Psych studies, [...], do show men have somewhat truncated emotions.Testosterone is a killer of many things, and is adrenalin fed. This of course supposes there is some compulsion to ACT upon a feeling, which there is blatantly NOT. If a projection is derived from the past experience of a male with females, then it is literally "shadow boxing". Perhaps the fuel for certain major emotional experiences can be quantified from biochemistry, but the decision is psychological, the expression , - social. So many male / female encounters are actually not only a play out of atavistic neurochemistry, their expression psychologically is an odd mixture of a mosaic of previous experiences, projected from the male to the female, and the female back. This is sadly inheriting both the cultural weight, and the biochemical parameters of the species, and it take a hyperawareness to see the impetus, and the projection.
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Jennifer ArmstrongVery well expressed, Karen, although I don't think male emotions are necessarily biologically truncated. That doesn't seem right to me.
As an aside, I wonder whether the shamanistic injunction to "do nothing" but learn to be at one with one's own subjectivity is, in fact, the means to overcome this impasse of projection and counterprojection.
I can never stop being dismayed that people don't realise what they intend as "dominating" behaviour can often come across as expressing insecurities.
Dominating behavior is concerned with emotional responses and so a person intent upon dominating another usually doesn't register much of the intellectual content of what anyone is saying. He actually hears less and understands less about the other person when he is intent upon dominating them, than if he were to see the other as an equal.
I suspect that this approach works enough of the time, at a simple, reflexive level, for it to seem to pay off. After all, some people are, indeed, duped by emotional posturing, which tries to do away with intellect.
But this bluff spoils any further discourse in due course. Even the instigators are bound to register to this emotionally at some point. If they happen to score hits by getting others (mostly women) to temporarily defer to them, they still have to endure an anxious feeling that others could always see through their disguise. Those subjugated would then see very clearly that having genuine ability did not play a significant part in the dominator's understanding of his identity.
It would become transparently apparent that investing in the emotional reactions of others is always a loser's game.
Eddy Hallheiyqckzxs Ilunga Jr.:“Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.” (1 Peter 2:18) “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:22) “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” (1 Timothy 2:12)Does it mean women and slaves have no right in front of God? somebody explain to me, please!
Jennifer Armstrong: It seems to imply that we are to rely upon the benevolence of our local patriarchs. If they are not benevolent, then we are in trouble.
Stan Sykes: Your local patriarch would likely be Mike and he looks very affable. Or maybe our local 'patriarch' is Colin Barnett?
Jennifer Armstrong: I was using abstract thought, Stan.
Stan Sykes: I know Jennifer and I agree with your copmment. It's just that people (in general) can look at patriarchal societies and for some reason come up with the notion that they were somewhow unjust, overbearing and demeaning in structure and application. I just used MIke to humanize it. The realationship of Patriarchs with their wives were as husbands, lovers (if one wishes to use the term), quite often friends and partners in running their household. Sure, you can get nasty blokes and their families would pay the price. I don't know what studies are currently available on the percentage of abusive fathers in families, but I tend to fear that it might be rising.
Jennifer Armstrong: The difference between a religious view of society and a secular one is that the secular one is rational. It takes care of contingencies (such as an oppressive patriarch) by saying, "women do not need to subject themselves to males". The religious view says, "Men are generally good people, except for a few bad apples, so women should subject themselves to males." See the difference? The first principle embodies an ethical stance. The second is a principle of faith. By the way, Mike is a socialist and is therefore in no way patriarchal.
Supposing that, like Socrates, I had been "a long time sick" -- it was Western metaphysics alone, that had made me so. The idea that "the individual" is responsible and to blame for anything that happens to them was the cause of my distress. I had internalized too much blame for the political disruption in my life that had led to me having to start all over again, in a different country, at the age of 15. The cure I found for the Western metaphysics that I had inadvertently internalized was shamanism.
To obtain a shamanistic cure, one has to let go of one's need for control over the circumstances of life, even though this is the last thing one wants to do. In fact one may not be able to do so, immediately after a disastrous event, when the power of the event threatens to annihilate one's very sense of self. (The fact that the victim blames himself or herself straight after the event is an attempt at first aid recovery: the victim intrinsically knows that it's more important, at this early traumatized stage, to restore a feeling of control than to be considered right or wrong. Once the ego is much stronger and a sense of control has been restored, a shamanistic cure can be tried.) The curative power of shamanism is in the realization that the world has no moral structure. By gaining experiential (rather than intellectual) knowledge of this, one is released from feeling guilty or ashamed as a result of events that were outside of your control.
While it is noble to take on the responsibility for event not of one's making, this attitude of mind wears one down. It is far better to understand who one is, without this heavy emotional baggage -- which one only accepts as a means to trick oneself that one has full control, when one hasn't.
Consider how effectively the one from a competitive egoistic culture subsumes the other in the following dialogue. The one from another culture speaks of something that they do not know, but this is turned into a claim of superiority in the mind of the individualistic thinker:
"I come from a different culture. I don't know your ways."
"What makes you so special that you choose to stand out from others?"
"I don't know what you mean by 'special'. I don't know your ways."
"You're trying to say you're better than us!"
"How can I be better? What does it even mean?! I don't know your ways."
"You're demonstrating your individualism in a defiant way by choosing not to know things!"
"What things!? I don't know your ways."
"You are an individual who thinks they are superior."
"I didn't say that."
But, the cultural egoist won't hear of any 'not knowing'.
The cultural egoist instead demands (according to the logic of his matrix) that the cultural outsider should "take responsibility" for what she or he hadn't originally chosen: that is, to take responsibility for his inability to understand the cultural egoist's culture. The cultural outsider is therefore stymied by the complexity and blame-inducing logic of this cultural egoist thought.
The cultural egoist wants the outsider to believe that her actual innocent lack of knowledge is really just a sneaky way for him (the outsider) to stake his claim to be someone superior. So, the outsider learns from this that she or he ought to express their thoughts only after considering what would logically make sense to a cultural egoist. Once this has happened, the outsider has been swallowed whole by the egoist's cultural matrix!
Once she or he has been eaten up entirely, the outsider automatically understands that it is important to reformulate one's thoughts and ideas to comply with narrow cultural egoistic conceptions about himself and others.
I'm not sure where to begin, but my dreams give me some indication that my life has a pleasant landscape around now, although it's surely the case that I am surviving in an odd way. I was in fact on very rocky terrain on the north-eastern part of Japan. I had to raise my head a little to get a picture of the map itself, but when I did, I noticed I was not just near the coast, but literally right on it. Young children were playing on these rocks and families had built their houses placidly alongside the silver, grey, clairvoyant waves. (Previously playful waves suddenly leaped with greater energy and malice, as my anxiety causes them to display a fiercer animation.)
I'm "on the edge" and "off Japan". That's how I am surviving now. The sense of place is magical, if a little dangerous. A rising tsunami might sweep all of us away.
In another part of the dream, I made a synchronized jog the surf with a kind of guru or fitness instructor with my army boots on. I grew not tired. I wondered why afterwards I chose to cut my boots and socks off with a pen-knife, starting at the sole. I'd already removed the fight boot that way, but I reconsidered having to do the same with the left. It suddenly dawned on me that it would be more natural to undo the shoe-laces, so I removed the remaining shoe in a more straightforward fashion. (I think I've cut a lot of right-wing people out of my life, but I plan not to do that with the left.)
In the final scene, I am racing through the Melbourne, up drainpipes and on trams, having stolen goods and finery. I have to disguise myself in clothes other than those I've stolen, in order to get through customs. I'm enjoying the game of searching for something to pass through in, since I am reasonably rich all of a sudden, which means I can explore some colorful disguises. (The 'stolen goods' are the knowledge I've gleaned, from previous ages.)
So, I encountered the three aspects of my life: my work, my leisure and my PhD.
Post-PhD, I am much older and a little wiser. I used to imagine that the use of a common language pretty much assured that ideas would travel along a solid channel from my mind to the minds of my readers. Nowadays, I realize that almost the opposite it the case: the fact of having a common language means nothing when your environment and formative influences are not the same. In the these cases, language can have the opposite to the desired effect, giving false reassurance that effective communication is transpiring. This seems to be the case due to one's sheer familiarity with the words themselves. Yet, just because one is familiar with the way that words were used during one's childhood and in one's environment whilst one was growing up, does not necessarily imply that one has a full, rather than partial understanding of the content of another's person's words, as they intend to convey their meanings.
It's not precisely that we are locked into a solipsist's mental space. The willingness to avoid such a conclusion had sent me running towards metaphysics as a means to mediate a realm of social meaning that could otherwise have been made to feel as if it were purely subjective. Western metaphysics tends to function by means of polarizing ideas and values into opposite camps. So, what is masculine cannot be feminine, what is 'good' in some way cannot have anything 'bad' in it, what is progressive cannot in any sense be regressive -- and so on. To create divisions, in the world, in such a way seemed like a way to get away from the theorized pure subjectivity that would not guarantee I would be speaking to anyone other than myself.
Yet, this metaphysical approach also proved problematic in that Western metaphysics provides us with the form of 'objectivity' that is based on social consensus, rather than something that retains its truth even when social consensus is missing. To rely upon Western metaphysics as a means to stabilize the universe is not an effective solution to the philosophical problem of solipsism, since it works more in the fashion of a mold -- pushing the world into conformity with its prior existing shape, rather than as a mode of hermeneutics. Western metaphysics does not, despite what it seems to do, give us access to meanings that existed prior to an interpretation of the world based on Western metaphysics.
As a method of interpretation, it is only able to find what is already part of it: its basic dualisms. The computer science term for this phenomenon: garbage in; garbage out. There is an additional problem with seeking to build our recognition of truth on something as precarious as social consensus: It establishes mob mentality as a primary means for establishing new "truths" (which are, in turn, built upon a re-establishment of archaic truisms: women are like this; men are like that.) Epistemologically, nothing new is actually discovered using this approach. Ethically, human integrity is undermined, as the dominant side of the polarity -- "men" -- get to condemn and punish those at the wrong end of the archaic dualism -- "women".
Such a way out of solipsism is unacceptable. I have learned that it has less than no use. It fails on the level of enabling knowledge of how people actually experience their lives and it fails on the level of ethics, by using social consensus (mob ethics) as a means to establish facts. Those who don't want to work too hard at thinking, yet still want to feel 'in touch' will be the ones who continue to prefer this method, despite all its failures.
For those who have the time and will to go a whole lot further with their thinking, dialectics proves to be an answer. This approach involves figuring out the way the cultural landscape lies, by using language a bit like radar. One sounds things out. One gets 'responses' of various sorts. These responses should not be taken to indicate anything about the rightness or wrongness of one's ideas, at least not in the immediate sense. Rather, they are a sign of how others are positioned to respond to your ideas by means of their social conditioning and experiences. If a majority respond in a similar way, we can put this down to a certain part of the environment having certain objective 'geographical features'.
Kudakwashe Rukanda satire and mockery are the food of friendship and good company in Zim. If you are pissed of by these references and your friends know, they will try to piss u off while taking comfort in the mistaken belief that you will not really be pissed!
Jennifer F Armstrong It's funny --I use a lot of satire and mockery myself. My memoir is really a kind of satire concerning myself -- which has caused some Westerners, whom I ought to have been able to rely upon, to think I am "down" on myself or that I have a mental illness.
At the same time, if you were to actually read my memoir, you would see that there were tremendous pressures on me not to grow up at all. That is why I deeply resent it when people use childlike terms to address me. After all the strength of mind I've had to employ just to get beyond patriarchal mores, I cannot stand being treated like a small child as if my efforts had paid no gains.
Let us suppose those referring to me as a "girl" are mocking from a position of black comedy, whilst allowing me to have a bit of fun with the term, "kaffir", or black servitude. Is it now okay, again, to refer to grown Shona men as "boys" and grown Shona women as "girls"? This kind of to and fro could be exhilirating, but somehow I suspect that if I laughed and called you a silly old kaffir at this point, you would pissed Kuda.
The first roadblock: I was intent on developing my horse-riding muscles by squeezing a beach ball between my knees -- a piece of advice I'd found on the Internet. After several days of doing this for hours at a time, my right knee suddenly felt the strain of an old ligament injury. I stopped squeezing the ball for several weeks after that, but the sense of there being a knot in my knee persisted.
The second bump in the road: A few days before I was due to leave, I had gone up to have a farewell drink at the pub with my parents. Heavy bushfire smoke had permeated the area of the Kalamunda hills, just as the sun set. The air was dry and rather caustic. Inside the pub, flames raged in the hearth. I was already tired. I went home that night with what seemed like a mild cold, which turned into one of the worst flus I'd had. Mike then came down with it.
We did not kiss each other good-bye at the airport. Instead, I walked as resolutely as I could manage, away from a miserable situation. Upon arrival in Harare, my ears were permanently blocked and I had trouble making out what the customs guy was saying to me. My cousin finally picked me up from there and for the next few days, I made desperate attempts to find the means to unblock my ears. The 'flu settled in to my neck and shoulders, making them rigid. I was due to start the safari in the next few days.
I didn't recover in time, but resolved not to think about my ears. The safari guide picked me up and were were on our way to the middle of nowhere at a blistering rate of knots in a 4-wheel drive. The wind coming through the window felt like it does when you are about to do a skydive and the pilot shouts "engines off". The door of the plane is open and you're leaning out and cannot hear anything. I wasn't wearing a seat belt in the vehicle because I couldn't get the seat belt fastener to work. This was Africa, where rules didn't matter. I enjoyed the extra adrenaline that went through me, knowing I was on the edge of danger.
We arrived at the preliminary camp and everybody else went for their first ride on the horses, which took several hours. I slept, instead, resolving to get rid of a feeling that was now, most certainly, the 'flu.
The next day, my aches and pains were about the same. We had a late breakfast and mounted our horses. Due to my lack of riding for over 20 years, I was given a very reliable horse, with a Western saddle. Her name was Bonus. So we began our eight day journey into the Mavuradhona wildness and back again. That day, I learned to be comfortable riding again. As I descended my mount, I realised that there was little I wanted more than a few hours' sleep. I handed over my mount, luxuriating in the fact that someone else would take care of her for me. Then, I retreated to my hut to sleep. I missed dinner but that didn't bother me. I was running a temperature and sleeping through the afternoon allowed me to sweat the fever out.
The next day, I began to settle into the rhythm of being on a horse. It's a kind of meditation, where you let your mind move according to the horse's gait and you provide as little resistance to moving along as possible. You become a zombie. You are at your horse's mercy.
By employing the method of zombie consciousness, I was able to make it through another day. Since the fever had broken, my ears began to clear up. The absence of ear ache was replaced by pain in my knees and thighs. The knee pain was caused by going up and down ravines, which required considerable knee pressure to remain balanced on the horse. Fortunately, my yellow beach ball exercises assisted me, along with my martial arts training, which compels us to maintain a bent kneed stance. The other issue was that I was hitting many thorn trees with my knees in passing, not yet having learned to anticipate their presence and push them aside.
That day, we rode for about five hours. I'm not sure. Each day, we rode for that amount of time, approximately. After either one or two days of this, we arrived at a new campsite. Here, I dismounted my horse only to discover that my right foot had swollen up (probably also a victim of collision with thorn trees) and both knees were so overworked that I could not walk up or down a gentle slope. These features of my existence struck my as grotesquely amusing. I am forever in the debt of powerful anti-inflammatory pills, which fixed me up overnight, entirely against the odds. (I could even walk up and down fairly steep slopes without feeling any exaggeratedly sharp pain.)
I had a drink of white wine that night -- my first alcoholic beverage since arriving in the country. It immediately intoxicated me. I had a warm bucket shower behind three-quarter grass walls, temporarily lost my glasses somewhere on the thatched wall and was unable and unwilling to find them. It had begun raining heavily, even as I was taking my shower. I retreated to the tent and report on my loss when the safari guy announce that it was dinner time. He found the glasses for me, whereupon I inadvertently managed to discard my airline pillow in the mud (due to being barely conscious I had been wearing it -- a feature of the white wine entering an empty stomach). My South African companion became thoroughly concerned upon finding this pillow on the way back from her meal, fearing that witches on hyenas might have been up to mischief.
This kind of chaos was something I was personally accustomed to. My everyday life is not devoid of unpredictability.
So, we went deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. We marched and marched and marched and marched up and down a thousand mile high ravines. These got steeper and steeper and more tiring to navigate. We were on our way to our destination: to sleep under an overhanging rock, overnight. We stopped around mid afternoon at a river with boulders around it. There, I lay on a rock in the middle of the stream with my riding hat over my face. I felt that there were river spirits speaking to me. A baboon threw a stick at one of us, but this I couldn't see as I was half asleep.
The safari guide said we had a few more hours riding ahead of us. That was a lie. We went up a hill and then down the other side and the horses locked their legs in brake position. It was the same as when they'd seen zebras. Only this time, it was the pack pony, neighing out a greeting and waiting patiently for us.
We stayed under the rock that night and we noted all the speckles in the sky -- so many stars that not one space of sky was not covered with a star. We slept on numnahs and hard rock and all the sand we slept upon got into everything. When the tour assistants shook out my companion's sleeping bag, they chuckled that she had been able to spend the night with so many stones.
The day of the return back in the direction from whence we'd come was the hardest for me, since I had not slept so well. I drank coffee to keep me alert, but this enervated me. I knew that if I made an error of judgement in this steep and rocky terrain, many miles away from medical assistance, I would not be happy with the consequences. I did actually fall off my horse, all the same. It happened as I was gaining confidence in Bonus's abilities to perform almost supernatural tricks involving the descent and ascent of many river banks. I had aimed her at a rise a little too steep, even though the guide called out to take her around the other way. I'd already committed to taking the steep rise. She pounced onto the rise on the opposite side, but the ground was muddy and she could not get her footing. She immediately tried again, in fact two or three times -- and I, resolving not to make things worse, delicately slipped off her side onto the muddy red earth on the left.
That was the worst situation, but it was minor. We continued our journey at a knee-breaking speed. It would not be long before we were home.
The first roadblock: I was developing my horse-riding muscles by squeezing a beach ball between my knees -- a piece of advice I'd found on the Internet. After several days of doing this for hours at a time, my right knee suddenly felt the strain of an old ligament injury. I stopped squeezing the ball for several weeks after that, but the sense of there being a knot in my knee persisted.
The second bump in the road: A few days before I was due to leave, I had gone up to have a farewell drink at the pub with my parents. Heavy bushfire smoke had permeated the area of the Kalamunda hills, just as the sun set. The air was dry and rather caustic. Inside the pub, flames raged in the hearth. I was already tired. I went home that night with what seemed like a mild cold, which turned into one of the worst flus I'd had. Mike then came down with it.
We did not kiss each other good-bye at the airport. Instead, I walked as resolutely as I could manage, away from a miserable situation. Upon arrival in Harare, my ears were permanently blocked and I had trouble making out what the customs guy was saying to me. My cousin finally picked me up from there and for the next few days, I made desperate attempts to find the means to unblock my ears. The 'flu settled in to my neck and shoulders, making them rigid. I was due to start the safari in the next few days.
I didn't recover in time, but resolved not to think about my ears. The safari guide picked me up and were were on our way to the middle of nowhere at a blistering rate of knots in a 4-wheel drive. The wind coming through the window felt like it does when you are about to do a skydive and the pilot shouts "engines off". The door of the plane is open and you're leaning out and cannot hear anything. I wasn't wearing a seat belt in the vehicle because I couldn't get the seat belt fastener to work. This was Africa, all the same, where rules didn't matter. I enjoyed the extra adrenaline that went through me, knowing I was on the edge of danger.
We arrived at the preliminary camp and everybody else went for their first ride on the horses, which took several hours. I slept, instead, resolving to get rid of a feeling that was now, most certainly, the 'flu.
The next day, my aches and pains were about the same. We had a late breakfast and mounted our horses. Due to my lack of riding for over 20 years, I was given a very reliable horse, with a Western saddle. Her name was Bonus. So we began our eight day journey into the Mavuradhona wildness and back again. That day, I learned to be comfortable riding again. As I descended my mount, I realised that there was little I wanted more than a few hours' sleep. I handed over my mount, luxuriating in the fact that someone else would take care of her for me. Then, I retreated to my hut to sleep. I missed dinner but that didn't bother me. I was running a temperature and sleeping through the afternoon allowed me to sweat the fever out.
The next day, I began to settle into the rhythm of being on a horse. It's a kind of meditation, where you let your mind move according to the horse's gait and you provide as little resistance to moving along as possible. You become a zombie. You are at your horse's mercy.
By employing the method of zombie consciousness, I was able to make it through another day. Since the fever had broken, my ears began to clear up. The absence of ear ache was replaced by pain in my knees and thighs. The knee pain was caused by going up and down ravines, which required considerable knee pressure to remain balanced on the horse. Fortunately, my yellow beach ball exercises assisted, along with my martial arts training, which compels us to maintain a bent kneed stance. The other issue was that I was hitting many thorn trees with my knees in passing, not yet having learned to anticipate their presence and push them aside.
That day, we rode for about five hours. I'm not sure. Each day, we rode for that amount of time, approximately. After either one or two days of this, we arrived at a new campsite. Here, I dismounted my horse only to discover that my right foot had swollen up (probably also a victim of collision with thorn trees) and both knees were so overworked that I could not walk up or down a gentle slope. These features of my existence struck my as grotesquely amusing. I am forever in the debt of powerful anti-inflammatory pills, which fixed me up overnight, entirely against the odds. (I could even walk up and down fairly steep slopes without feeling any exaggeratedly sharp pain.)
I had a drink of white wine that night -- my first alcoholic beverage since arriving in the country. It immediately intoxicated me. I had a warm bucket shower behind three-quarter grass walls, temporarily lost my glasses somewhere on the thatched wall and was unable and unwilling to find them. It had begun raining heavily, even as I was taking my shower. I retreated to the tent and report on my loss when the safari guy announce that it was dinner time. He found the glasses for me, whereupon I managed to discard my airline pillow in the mud (due to the fact that I was barely conscious I was wearing it -- a feature of the white wine entering an empty stomach). My South African companion became thoroughly concerned, upon finding this pillow on the way back from her meal, that witches on hyenas might have led to this. This kind of chaos was something I was personally accustomed to.
So, we went deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. We marched and marched and marched and marched up and down a thousand mile high ravines. These got steeper and steeper and more tiring to navigate. We were on our way to our destination: to sleep under an overhanging rock, overnight. We stopped around mid afternoon at a river with boulders around it. There, I lay on a rock in the middle of the stream with my riding hat over my face. I felt that there were river spirits speaking to me. A baboon threw a stick at one of us, but this I couldn't see as I was half asleep.
The safari guide said we had a few more hours riding ahead of us. That was a lie. We went up a hill and then down the other side and the horses locked their legs in brake position. It was the same as when they'd seen zebras. Only this time, it was the pack pony, neighing out a greeting and waiting patiently for us.
So, we stayed under the rock that night and we noted all the speckles in the sky -- so many stars that not one space of sky was not covered with a star. We slept on numnahs and hard rock and all the sand we slept upon got into everything. (When a tour assistant shook out my companion's sleeping bag, they let out a laugh that she had been sleeping with some sizable stones.)
The day of the return back in the direction from whence we'd come was the hardest for me, since I had not slept so well. I drank coffee to keep me alert, but this enervated me. I knew that if I made an error of judgement in this steep and rocky terrain, many miles away from medical assistance, I would not be happy with the consequences. I did actually fall off my horse, all the same. It happened as I was gaining confidence in Bonus's abilities to perform almost supernatural tricks involving the descent and ascent of many river banks. I had aimed her at a rise a little too steep, even though the guide called out to take her around the other way. I'd already committed to taking the steep rise. She pounced onto the rise on the opposite side, but the ground was muddy and she could not get her footing. She immediately tried again, two or three times -- and I, resolving not to make things worse, delicately slipped off her side onto the muddy red earth to the right.
That was the worst situation that happened, but it was minor. We continued on our journey at a knee-breaking speed, which was a sprightly walking pace. It would not be too long before we'd made our way home.
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