Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I’ve raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.
Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone — I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial — who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is — he has neglected to mention — a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.
What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you. I’m thinking of Nelson’s comments on the formerly famous Norman O. Brown, or on deconstructionism, although all this came much later. Denoon was an answer to something I was only subliminally aware was really bothering me, namely the glut of things you feel you ought to have a perspective on, à la core-periphery analysis or the galloping hypothèse Girardien. You are barely able to take note of the earthshaking novelties people are producing before they are swathed in bibliographies to be gotten through. But paradoxically you also want some tinge of provisionality about the most sweeping or summary judgments offered up for you. There was this feeling in for example Denoon’s fairly straightfaced contention that Christianity was originally a type of police socialism, id est Paul was a Roman imperial provocateur out to undo armed messianic Judaism and replace it with toothless lovingkindness. There needs to be humor, also. And there needs to be unselfconsciousness, some degree of it anyway, about the quality of the propositions our hero is able to produce. Denoon was often quite aphoristic. By my standards he often said publishable things. But there was no great vanity attaching. He said things matter of factly, and he was scrupulous to the point of mania about crediting whoever the author was of something he was using that the hearer might think was his, such as Society — an inferno of saviors, one of his favorite quotations and one I told him he didn’t have to keep telling me was by E. M. Cioran, a name I’ll never forget.
Nelson was interesting on the Boers, which was our last main topic at Tutwane’s. I was flagging, but this woke me up. In Gaborone, especially within the embassy penumbra, everybody talks about the Boers but nobody does anything about them, as I once said and which went over gratifyingly. The Boers keep coming into Botswana and killing people when they feel like it. They are still doing it. So we were always speculating about when the next raid would be, how far they would turn the screw, when they would close the railway at Ramatlabama, and so on. Anyone who had anything new or acute to say on the Boers was regarded with interest. I in fact jotted down key words from Denoon’s take on the Boer menace as soon as I got back under a streetlight. I might not get invited to the site, but I would take this away with me against a rainy day. Waste not want not is my motto.
The craziness of the Boers comes out of nationalism, he said. The Boers have only had the feeling of being in charge in South Africa since 1948 or 1950, which is recent, when they finally overcame the British. They had just gotten their feet under the table, so to speak, when of all people the kaffirs start telling them it’s all over, dinner will not be served. All they get is starters. The Boers reminded him of America, which only got to run a Pax Americana from the end of the Second World War until the sixties. Tantalized nationalisms are the worst. To which he added that, more than in any comparable case, the Boers are their state, since over half the adult Boer workforce is state employed.
Secondly, apartheid had to be looked at as an instance of a generically male form of madness having to do with sport. He said You’re looking at a particular game of performative excellence, like the shepherds in Crete who base their hierarchies on successful sheep rustling. Oppressing blacks is a national blood sport. We should consider the handicap the Boers accept. A tiny minority is holding down a gigantic black majority getting larger and more furious by the day. If the Boers can do it it’s better than winning every medal in the Olympics, which the Boers can’t play in anyway. The game is called Triumph of the Will. I know a fair number of Boers, he said, and Boers want to go into the SADF and go to the border or ride like lords through the townships. The English speakers don’t and are the ones who are conscientious objecting or slipping away abroad when the draft touches them. The white exiles you meet in Gaborone are English speakers, most of them. You strike up a conversation with a Boer and the first thing he wants to know is if you’ve done your military service, wherever you come from. Been to the army, then? is the first line out of their mouths. If you haven’t, they’ll still talk to you but from an emotional distance. I know them, he said.
There was no bravura about any of this analysis. In fact I could see he was depressing himself as he went on.
How is it going to end, do you think? I asked.
I don’t know, but it is, he said, and there’s something amusing the Boers have done to themselves that they won’t appreciate until it’s all over. Possibly the dumbest thing the Boers ever did was allow kung fu movies into the townships. They thought they were letting in cultural trash to distract the masses. Mark my words, someday somebody will trace the influence of kung fu movies on the liberation struggle and it will be substantial. Because kung fu movies, which are in fact trash, nevertheless teach over and over again an important lesson: you’ve got to get revenge. Christianity says you don’t, the reverse, and for years the educated black leadership went with that. But here comes something else, a set of brilliant how-to illustrations that says to young men Join into groups, use your bare hands against the enemy — the corrupt kung fu clubs that support the gangsters or the evil dynasty — accept discipline and adversity, team up, never give up, avenge your brothers. And by the way, here and there include women as fighters.