About me

Location:

Perth, Australia

Affiliation:

University of Western Australia 

Favourite books:

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

Philosophy:

The modern conception of [anything-at-all] is that we are passive victims of our circumstances. The old-fashioned concept is that we take our circumstances by the throat and change them -- just as we are changed by them.  I'm old-fashioned.

Biography:

I was born in Rhodesia in 1968.

Awards:

PhD (2011)

Description:

In my memoir, MINUS THE MORNING, I make fun of my youthful lack of knowledge about my time and place, whilst endeavoring to understand the origins of my sense of connection with nature as being sacred.   As as young adult, I struggled to understand why I lacked accurate political and social information about who I was in  the world.     Twenty years later, I have pieced together much of the cultural psychology that had led to my originally psychologically-naïve mindset.  I've developed all sorts of knowledge and power to take control of my circumstances.       

Personal information:

I was born in Zimbabwe and live a vivid physical and intellectual life with an active USA guy.  I'm attached to stoicism as a trade-off for the ability to have wide-ranging experiences: I crave these experiences as my body craves roughage. Such challenges provide substantial intellectual, emotional and cognitive rewards.

Personal interests:

Extreme sports, martial arts, women's self defence instructor, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, feminism, the life of the mind, Western boxing. Eastern philosophy,  Shamanism. I coined this term, "shamanistic doubling" to describe how certain types of 'madness' can be productive states. One looks at oneself from the outside and gains valuable knowledge and experience by reducing or increasing the level of one's emotional involvement.   Traditional shamans take special drugs in order to see everything from, as it were, outside of the ego.  


We can understand shamanism as a temporary departure from the here-and-now in order to bring something back from an altered state of consciousness.  This could be a solution to a problem, a creative product or an intellectual idea.  Notably, The double helix was discovered on LSD.  Altered states of consciousness are often experienced spontaneously by those who exposed to war or extreme episodes of violence.   My PhD thesis (2010) examines the experiences of Zimbabwean writer, DAMBUZDO MARECHERA, from this viewpoint.  My philosophical, psychological and aesthetic influences derive from Nietzsche and Georges Bataille.   As for myself: I was an emotionally-detached child -- extremely in tune with nature, but far from being enmeshed in human affairs.  

 "Shamanistic" detachment and stoicism thus come naturally to me. My employment of the term, "intellectual shamanism", is intended to imply neurological shifts and in no way suggests an experience of mysticism, except as a phenomenological effect.  This paradigm of "intellectual shamanism" is entirely my own and was developed over five years, whilst writing my PhD.