.
One used to fly by vision and now one flies by radar — blindly, as it were. That is the destiny of women within patriarchal societies – to have to rely upon a set of “civilising” values. That way, their navigation systems can always be jammed if they become too vocal. Women who have been “translated” into beings with now ‘ Civilized’ as opposed to Natural demeanours, have been taught to rely only upon those forms of communication that have been narrowly defined as “sensible” according to expectations which are starched, formal and conservative. How does one live within patriarchal society as a woman? Blindly, and disregarding of one’s own experiences, lest they puzzle and derange one enough that one finally takes action. Women are born to be castrated, according to some.

I'm not sure that the psychoanalytic notion of "castration" can really mean more than the inability to trust one's five senses. One's methodologies for drawing conclusions from them have all devolved. One sits there, stuffed: A scarecrow or a mummy. I have long resisted ideological castration. I didn't know I was resisting it, only that I angrily opposed the way in which my sincere tokens of communication were being deliberately thwarted. At one time, what I said made clear and logical sense. This changed around a certain time, when I was twelve or so. My own attitudes hadn't changed. My father's had.

Suddenly what I said had no natural meaning to him -- nothing that had to do directly with the practical affairs we were involved in. Instead, my assertions suddenly took on ethereal and disconnected emotional resonances for him. What was I meaning all of a sudden? I could use the exact same words and a similar tone to tones and words I'd used before, but now an enemy was jamming my communication. No longer could I be permitted to relate my own experiences -- so far as my father was concerned, I'd gone over to the other side. I had become his enemy, due to my gender. I was, within several weeks, though far from puberty still, no longer a child. So, if I said anything, it had to be negated as if it contained so much potential evil. That was how my father turned against me -- treating me like I was now merely a turbine generator of 'emotion'. What I had to say, I learned, I shouldn't speak.

I knew that something had gone wrong with him mentally when he first obstructed my conversation. The first time, I thought that he was merely being odd -- obsessed with some particular concern, which I had simply not mentioned.

We were down at the stables, attending to my very old horse. I was regularly concerned about her general condition. Was she sprightly and well today? Were elements of old age setting in already? She was 28 when I got her, which was very old in horse years. She was a lovely horse! I owned her and I did my best to take care of her.

When I climbed on to her back, she seemed a little stiff that afternoon. She carried her hind legs more awkwardly when I pressed her to canter. What could the matter be? Perhaps little -- perhaps just the need to stretch, to warm up further, plying muscle and flesh. Still, it was worth mentioning -- perhaps a small stone had gone caught within her hoof.

"Her hindquarters feel rather stiff today!" I called out to my father, as I sailed around the circle of the paddock. As I said it, my voice was snatched by fresh afternoon winds. I loved nothing more than lively afternoon rides -- each one was an entire new adventure!

"What did you say? Are you talking about how it's feeling?" my father intoned. "Feelings are for artists!' he announced, before proceeding with a more verbose warning about distrusting feelings in general.

Feelings -- yes, emotions -- were quite a different subject from the information I'd been trying to convey. No, father, I didn't have an emotion about stiffness. Rather, this was the sensation of the horse that day: her kinetic manner had become somewhat stiffened and foreshortened. There had been no specific emotion in my imparting of this particular information.

This was the first instance I noticed that my father was thinking weirdly. I thought that his obstruction of my message at the time was odd, but nothing much to worry about. I didn't mention it to my mother or to anybody. It just wasn't that important. Not at that time

As it has turned out, my injury was related to the specifics of my father's madness. I don't blame him for going half-mad. In fact, it was the decent and honorable thing to do. To fail to react to maddening situations would have been even more maddening. I would never have realized the truth behind the madness of life had he kept up a veneer that everything was fine when it wasn't.

My father's madness involved a reversal of typical parent-child relations, where I was held responsible for all sorts of things that seemed to have gone wrong, in the eyes of my father. I didn't know what these things were, as they have occurred before I was born. It has taken me about twenty years to find them out.

I remember when my father was yelling at me, attacking me, with one term of abuse after another -- it finally dawned on me that he saw me as impervious to any insult, not matter how hurtful. From then, I realized he wasn't really talking to me personally, when he got into a rage. Rather, he was addressing an adult, omnipotent figure, from the point of view of angry two-year-old, who knew no limits to his anger.

This, in turn, explains my own lifelong preoccupation with not being pushed into a role where people feel it natural to take out on me their undefined or barely articulated aggression. I'm afraid of  the inarticulate emotion of those who seem to demand my unconditional approval at great cost to myself. When people complain that their emotional expectations were not met, I never know how to discuss that, least of all in a workplace setting, where the implicit threat of losing my livelihood hangs over me. My understanding is that these demands are potentially infinite, unless someone in authority steps in and draws a clear line about what is expected from me. For the reasons I've just outlined, this is why I prefer typically "masculine" work environments, where my ability to cater to others' emotional needs is not assessed as a feature of my ability to do the job at hand.

They cannot be satisfied by any act on my part. It expresses an infinite source of destruction, always in opposition to any form of reason. That was how I had experienced my father's rage, growing up. It had increased exponentially the moment there was no hope for "Rhodesia". My father's faith in the established order was shattered. His ideals of permanence and stability -- the ideals he'd sacrificed for -- were suddenly gone from the realm of possibility.

I was trying to grow up, but in many ways I had to play the role of the parent. This was exacerbated for me as the eldest child of new migrants, who expected me to teach them the ropes. My parents lent on me for support, but became embittered at any turn away from narrow, conservative values -- those of family, God and Church. I was being exposed to more liberal values, thus the tension.

The problem at the core -- well, there were a few. The main one was I was ill-equipped to be my father's mother in a culture which I couldn't understand whilst I was still trying to grow up and make adjustments of my own. The secondary problem was patriarchy. Yes, it exists and the reason I know that is I couldn't get any help in dealing with my father and his strange ways. He burdened me into feeling guilty for his negative emotions. He leaned on me to play a mothering role. I lacked the necessary emotional and intellectual resources to appease him. Nobody I turned to would believe there was any sort of problem -- except, perhaps with me.

My father had certain ideas about people who depart from conservatism "going off the rails". I think he sincerely believed I had "gone off the rails" due to my adjustment to a more liberal culture, which Australian culture seemed to be at that time.

Nobody ever assisted me. That's because Judeo-Christian culture maintains the men are rational and women just aren't. This is the theological structure of its belief system and I only found out how pervasive it was by turning to various people only to find them repeat their version of the "men are rational; women are emotional" formula. That is how it went. My concerns entered the "too hard basket". As for my family, it was more convenient for them to keep up the pathological state of relations, because blaming the family's new migrant difficulties on the only atheist in the family hid a multitude of sins.

My father's psychological problems did give me insights into human behavior, in particular how authoritarianism is structured by finding a scapegoat and projecting. It is quite clear, people actually aren't aware that they're engaging in this pattern of action. My father's madness gave me the basis for understanding that one can't simply adapt to one totally different situation after another, willy-nilly. To expect people to do that is inhuman.

His reactions also formed my character in giving me an extreme aversion to playing the role of anyone's early childhood mother. I won't play the part where anyone unleashes their tantrum at me and expects me to help them deal with their anxieties, just because I'm female. I have a completely traumatic reaction to this kind of attitude. I realize I'm doomed and that I can't cope with it no matter what forms of reason or logic I impose, as I had tried to tell people of my father's attitude before, using only cold logic and reason.  This hadn't worked out.

Shamanic "doubling" appears quite clearly at the end of sequence of books, in Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche speaks of having a privileged understanding of what constitutes health, due to his tendency to become ill.

To view healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to view the secret work of the instinct of decadence out of the abundance and self-confidence of a rich life-this has been my principal experience, what I have been longest trained in. If in anything at all, it was in this that I became a master. To-day my hand is skillful; it has the knack of reversing perspectives: the first reason perhaps why a Transvaluation of all Values has been possible to me alone. [my emphasis]

 In Gay Science, Nietzsche also speaks about the basis for self-overcoming, though sinking into the depths of despair and learning to think more suspiciously about the structure of reality:

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better"; but I know that it makes us more profound.

Such a descent into pain, along with exercises in mistrust of how things appear to be,  make a thinker more profound.  We become more profound because we become suspicious of what we used to "know"
-- i.e. "things in which formerly we may have found our humanity". One, in effect, sinks to the underworld and then comes up transformed.

This is one direction of the Nietzschean dialectic:  the underworld of experience in relation to normal life. Nietzsche points out in Ecce Homo that dialectics are a sign of decadence, but nonetheless a person who is healthy overall turns even injury into an experience for learning. This is as per the historically recurrent motif of "shamanic wounding" -- but one must be strong enough to begin with for any suffering to be able to yield genuine insights, rather than merely pathological notions about the world.

This "down-going" or "going under" relates to an age-long shamanic notion of the underworld (met by facing death, first figuratively and then literally).  It is also indicative of Darwinian advancement of humanity.  One succumbs as a herald to "better players".  For the individual who must "go under", though, there is a sense of sacrifice and evocation of the sacred in relation to the whole of humanity.  One descends into an underworld of non-being, so that humanity might have its chance to progress.

A middle level of experience comprises the everyday world.   More interestingly, in shamanic terminology, there is also a realm of the heights.   To reach one's inner heights, one transcends oneself.  This has the structure of tactical self-doubling.  Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes the nature and meaning of self-transcendence; a particular Nietzschean motif (Bataille contrasts it with immanence, which he logically prefers):

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.

Self-transcendence is fraught, as it involves being aware of the contemptible aspects of one's self and moving above those cowardly elements.   Consciousness is thus doubled in the process of moving between what we are and what we will to become.   This process implies painful self-knowledge, which nonetheless one must accept if one wishes to explore a higher realm.

I'm reading Nietzsche's ANTICHRIST again.  I find it perfectly logical.  What can make a difference is the perspective of the reader.   It takes a while to develop the capacity to read it without the lens of contemporary ideologies.   I remember being very much enmeshed in some of the contemporary era ideologies that were invented to smash the left.  You were either on the side of "civilization" or against it.   This kind of reading distorts Nietzsche's writing so that instead of making logical points, he seems to be taking sides in a political struggle.  To read Nietzsche as making psychological observations, not political ones, gives coherence and intelligibility to his whole approach.

When I consider his opposition to the anarchists, I can reflect from the standpoint of today that I have met many left wingers who seem emotionally weak.  I've also met their equivalents on the right.   Nietzsche thought that the disruptive people, who looked to undermine society, were intent to undermine a structure which they could not enjoy anyway, due to their dependent natures.    It wasn't the society that had something wrong with it, but these agitators themselves did.   Psychologically speaking, I have found this is often true.  It doesn't work to condemn all agitators as weak personalities, though, because to generalize in that way is only possible by invoking metaphysical -- that is theological -- principles.   That's exactly what Nietzsche's writing wants to avoid.  Rather it seems one should exercise intellectual caution and view everyone on their own merits.

From my point of view, I find Nietzsche's commentary on those who want to overthrow the established order to have incredibly complex ramifications.   Consider that I had barely become an adult, when my own established order was completely overthrown.   Almost nothing remained, except for a small core of agitators for the extreme right and another skeleton group taking refuge in denial within the protective bubbles of their Christian ideologies.  For me, life itself, in almost every sense that I had known it, had been completely overturned:

Let no one doubt for an instant! One has truly not heard a single word of
Nietzsche's unless one has lived this signal dissolution in totality; without it,
this philosophy is a mere labyrinth of contradictions, and worse; the pretext for
lying by omission (if, like the fascists, one isolates passages for purposes which
negate the rest of the work).["will to chance," Bataille]

I immediately saw through the ideological, defensive response, and I only considered the alternative -- the hive of right-wing agitators -- when the aggressive people of the left had begun attacking me too much.  Primitive emotional responses are common when a defeated enemy (me) is in your grasp.  They're also common when the prior rulers realize they have been defeated and seek to take revenge for their humiliation.  I've experienced this aggression from both sides of politics.   Both have seen me, somehow, as their enemy -- someone whom they need to pick on to score points, or prove themselves worthy of their particular political ideologies.

They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others....

(comment by Nietzsche)