of self. The price has been paid -- the body and mind are able to be healed again. (Although nothing is assured -- they do not call this a "difficult journey" for nothing.)
One can read more about the Way of the Shaman and the difficulty of a shamanic crossing in Nietzsche's Zarathustra.
Wouldst thou go into isolation, my brother? Wouldst thou seek the way unto thyself? Tarry yet a little and hearken unto me.
"He who seeketh may easily get lost himself. All isolation is wrong": so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.
The voice of the herd will still echo in thee. And when thou sayest, "I have no longer a conscience in common with you," then will it be a plaint and a pain.
Lo, that pain itself did the same conscience produce; and the last gleam of that conscience still gloweth on thine affliction.
But thou wouldst go the way of thine affliction, which is the way unto thyself? Then show me thine authority and thy strength to do so!
Art thou a new strength and a new authority? A first motion? A self- rolling wheel? Canst thou also compel stars to revolve around thee?
Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitions! Show me that thou art not a lusting and ambitious one!
Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.
Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?
Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee? Canst thou be judge for thyself, and avenger of thy law?
Terrible is aloneness with the judge and avenger of one's own law. Thus is a star projected into desert space, and into the icy breath of aloneness.
To-day sufferest thou still from the multitude, thou individual; to-day hast thou still thy courage unabated, and thy hopes.
But one day will the solitude weary thee; one day will thy pride yield, and thy courage quail. Thou wilt one day cry: "I am alone!"
One day wilt thou see no longer thy loftiness, and see too closely thy lowliness; thy sublimity itself will frighten thee as a phantom. Thou wilt one day cry: "All is false!"
There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die! But art thou capable of it--to be a murderer?
Hast thou ever known, my brother, the word "disdain"? And the anguish of thy justice in being just to those that disdain thee?
Thou forcest many to think differently about thee; that, charge they heavily to thine account. Thou camest nigh unto them, and yet wentest past: for that they never forgive thee.
Thou goest beyond them: but the higher thou risest, the smaller doth the eye of envy see thee. Most of all, however, is the flying one hated.
"How could ye be just unto me!"--must thou say--"I choose your injustice as my allotted portion."
Injustice and filth cast they at the lonesome one: but, my brother, if thou wouldst be a star, thou must shine for them none the less on that account!
And be on thy guard against the good and just! They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue--they hate the lonesome ones.
Be on thy guard, also, against holy simplicity! All is unholy to it that is not simple; fain, likewise, would it play with the fire--of the fagot and stake.
And be on thy guard, also, against the assaults of thy love! Too readily doth the recluse reach his hand to any one who meeteth him.
To many a one mayest thou not give thy hand, but only thy paw; and I wish thy paw also to have claws.
But the worst enemy thou canst meet, wilt thou thyself always be; thou waylayest thyself in caverns and forests.
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way to thyself! And past thyself and thy seven devils leadeth thy way!
A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a sooth-sayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain.
Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes!
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way of the creating one: a God wilt thou create for thyself out of thy seven devils!
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way of the loving one: thou lovest thyself, and on that account despisest thou thyself, as only the loving ones despise.
To create, desireth the loving one, because he despiseth! What knoweth he of love who hath not been obliged to despise just what he loved!
With thy love, go into thine isolation, my brother, and with thy creating; and late only will justice limp after thee.
With my tears, go into thine isolation, my brother. I love him who seeketh to create beyond himself, and thus succumbeth.--
Thus spake Zarathustra.
If on the basis of this text, shamanism doesn't interest and entice you, then I wouldn't be surprised. Just keep in mind that shamans are generally initiated against their will, and not by choice.
And now we return to the issue of the dialectics of shamanism and how shamanic "magic" can influence the real world.
The strongest certainly I had that I had changed not gradually, but somehow absolutely and definitively was when my book was being analysed for editing by a kind man (whom I paid well), who tried to find the continuity of the old, pre-shamanised self, which should have been there "in reality" -- but wasn't.
Through regression and restoration, I no longer internalized my father's perspective that when Rhodesia came to an end, emotional life must also come to an end. I had tacitly accepted that emotions and spontaneity belonged to the past and that since this past no longer had any continuity, this meant I also had no right to continuity. This was an implicit assumption I had made, which I did not realize. I'm sure there was an element of guilt that said, "If the past way of life didn't work out, one has no right to forge one's way beyond the present." Sudden changes, wrought by history, are traumatic. My father's sacrifices had all been for the perpetuation of the Rhodesian nation. Therefore, life must come to an end.
My ability to smuggle out a double, who could live fruitfully in the new world, after migrating, was my trick to overcome the superego, which had frozen me in the present. I had to deceive the superego into relinquishing control over me bit by bit. The key was transgression, which allowed detachment from superego states. I transferred my ego base in this way from the past, into the future, by means of denying the principles of right-wing guilt-driven behavior and the limitations of right wing misogyny.
Thus, by means of shamanistic transgression, one destroys oneself and creates oneself anew. This was my experience. The battle against oneself for freedom has been long and drawn out. It has also involved many sacrifices.
The brain's plasticity
The brain is highly adaptive and reflects how we use it. If we want to change the structure of the brain, we need to start using it differently
UBUNTU
In many of my readings concerning psychoanalysis, I keep coming across this expression: "The depressive position."
Upon reflection, I wonder whether this term is key to enscapsulating the difference between how most Westerners experience their own consciousness, and the way I experienced life growing up.
I've spent 12 years delving for useful ethnographic information in my autobiography, and I can honestly say that at least for the first 16 years of my life I experienced nothing of envious competitiveness with any of my friends.
It wasn't that I was of such superlative character than I simply rose above that. Rather, my life was just immensely full -- and somehow the antics of my friends only added to that sense of fullness rather than detracting from it.
On a related matter, I have very often wondered how it could be that people brought up in Western culture -- people who often have a much more subtle and refined version of right and wrong that the ones that I was brought up with -- tend to put up with so much seemingly open malice directed against them.
Could it be that the answer is linked to the proximity in experience of the depressive position (being resigned to the world of objects and objectification)? Maybe a lot of people cannot bear to admit the truth of how little they are worth to others, or how flimsy the underpinnings of their social positions are. Such recognition would cause them to plunge into despair -- an acceptance of their lack of subjective value in an objective world.
Perhaps I never felt this way, because my conception of the social world was collectivist, rather than individualist. With me, it was more a feeling of, "I rise and fall with my tribe. And if something bad happens to me, it can be balanced to some degree by something good happening to someone else."
This kind of approach to life gives one a certain robustness. I find that these days I have transitioned back almost entirely to viewing the world according to this earlier engendered perspective. One lives many lives vicariously in this way, and if something personally bad happens, it seems relatively minor (compared to if I have the mindset that I am competing strongly as an individual -- of course I am still competing, only differently).
One can also experience more of the highs and lows of life, this way, without feeling like the world has to come to an end.
------------------
From Wiki:
Ubuntu: "I am what I am because of who we all are." (From a translation offered by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.)
Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered a definition in a 1999 book:[3]
A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Tutu further explained Ubuntu in 2008:[4]
One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu – the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.
Nelson Mandela explained Ubuntu as follows:[5]
A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?
Committing psychoanalysis
The metaphor of the pre-oedipal is relevant to Minus the Morning.
I say, "metaphor", because I do not want to conjure up an image of the disorderly paranoid-schizoid mode or stage, but rather to refer to the requirement of continuing work for maturation.
It is very clear to me now that I was brought up largely by Nature, in the realm of Nature, and that I had, throughout my childhood and up to my late teens at least, very little knowledge of the political and social world at large.
What was necessary was some additional work -- some "parenting" that would have enabled me to make sense of my experiences within the context of existing political and social systems. It was important for me, throughout most of my twenties, to have experiences that were nurturing of my sense of self, rather than negating of it. The work I still had to do (and which should have been done much earlier, by a more socially engaged and intellectual form of parenting) was to bring my sense of who I was (up until the point of migration) into the present very different social and political contexts, without negating who I had been up until that point.
That was the very difficult aspect of self-parenting that I had to take on. I'm sure it would have been much easier if I had already at my finger-tips the kind of social and political knowledge that pertained to most teenagers who had already been brought up in a first world, late industrialised culture.
I had none of this fundamental knowledge with which to train my organic, nature-aligned feelings to understand linear, civilized mores, so bringing myself up proved to be extraordinarily difficult to do.
And then there were the continual attacks by those professing to be on the side of the left or right wing of politics -- to put me in my place, when I still had no holistic understanding of where my place was. This felt like what it was -- so many psychological assaults. And there were those, too, who felt that I ought not to know my place -- that is, where I could be presumed to fit in with the larger scheme of things -- because this would compromise their self-image and cause them to feel ashamed of the things that happened in the past.
So there were many mitigating factors against me doing the job of a good parent, in relation to myself. Nonetheless I finally succeeded, bringing myself all the knowledge and experience I had long craved.
It is difficult to bring oneself up under such negating circumstances, in a culture very different from one's own, and without peer support of any sort.
It's not surprising that, under such circumstances, I learned a few of the techniques pertaining to shamanism.
NOTE: Unlike those of the Kleinian schools, Jungians don't use the term, "pre-Oedipal" to imply evil or pathology in an unambiguous way. Jungians see this putative early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm. It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness. We all have components of that in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's great oneness.
To be unable to access this realm of infinitude is also a sign of pathology. According to Anton Ehrenzweig, a lack of access to consciousness where the ego is de-differentiated signifies schizophrenia.
I see that I have attained everything I've wanted to over time. I can only understand the past three years if I remember how I was hungry, desperately hungry.
1. I had to resolve some confusing intellectual issues in order to grasp the internal logic of my paradigm more clearly. The level of frustration was like having a word at the tip of your tongue, which would be able to convey everything you intended to say, only you couldn't quite get the word to move laterally and upwardly. Similarly, I couldn't quite draw some important aspects of my thinking together until more recently.
2. I was hungry for the wild -- specifically for an African experience.
3. I was hungry to for initiation through risking myself and proving my tenacity to myself.
1. I had to resolve some confusing intellectual issues in order to grasp the internal logic of my paradigm more clearly. The level of frustration was like having a word at the tip of your tongue, which would be able to convey everything you intended to say, only you couldn't quite get the word to move laterally and upwardly. Similarly, I couldn't quite draw some important aspects of my thinking together until more recently.
2. I was hungry for the wild -- specifically for an African experience.
3. I was hungry to for initiation through risking myself and proving my tenacity to myself.
The futility of explanations
It may be difficult for others to understand why I see right-wing men as generally passive -- after all, the current cultural rhetoric would try to chime in, "They have penises, and that makes them anything other than passive."
But let me try to explain, and we will see how far we get.
To begin with, let us try to imagine a place called Herstralia, where the women roam free as magnificent as Giant marsupials, and where the males are fine and dandy, too, but are somehow incongruously referred to as "boys". Plodding along in parallel time with this magnificent land of Herstralia is a rather mentally grainy patch of land called GoodolUSA. It's far away so I can't tell you much about it. Besides, adult women do not pay much attention to context -- social, political or other -- because that is for whiny little boys who have nothing better to do with their time.
Anyway, in this whiny continent called GoodolUSA, I have a couple of internet pals. I try to help them as best I can from my distance in this great country of ours -- but somehow they won't be helped.
One of them complains about a chronic health condition and says that the hospitals over there simply won't pay to get him healed. "Why doesn't he just access our public health care system for free?" I think, to myself. I guess he's complaining about the costs he's charged because he enjoys it, but I've never had that experience myself, over here.
Now, from the perspective of my armchair, I simply don't know what all the fuss is about. "Whine, whine, whine," he goes. (I label this one "the whiny boy", although he doesn't know it yet. It will take a while before I suddenly spring my conclusions on him.)
"Whine, whine, whine," he says to me, one day. "America, blah, blah, blah."
Frankly, I don't know what the trouble is. But in my heart of hearts, I think it could point to the decisive issue that separates the Women from the Boys. After all, I have never had any trouble getting health care. I guess the key principle is to be assertive enough. You really do have to make the time for the doctor's appointment, and turn up when expected to. Once you get there, it is imperative to look the doctor straight in the eye, and tell him exactly what is wrong with you.
But he goes on and on about the same thing. It really tries my patience -- this constant mention that he is in great pain or something.
"Dick!" I tell him (for he really is a dick), "Haven't you considered that there really might be nothing wrong with you at all? I mean if you are not getting treatment as you claim you should, isn't there the possibility that you are MALINGERING?? I mean, the pain might not actually be real?"
At this, Dick hit the roof -- or at least I imagine that he did, since he never did write back to me again. But isn't that the thing with boys, and how they are? You have to tell them some home truths about themselves sometimes, give them a little bit to chew on, and in reality they simply can't take it at all.
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth all my time and effort trying to help, but I do try to point out that for me accessing health care is relatively easy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
