My mood is black, bordering on suicidal. Nin has no further use for me. Her money is safely tucked away in the bank, and I am history. Abuse in the form of physical violence is easy to recognise. Mental abuse through verbal attacks, unwarranted silence or forced moroseness is not. Am I bitter? You bet I am. My disastrous marriage and the resulting acrimonious divorce in Cape Town’s divorce court, caused me to spend hours researching abuse in relationships. I was shocked to find how many men suffer abuse from their wives or partners, but I never imagined it could happen twice, and in such quick succession.
If you had been through what I’d been through, you’d feel bitter too. Say what you want, you may be the most sanguine person on earth, but if you were treated with such disrespect, you’d probably have a breakdown or violent reaction. A less balanced person would have fled the country. I nearly did; my finger was on the Enter key, before there was a power cut and Qatar Airways’ website disappeared. Riddled with angst, memories of the empty wine bottles and the post-it-notes on the fridge door came rushing back.
I am feeling sorry for myself, and I make no apologies. I fear for my sanity; I have to get away from this place and away from myself before something bad happens. I’m not joking. I’m sane enough to know there’s a problem round the corner.
I’ve been asleep a long time, and it’s time to wake from my slumber and do something about it. I know about abusive relationships; who doesn’t? But I never expected this. I know about junkies and alkies from the outside, that they go through hell. And I now know about domestic abuse from the inside.
“You are my son, and I know what you are capable of. How dare you turn your back on life – I let you down – I know. But that doesn’t give you an excuse to let yourself down. Pull yourself together, get out there and show the world who you are.”
When we argued, this was how my father tried to motivate me on more than one occasion. It may have been an elaborate game – a dance of vanities – seeking power over one another, the winner, to then abuse it without thought for morality. There was no winner. Had this not been the downfall of mankind for centuries?
When Hermann Hesse described the rape of the weak by the strong in the Glass Bead Game, he could just as easily have been describing the psychological abuse of one spouse by another.
World history is nothing but an endless dreary account of the rape of the weak by the strong. To associate real history, the timeless history of Mind, with this age old, stupid scramble of the ambitious for power and the climbers for a place in the sun – to link the two let alone to try to explain the one by the other – is in itself betrayal of the living spirit. It reminds me of a sect fairly widespread in the 19th or the 20th century whose members seriously believed that the sacrifices, the gods, the temples and myths of ancient peoples, as well as all other pleasant things, were the consequences of a calculable shortage of surplus food and work, the results of a tension measurable in terms of wages and the price of bread. In other words, the arts and religions were regarded as mere facades, so-called ideologies erected above a human race concerned solely with hunger and feeling.
Doesn’t the history of thought, of culture and the arts, have some kind of connection with the rest of history?
Absolutely not, his friend exclaimed. That is exactly what I’m denying. World history is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the strength, luck, or vulgarity, not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture, of art are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness, and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical.