#dorris lessing

[librarydruid]

2 December

[madeinkerasus]

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

[linusjf]

Doris Lessing: Learning

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” —Doris Lessing.

[joeuissance]

[lioninsunheart]

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be.

 You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself -- educating your own judgements.

 Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

-Dorris Lessing-

[der-unverantwortliche]

My conclusion is that until we know the patterns that dominate our thinking and can recognize them in the various forms they emerge in, we shall be helpless and without real choice. We need to learn to watch our minds, our behaviour. We need to do some rethinking. It is a time, I think, for definitions.

Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism by Dorris Lessing

[lilyannsinclair1]

A Few of My Favourite Things.  The Memoirs of a Survivor.

Through her work, Doris Lessing has consistently examined our society’s precarious ideological structures and the collective anxiety that exists therein. The Memoirs of a Survivor is a bewildering example of this structural dissolution. Set in some undefined future, an unnamed middle aged woman watches from her window as her reality gradually falls into barbarism and disrepair. The sudden arrival of Emily, a perplexing and precocious adolescent, heralds a new world order as she traverses both the old world structures and the new. As these events unfold, the unnamed narrator retreats into a realm of fantasy which lies in obscurity behind her living room wall. This fantasy world allows the narrator to actively engage with her changing reality through an exploration of the unconscious realm. This realm of symbols, repressed memories and dark secrets enables her to shrug off conditioned roles in favour of her multifaceted self. 

The Memoirs of a Survivor presents a destabilisation of societal structures that prompt the reader to “break out and away from contemporary conditioning”  so that “we can awaken from the roles to which we have been so skilfully programmed.”  Doris Lessing persistently challenges the propensity to privilege reality over fantasy in an increasingly fantastic contemporary experience. This text allows for the re-examination of reality and fantasy as distinct categories and suggests that each inform and affect the other.

As well as exploring the instability of societal structures, the text also highlights the instability of an essential self. The narrator is left baffled throughout Emily’s adolescent development where she cannot comprehend her performative acts of “trying on” different selves. Lessing wants us to understand that Emily is all of these people and it is the pressure of the humanist drive to an essential self that causes such anxiety. From a feminist perspective this refusal to be confined to strict roles and even stereotypes asserts the legitimacy of fantasy literature as social and cultural commentary. 

This text consistently speaks to me as an emotionally sophisticated and reflective piece of literature. It enables us to step outside of our conditioned roles in order to understand our place within an increasingly baffling modern existence. In this way Lessing asserts fantasy as endlessly regenerative and consistently responsive to contemporary experience. Within this text fantasy, as a form, aggressively challenges a rigid and overarching ideology in favour of an active response to a multidimensional modern existence. The texts appeals to my belief that we should strive to honestly and actively engage with our environment through a genuine understanding of the self. This is an understanding that we should continually challenge and review in order to grow individually and collectively.

Lily Ann Sinclair

[esmeandthemoon]

hello.

from where i am sat i can see a collection of fire works going off, even though guy fawks night ended 3 days ago. other than that i am having a minor existential crisis and am hoping to fix my life in a rather Lessing-esque collection of three pocket moleskines (black), this blog and a novel i am writing called Parmaviolets. 

we will see how it all goes.

i am formally: scribblesandpostcards on both tumblr & xanga//

hello.