Appreciation (26) … Pan’s Labyrinth , revisited

Appreciation (26) … Pan's Labyrinth , revisited*
Torrey Orton
June 28, 2010

The last bits from my trip notepad have peered out at me longingly for two weeks. I couldn't really get any energy from their reference to two museum visits, one in Bilbao Museo de Bellas Artes) and the other in Barcelona (Museo Nacional D'art de Cataluña). As often, such notes are the surface evidence of an underlying wonder – in this case about Spain and the Spanish, a defined geography containing contesting populations, as it has for centuries. My wonder was something about how the Spanish came to be as they are, another confused European entity gathered together under one banner with regional populations struggling to reclaim historical identities and right historical wrongs. I was particularly interested in the forms violence takes culturally. Each museum had a very good exemplar couched in their regional histories.


This is a long history and too much to learn well enough to penetrate it with intellectual confidence. The Basque struggle is one of these, noisily in our awareness, while the Catalan is another, less prominent outside its region but ever present within it, paralleling the Basques' commitment to retention of original language. The Basque country is on the borderlands of the both the aboriginal peoples of that area and later the boundary between Christian Europe and the Moslem occupation to the south.


I realised only after allowing the two violences out of my notes that Pan's Labyrinth captures that history to some degree. The two museums carried powerful emblems of it: a history of bull sculpture and bull fighting art in Bilbao, and a history of Catholic Church art of the Catalan region from the 12^th to 14^th centuries in the Barcelona area. The shared theme is violence, one in the name of human dominance and the other in the name of God's.


The inevitable…
First the bulls. Their images predate modernity by millennia. But, what was stunning for me were the 18^th and 19^th century paintings and drawings in which the bulls often seemed to be winning. In a couple of sequences various humans and horses were torn up and in a final frame the bull was standing looking defiantly at the remaining attackers. Of course there were others showing what eventually happens to bullish defiance, but the amount of others' innards shed on the way to the inevitable was clearly substantial and explicit. Not surprisingly one of the sequences was by Goya .** The inevitable continues to this day.


Christian violences
Second, the Christian message to worshippers. Across the mountains an hour by air from Bilbao and two days later, Barcelona's grandiose Museo Nacional D'art de Cataluña hosted a Gothic religious art display mainly composed of items from the regional churches of that era. The earliest of these pieces in the show (some four or five galleries worth out of the total of 15 or so) were characterised by more explicit scarifications of saintly flesh than I had seen for a while. These were not of Goya's representational competence, but the facts were clear; roastings and toastings with solders piking the future saints around on the grills; beheadings, hangings, lashings, and intricate combinations of these, often as the backdrops to altars.


The scarification theme slowed down over a century or so, to the point that kids arriving in their parents' churches around the 14^th century would see next to none such imagery. More your variations on the politer end of the biblical stories, with occasional implications of pain and tribulation. Holy families, visitors and ascended believers.


Organisational violence encourages the personal?
Shortly (1460's), the Spanish Inquisition came along to drive a new expression of God's violence with the added energy of royal sponsorship and partial funding (see PPPs below), which lasted actively until 1834! Not until I just looked up the Inquisition did I realise how both penetrating and persistent it had been. A love for public, terminal violences characterised both the church and the sports of their day, with the sport remaining to our day both in its lands of origin and exported to the Hispanic world. Its time may be going. Major public spectacle status of bullfights did not fully emerge til the 18th century, towards the end of the Inquisition's hold. Religious spectacle begets sporting spectacles, a link shared by the certainty of death in both? Religious violence pits organisation against individuals (carrying the burden of opposing organisations - Islam, Judaism and Christian protestants and heretics). Corrida de toros pits individuals against powerless but dangerous adversaries. Overpowering is the main theme, with black and white justifications the energisers.



 
And so, I wonder what it was like to live knowing that what you believe can bring you death by a thousand cuts, if it is known; and wonder how many refused to take the apparently easy way out (recanting, converting), and finally, wonder what it was like to be among the converted of all kinds – protestant, Jewish and Moslem - (13,000 Jewish conversos in the first 12 years) who were rigorously examined by the Spanish Inquisition. Just a little test of their faith, supported by a small army of local informers (who may, as always, have had other agendas than theological purity). After reading an early draft of this post, Charles recalled having been to an exhibition a few years ago in San Diego (Calif.) of instruments of inquisitorial torture, a visit he recalled with visible and audible horror.


Whateva, as we say these days, but that's hard times. Yet, the numbers shrink to relative peanuts in the scales of modern atrocity, and contemporary methods (Cambodia's "killing fields" come to mind) have little to learn from those of the pre-moderns. You can have it all on the web these days. But, it's not quite as clear about the look of the damages as were our precursors who, like Chinese road accident reduction campaigns in the early (1990's), posted explicit gore in unavoidable public places. I approve.


Finally, finally, this excursion reminds me how ordinary is the atrocious, permeated with its banal little vengeances and materialisms. If you want an argument against self-funding (for profit) public services, a trip to the Inquisition is instructive and easier to get the facts than our PPPs.



"Happy trails to you, until we meet again…."


*run through the first 20 posts to the Pomeranz / Stratton review for a glimpse of the range of takes on this film.


**I am aware that Goya is a major figure in my personal art history catalogue. This was because I was exposed to his realist treatments of Spanish civilians terrorised by an earlier group of foreigners in the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars. When we were in Basque country, we spent time in Gernika and its Peace Museum which memorialises the 1937 bombing by German and Italian airforces. For some reason an album of Goya (Disasters of War) was in my family home in the 1950s. I imagine that it was through Goya in my later primary / early secondary years that I first encountered undisguised human butchery. In the 50's that aspect the Korean war was not in TV (MASH never got there either 15 years later), and visuals of the WW2 European and Pacific calumnies were not in everyday print or film, though the first book length coverage of the extermination and concentration camps was around by the late '50's I think. An American history of a Civil War Confederate concentration camp was published as the novel Andersonville (1955) which notably did not treat the northern camps of the same sort.

Learning to act right (11)… No molestar

Learning to act right (11)… No molestar
Torrey Orton
June 23, 2010

No Molestar

(= Do Not Disturb - Spanish sign for hotel room doors)

In the borderlands

This is not a hotel story, yet the false friend offered by the sign is topical. It's an ethical decision making story which involves a failed defence with no negative after effects, except being reminded how threatened I can be by implicit violence. Why does this matter? What's the point, as Charles asked about an early draft?


The point has to do with situations in which the point is not at all clear but seems demanding to be clarified in an unavoidable way. There are life circumstances where correct perception of danger is the most important thing to have. Without the perception, correct action cannot be taken, or is likely to be compromised by the delay to ponder the facts. Trouble is, we can't always or reliably tell what's dangerous and what not in the facts. The following example is one of such. Our times are riven with them. These are the borderlands.


They are also relativity heaven, where judging the intent of others does not easily resolve itself into objectivity. Hence the detail in what follows! Its objectivity was hard to bring clearly into view. The flush of demanding factors in the process was almost overwhelming – in fact, to some extent I can now see that the whole event can be interpreted as an attempt not to fall into overwhelm …into that state where no action is as likely to arise as some action, right or not!! That's sometimes a very bad thing.


Wandering down The Ramblas in Barcelona at any time of day may be a challenging task moderated by the endless varieties of humanity surging around, even in the rain, as that day. A known but unidentifiable danger lurks thereon – the local pickpockets. I know they are there and carry my wallet in my left front pocket, my gold pen out of sight and camera in a backpack.


History

I once was the subject of a similar attempt in the Paris Metro about 8 years ago, with a similar outcome to this story, but much less explicit confrontation. So, there was nil subsequent hyper-vigilance or feeling of powerlessness. In the streets of Melbourne a related incident occurred four years ago across from the Telstra offices and just down the street from the site of "Doing little goods badly" a month ago. This was a case of beggar thuggery, or thug beggary as it turned out. A handout seeking hand protruded from a well-coated and trim bearded guy who said, "Why don't you look at me when I speak to you?" and followed up with, "Next time I see you maybe I'll take your wallet off you" (confirming the implicit threat of his initial question). That one populated a terror spot in me for a few weeks. Charles also pointed out that the underlying personal dynamic of this post and the one linked above is similar!


What follows is subject to all the distortion factors you can imagine, but, as elsewhere, it's the only evidence I've got*. The whole incident took 20 or 30 seconds I guess. It had been raining on and off that morning (we'd just gotten in from Bilbao), so I was carrying a tightly closed folding umbrella in my right hand by its crooked handle. My left hand was free and I had a small, lightweight, but heavy-duty backpack on.


First approach

At about this spot a guy around 30 drew along from behind my right shoulder waving a menu sheet about two feet in front of my face. Jane and I had been walking along for about 15 minutes by that time. We had just finished a very pleasant seafood lunch at the Boqueria Mercato with power assist from a bottle of rosé. He asked if we wanted to try something at one of the Ramblas restaurants. I walked on, maybe saying 'no', maybe just dismissing him with disregard, or some of both.

Upping the ante

He continued with the sheet and drew closer, touching my right shoulder with his left and starting to talk about learning the tango. The tango talk was punctuated by swings of his left foot across my right as we walked, each time trying to get further around my foot with a swing recognisably tangoesque if you've seen enough movies. It was certainly the first time I'd felt the fine fit of the swung foot to the other's steps, and the potential for a misstep to be a trip.


About the third swing I was feeling invaded! I can't pick what switched my attention from patientputtingup to impatient suspicion and irritation. I stopped and turned with the rolled umbrella in a useful though not threatening position, unless you know that a stab is better than a whack for defence. Almost at the same time, I was aware that his hand was on my right rear pocket (which had nothing but a handkerchief in it) and I faced him saying "get your hand out of my pocket." He denied having it there and threw an offended / angry look along with the denial, but also started backing off, and by the time I was fully turned he was jogging slightly away. He was about 180 cm, medium build, shortish black hair and cold eyed. I cannot reliably recall the guy's face, though I have a sense of classically attractive Spanish male.


Recovery?

We continued along the same path to the end of the Ramblas at the start of the harbour, paused for a few moments reflecting on the event, and decided to go back the way we came. I was in mild shock…a slight sense of damage with steady apprehension that he would reappear and there was nothing I could do but be vigilant; hence, hyper-vigilance set in and lasted for an hour or so.


My state of vigilance had been reasonably high all the time we were in the street, but not high enough to pick a set up in the making. I didn't react immediately to his invasion of my visual space with the menu sheet. Why not?


Two reasons come to mind. One, I didn't assume he was anything other than a restaurant spruiker (though that is not a common practice on The Ramblas), and two, I'm a small town kid with an innate first assumption face-to-face of benign intent in others (the underlying vigilance came from the published fact of pickpocket presence there). Of course there's the rosé effect, too. So, I didn't push him away, turn to face him or do other distancing things because they would have broken the first assumption. Even when he crowded my visual and then physical space, the first rule continued in force.


About now you might be noticing that this rule suite is also a rationale for an intrinsic passivity, or a conflict avoidant attitude. This is an underlying factor for me, but if it were not I'd still face an ethical dilemma something like this. His activities could all be explained, and so deflected, by a story about his spruiking role: need for employment, presently stressed financial straits and sick child….etc. And this would contextualise his invading my space from his viewpoint, and partly mine, too. I unconsciously provided that story, just as I have fabricated it now here. It's the story of a recognisable life role of low threat, but some invasiveness.


Perceived invasion

But, to explore the perceived invasion would have deepened a relationship I did not want to have at that time. It was not a casual encounter of the daily sort (a light acknowledgment of others in passing transactions – buying newspapers, croissants, coffee; or, managing passage in crowded streets: who goes first at the lights, which side of the pathway to tend towards, etc.) which arise and flow away briskly with a slight lift in general interest and affect, but no continuing commitment. Spruiking implies a potential commitment which is about to be negotiated. I did not even want that amount of engagement.


He knew, and I do too, that an initial response to another can be modified by expression of real intent. So, good spruikers are good at persisting up to the point of irritation, of explicit rejection. And, we both know that as a generalised social expectation. This makes both of us responsible for maintaining the appropriate distance…but, that but again, the responsibility is not symmetrical. The spruiker has more responsibility than I do (than one has!), and here comes the potential conflict.


To question a spruiker's expression of his/her intent is to implicitly question their conduct, to challenge it and potentially to reject it. The likelihood of an inquiry becoming a challenge increases when both parties are under pressure. For me this prospect reduces my capacity to defend against the unwanted, while not reducing the perceived invasion. An eventual query then tends to be over-expressed as the unexpressed offense gathers energy under my repression.


No refuge..

The underlying dynamic crosses many kinds of public (and presumably private) relationships, sharing the platform of perceived powerlessness, which can be as strong with the destitute (beggars, needy, homeless, temporarily down) as with the destroyers (thugs of various sorts). The ethical challenge is to act out of powerlessness usefully. Understanding my powerlessness is a starting place. The epistemological challenge is to understand something both ephemeral and terrifying – my powerlessness. There is no refuge from being disturbed by life.


*In fact, there were two guys in the restaurant pictured who I noticed noticing the latter stages of this brief incident. Of course, my noticing them noticing is also suspect... and so it goes. I think they were still seated there when we walked back along the same path five minutes later.

Being here (3) …. Being there, and not

Being here (3) …. Being there, and not
Torrey Orton
June 22, 2010

"Being interested in others' interests…"

I was asked (in that 'you must have been...' way that people often do) by a waitress in my local coffee shop if I was excited about being on vacation in France. I actually couldn't reply for a bit and stumbled around for a few more bits until the barista piped up from his lunch a few tables away to volunteer that I probably wasn't excited about something I'd done often. But, I was stumbling for another reason – something I still can't access or express clearly.


The experience I had just had was of being there on vacation pretty constantly. I wasn't irritated about being there, about not being elsewhere (at work in some sense). The best evidence of that was not feeling anxious about almost anything for 18 days. I didn't even read all of one (Eugen Herrigel's The Way of Zen; I commend it to those getting into being) of the books I'd taken for empty spots. I did, of course, take the machinery of my reflection along and tapped at it regularly, but not obsessively. More like there was a routine I follow which I enjoy, but am not preoccupied with. The result of being there was noticing things, and noting some noticed things in my standard breast pocket note pad for exploration. So, I was exercising awareness development without trying to.


Another evidence that I was there rather than somewhere else: my almost unflappable flexibility about all things travelling. Often I'm quite obsessive about certain aspects, with a tendency to angry irritation when things look a little out of line in the transport division (lateness, delays, etc.). Similarly, I found it pretty much totally easy to be with Jane's interest in visiting here and there. These are not things I would have chosen to do, but doing them was almost totally with unrestrained ease, followed often by interest (as reflected in some of June's blog posts). In a sense, I was accompanying her on her trip and found myself able to be with it all the way. She had done all the detailed trip construction tasks over months last year.



I realise that an insight I had in the Place St George in Toulouse (June 4, '10) applies here. This realisation is what I was heading for when I started this post 5 days ago though I didn't know I was coming here, yet I already knew the end three weeks ago! I wrote in my trusty notepad: "Being interested in others' interests is hard but if I am not (interested in them) I'm disconnected or disconnecting." My interest in her interests opened doors on other interesting things as well.


This being there (in France and Spain), being present to that experience and Jane's interests which drove it, allowed certain perceptions to occur in the open spaces of my unpreoccupied awareness – notably things to do with the mountains and waters, and their sounds in particular. I had another perception of a background sound in the Cafe Iruna (see excellent interior photo here) in Bilbao. On a Sunday afternoon, the day of our arrival from San Sebastian by bus, we got a table for two on family day (perhaps every day is, but this one was certainly so) in a visual marvel, with a nice medium buzz of humanity – animated but not loud. Part way into the consumption of the Menú del día, I became aware of a very light background rhythm, musical genre undistinguishable, but marked by running a little below the pace of breathing and operating almost at the visceral level of hearing.


Further through our meal (three courses and a whole bottle of quite drinkable local red for 37 Euros approx., tout compris!), a baby at one of the larger tables nearby started up the child's plea which touches all adults' hearts, one way or another. It's squally invasion was balanced by a slight rise in the general level of conversational noise in the room. No one I could see was orchestrating, but then maybe I was imagining….


…. being there happens like this. It's little wonder this beginner at being here has trouble being there! How could I have said that in 15 seconds between the waitress's deliveries?

 

Funny things happen travelling - 2

Funny things happen travelling - 2
Torrey Orton
Home
June 18, 2010

 

…but wait, there's more.

I forgot about a couple of things along the way.


The case of the disappearing gate
Right near the start we had prize winner for travellers' misdirections. We thought we had it all figured out – how to get from the airport hotel to the right gate for an early flight from Paris to Pau. There's this little, gratuit, robot light rail which runs from the backdoor of the Charles De Gaulle airport hotel sector around most of the main terminals. Gate 2G was our target and clearly listed among the train's stops. We got on with an hour to spare and got off ten minutes later at the designated 2 series gates (A thru G)
That's where the trouble became apparent (it had started when we assumed that our gate was somewhere within the natural ambit of the robot train system). Our objective turned out not to be grouped with 2A thru F. There were arrows to 2G pointing up which lead us up to a bus stop above the terminal and no more 2G. The arrows disappeared and no explanatory placards or helpful; staff replaced them. It took 8 minutes of wandering around to find the bus stop and another 2 to discover that only one bus went to 2G and it came around every 20 mins. We didn't know when it last came thru and time was awasting. We had no boarding cards yet, either.
The next circuit came around in 5 minutes and we got to 2G in time, but no one ever said they'd moved 2G 5 ks away from the rest of 2 into a rehabbed cargo centre on the edge of CDG.


Up ain't up, always
This leads naturally on to another cultural foible – up doesn't always mean up; sometimes it means straight ahead. We had had some learning opportunities with this earlier in the Paris Metro the day before (and subsequently in other airports and train stations – slow learners!). We were getting misled by arrows pointing up which actually meant straight forward, not up, but in circumstances where there was an up to go to which was within view as much as the forward. Under a little time pressure this easily translated into mild local industrial disputes within the travel work team.


Many large black slugs
For something a lot different…back to the mountains. In three of the valleys we walked there was an intrusively prominent flat black slug of substantial proportions which slid out onto the paths, and in the greenery along them. We had never seen one before and as you'll see from the web link, they are not native to Australia, but some infestations have been sighted recently in similarly damp countryside in Victoria (one Victorian website relates a woman showing up at the Ag Dept. or similar with buckets of them collected in small patches of river flat in the Otways). The fourth valley seemed to have none of the black variety, but our Cauterets host suggested that there may have been brownish ones. As the link discloses, the black comes in a number of colour variations. But why the colour change in that valley? Well, wonders of nature?
I'm mildly disappointed to find now that the large black slug is even known commonly as just that, the "large black slug". Worse, I'm not the first person to see one, not by a long way. Not that I really harboured that fantasy, but…just a smidge of discovery desire.


Enjoy, again.

Funny things happen travelling

Funny things happen travelling
Torrey Orton, Barcelona, Spain
June 11, 2010

 

Travel isn't always illuminating or diverting, but it seldom has none of these. This trip is no different, though I pay more attention to capturing illuminations than I used to. My pocket note pad is gathering stuff at an alarming rate. I'm about to start investing in those bound "moleskin" ones which will make them collectible. Ah, the pretences.


Anyway, travel to foreign parts is even more likely to have diversions, with occasional illuminations in train, and some of these follow. I call them "funny things" because they are variously strange, surprising, laughable, shockingly unexpected, pathetic….I mean no item to add to the evidence base for those who consider foreign ways impenetrably dopey, immoral, etc. They are presented in the order of their occurrence. For example,


A gluggy tale In the loo of the flat we shared in Cauterets, France (which I recommend to walkers and skiers, the flat that is) there was a well-fitted 20 cm. wide hand basin of recent design and even more recent installation, meeting health expectations, etc. It had a little towel rack next to it and a bar of soap was provided. The thing was this – the bar kept sliding into the bowl and lodging over the drain. It did because the inbuilt soap space (whaddya call such a thing?) was slightly inclined towards the bowl from left to right to allow the residual water to run off the and the bar to retain its barness rather than descending into glug, the prime enemy of happy relationships…. However, the design was ever so slightly off…the wet soap slid relentlessly, as reported above…and we all tried hard to make it stay in its allotted spot and no one could so; we always found the bar slowly descending as said towards the bottom of the basin…a good idea gone wrong or just a bargain purchase failure?



A nice touch to being in a town long enough to go to the croissant shop several mornings in a row is having had the good chance to find the best local one the first time around (confirmed by trying both of the other offerings by chance). On the third morning the management volunteered that they would be closed (as normal, but not advertised because everyone knows when core sustenance providers are open and closed in the neighbourhood in France) and that I could find the desired articles around the corner. An unexpected virtue of having enough French to seem I know what I'm doing.


And a thing that happened on the way to another scenery in the Pyrenees: we drove up the perilously poised Col de Tourmalet passing a small pack of uniformed cyclists halfway, surrounded by a small but diligent filming crew front and back. We made it by with some help from the crew and pushed on towards the top with growing apprehension about the distance from the road edge to the bottom of the ski slope (1000 metres). On arrival, in a temperature of about 5C we savoured the ride and pondered the quick follow up of the cyclists, met by more filmers and shortly thereafter by more cyclists coming from the other direction, more filmers, and a general conflagration of made-my-day joy from one of our foursome! Her joy was Contadorian – as he emerged out of the second arriving group and she got a chance to attach herself to the media scrum for a few minutes. Note that we had NO idea such an event was occurring that day, so the lions of chance were at work for us – chance that we did not fall over the edge and that we did arrive just as the cyclists did; and the rest is family history for her, whose eldest daughter is a cyclist of some standing herself in triathlons and both are serious Tour de France followers just warming up for the annual round shortly which was part of the rationale for the Col visit in the first place! Mum's a fair performer on the wheels herself!


While I'm on bathroom stuff, there was the hotel of the Mercure brand in Toulouse where we spent a couple of nights in support of the Millau Viaduc visit ( a 200+ Ks drive away). A wonder of cleanly modernity including both loo and bidet all packed nicely into a good space with normally restrictive shower for lads of my proportions (but then I wonder about really big guys whose heads could hardly be got under the rose). The loo however had been designed by true midgets so there was about 15 cm. between the bowl and the wall, into which space a doubler role dispenser of vital papers was also squeezed at a height about 30 cms above the bowl. You, too, can calculate already that this is a tight fit, even for less disproportionate types than myself. I've seen similar in China in earlier years where there had been no social history of private loos to instruct builders with appropriate proportioning of loo spaces. But in France, in the third largest city in an international hotel chain, in a very generous allinone bathroom space by five star standards in a three star hotel?? Weird funny. There was not that much funny in the utilisation struggle but some physical training effects were achieved over a few days.


We had passed thru Irun station on the way home to Paris from Torremolinos, Spain, in 1972 with a lasting impression of Franco's ever ready search for the enemy embodied in the coldest looking eyes we'd ever seen on a secret policeman searching each carriage for enemies of the state. On the way to San Sebastian, that impression, without the eyes, was recreated a few days ago in arriving at Irun around 10pm – a station of astonishing blankness, greyness and enclosedness. Only one way led out of the platform into a room with no directions and a couple of customs agents sort of manning an X-ray machine (turned off). A small crowd of arrivals gathered in the small hall, a few oriented towards the machine and all of us needing to get on the next train to Lisbon, from which a scad of other ends could be reached, amongst which ours of San Sebastian - next stop on the line! Having gotten on the train to Lisbon and travelled 15 minutes, we arrived in San Sebastian unannounced by anyone. If we had not known the first stop was San Sebastian we might still be trying to get back there from Lisbon now. A little consultation with other passengers confirmed what we knew must be true: this was San Sebastian. It was an introduction we could not recognise to a serious low grade glitch in directions in Spain. The glitch has stood up for five days in Bilbao, Bermeo, Bakio, Gernika, and eventually Barcelona. It appeared in trains, busses, undergrounds, funiculars, museums, shops in a plethora of forms with a constant threat of misleading, though never quite really getting us into trouble. We eventually began to develop a work around – basically, assuming that whatever directions there were would be faulty to some degree. Not an irritation after a bit just something funny, like user directions in IT applications and tools which never seem able to take a naive user's viewpoint.


While in Bakio, a seaside resortish spot principally for Spaniards I suspect, I had another kind of funny, the potentially highly embarrassing sort. After a lunch of disappointing ordinariness in a spot masquerading as the local eatery of choice, I sought out the loo. It was quite passable, as had been true in Cauterets and various other places. Especially, since it was in a cellar, it was well lighted. So I went in for serious business and a minute later all the lights went out. I had failed to notice that they were on automatic – they were a self-starting minuterie. Fortunately, I had scanned the service available and checked off against a notional required list before even setting to. Paper source was remembered, roughly, though not checked for fill level. Double fortunately, paper fill was good and access was manageable with some contortion of left shoulder, arm and hand. In brief, I escaped with all needs satisfied and no self-regards injured. But, what a joke on a supposedly knowledgeable traveller.


After visiting some new acquaintances in Gernika we moved towards parting, powered by their need to see their kids who had been in the care of a "kangaroo". It turns out that the local term for a baby-sitter is kangaroo. Strange. They said it had to do with the pouch. Skippy, what have you done? Their only previous exposure to things Oz is an artist friend - Bill Kelly - who's been involved for ten years in the memorialising of the 1937 Gernika bombings. I don't think he's even drawn a roo…but ?


While one of the above said roo users was showing us around Gernika, one stop in the rain included a last minute (the present Basque police officials in charge of the Basque parliament site were trying to close it down for the day) stop at the Tree of Basque. There at the edge of the fenced in ground was a 100 year old blue gum ( I think). The mountains of the Basque area are now half given to gum plantations for wood pulp, so the species is very common, just not huge examples. Our history follows us around, or more likely we are constantly awakened to the fact it is always there.


Walking down a main drag in Bilbao three days ago brought us in reach of a demo breaking up around midday. We had seen outliers of it in another part of town earlier in the morning, so the fact was not surprising. The stunner was not that they left a trail of promotional handouts behind them; it was the tune they were chanting: a Spanish version of "workers united will never be defeated" in the exact rhythm and tune we are so acquainted with. Not a few were carrying some red banners and the local news reported the next day that 150,000 marched in Barcelona the same day in protest over proposed reduction of public sector pay to cover GFC debts incurred by the usual suspects (hmm, that just slipped out naturally, 'the usual suspects', so it must be appropriate in this context!).


There seems to have been a strong loo theme here. When I first noticed it, I shied away from it in slight embarrassment. Then giving the fact some space to display itself I noticed that loos have three significant features: they offer little space to avoid what's present, they are concerned with core business and any variation from standard core business protocols stick out baldly. Variations in more everyday matters more easily escape notice until they coalesce into persistent deviations from expectations. Or, so I suppose.


So, a final funny. Somewhere in Toulouse I was in front of the smallest urinal I'd ever seen. While there are many wonders which can be elicited from such facts, the one I want to note is that it had a perfectly situated porcelain fly in it to assist aim – a really good idea if the container is slight and aim is known to be flagging.


Enjoy.

Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?

Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?
Torrey Orton,
Barcelona, Spain
June 10, 2010

 

Where there's mountains and there's water, there's beauty

• 
  
  Rough translation of traditional Chinese saying
  
   

As we walked along our fourth snowmelt powered stream in the Pyrenees a week ago, I became aware that the rhythm of its downhill rush had an undercurrent to the foreground roar of water on stone and water. This was a persistent low rumble, a susurration maybe, which recalled the background voice of our favourite beach respite, Eastern View. We spend a week a year looking out into the steady but highly varying roar and rumblings of the ocean surf. It's the auditory respite of our resort from the city. The noise counterpoints the view in that case, and so maybe that was what was happening in the mountains. It is ever-present to some degree, lingering while the waters of stream or sea come and go with thunder or slush (hear it).


While the views of the mountains in their ever changing variations were moment to moment present to us, the fact of their slow degradation by the waters rested in the background of my awareness. And so, perhaps, in starting this post my first awareness of its topic was aural, not visual. This came, as topics usually do, in the early morning seeking words for the difference between the noise of clashing waters and the sound of flowing waters – a search as yet incomplete! The undercurrent sound was delicate and could only be heard at certain spots on the mountain path, to be as suddenly overwhelmed by noise as it had appeared out of the noise moments earlier. Their expressions, the undercurrents and the topics, are similarly reluctant. But, on to the mountains, and the questionable eminence of the visual over the aural, unlike that of taste over touch ….


Primary senses?
The attraction of attractions in real mountains (we haven't any in Oz, though we have competitive heights – a reminder of the eventual dominance of the waters over the lands) is the appearance of having a great view of this or that snow-garnished, rising wonder…great until we move from this point of view to the next one a few steps over or up from here. We seem to produce the new view by moving, without knowing what it will be only that it will be. As we were walking one of these perception-making paths, I encouraged us not to stop for lunch until we went around one more corner, out of my certainty that a better view was there, as it was to some others' surprise. It has so often, so long been so for me that I don't even think about proposing it.


Attracted attention
This is the attraction of mountains, and of waters, for me. They attract my attention; incite my interest…..as much if not more than I invest them with attractiveness by creating the changing views. That any scene/setting can be attractive is attested by the capacity to see views which people have in the most unpromising visual and auditory environments – the two apparent perceptual deserts of permanent sand and snow. Languages notoriously reflect this capacity to invest attractiveness with, to others, incredible refinements of descriptive power for their dominant environments. What's snow for us is a dozen distinctions in the character of its surface and composition for Inuit, as is sand a palette of colours to the Tuareg, who lack our variety of greens for good reason.


A motion picture can show that this process occurs, that there are views to be produced by what's present in the terrain of our passage – the objective mountains of life. I'm exploring the subjective ones of our experience, what keeps us seeking them perhaps. Maybe, too , it's not 'us', just me who does this, though I suspect a greater generality of experience because my capacity is not mine it's human, with the variation arising from my particular biopsychosocial heritages.


Novelty and interest
Staying with representations (photos, videos, paintings) a bit more: I noticed at Millau, France, that the viaduct was less compelling alive, so to speak, than some of its web images, particularly the moving ones done from a helicopter on perfect days, etc. I was a little disappointed, though Jane was not. She had a different investment in the event, the thing. From close up my disappointment melted without mention because I was seeing aspects of the viaduct inaccessible to the helicoptered eye. We were seeing it at moments from the inside as when we entered one of the pillars at its base to find it was two pillars designed to reduce wind resistance by circulating the passing winds to create a counter pressure to that applied by their hitting the exposed flanks of the pillars. And, we could see that the other six pillars, over their 2.5 Ks carriage of the roadway, were similar great things scaled down by distance.


What we saw on arriving is also not what we mostly saw in the recent Richard Hammond treatment of the viaduct's engineering wonders, and their historical origins (another reason for my diminished joy with the eventual reality – too much exposure?).


A missing picture
Another take on perception driving objectivity: two days ago I followed Jane into the Bilbao (Gehry) Guggenheim which is quite wondrously intrusive on the outside and enclosing on the inside. That's a double in most books. This is another place she has wanted to be in and around for a while. Among the offers inside was an Henri Rousseau historical from start to finish. I enjoyed wandering through with a mild sense of 'I know what's going on here' which derived from a competent exposure to the visual arts in college, backed by a fair photo recall memory for pictures and words. This has done me OK for a general grip on the visual art world.



 
But, towards the end of the review I realised I was on the edge of a slight disappointment - that the most characteristic Rousseau (The Dream, 1910) was not on show, though a small photo of it in somebody else's museum was on show. I had actually been going through the show to get to that pic, to revisit in the real an image I had collected 45 years ago in Art 102 (101 was everything up the renaissance, or so, I think). Not, of course, that I consciously knew I was doing so until the awareness struck. It only slightly surprised me when I looked the picture up to discover that I had cropped it in my memory, leaving out the dreamer.


This event opens a Pandora's worth of wonder about underlying motivations in all manner of settings…but that's for another day. Yet on this day I have to notice that this event points the finger of probability at unseen influences distorting our everyday perceptions …which a number of people have noticed before. What they do not say is that the motivation of the unknown, but not unknowable, may also be the very force which drags us into the light of unexperienced objects as with Rousseau above. So, a reality undistorted by consciousness may not be available.

And I haven't even started to describe the mountain / water mix with any fineness!

Learning to act right (9)…. Learning reciprocity




Learning to act right (9)…. Learning reciprocity
Torrey Orton,
Barcelona, Spain
June 9, 2010

"En cas d'affluence, ne pas utiliser les strapontins"

Paris Metro 270510

On our first and only day in Paris I noticed a little sign (above) to the left of a Metro car door. One word reached out - "affluence" - touching my mangledmeanings warning system. So I read the whole sign again. While I knew I was in the presence of an example of what linguists call 'false friends', the overlap with our popular social disease affluenza was an irresistible attraction. However, in the Paris Metro an affluence is an excess of a different kind; one to be avoided by travelling out of rush hour. The little sign commands us not to sit on the springloaded, flapdown seats at the car door when there's a crowd on board. Something similar can be found in our own Melbourne Metro trains which also suffer affluences in the French sense, perhaps with less grace.


One might have thought the command unnecessary, that anyone would know not to sit down when their seating would block the ingress/egress of others - in a word, not to be civically inconsiderate. But like the French (the same sign is in the Metro of Toulouse, so I'll guess it's napoleonically everywhere in France), we have seriously increasing shortages of public consideration, especially where one would have thought that the right action was obvious!!


I expect soon there'll be signage on the outside of our Metro train or Yarra Tram doors saying 'make way for exiting passengers, you dopes' in recognition of the increasing practice of standing in front of the doors at rush hours. I have sworn lightly but audibly at some malefactors of consideration at Flinders Station tram stop. This malefaction seems to be a gender, age and ethnicity free affliction. Little old ladies of various origins look a little put out by a large old guy of my dimensions staring them down from the tram front doorway, especially the older grey ones which only admit one person in or out at a time.

The 'one'Ah, the ubiquitous 'one' of a notionally shared code of practice. Public life is where we learn and reinforce these codes. Some are found all around the world wherever modernity's opportunities (immediate need fulfilments across the whole range of the imaginable) impose their own constraints like traffic rules, queuing for service, and so on. Where they are well established, they are understood as right actions which everyday public life depend on. In Hong Kong the code of ingress/egress is marked in fat white lines on the train platforms to remind the selfish of a virtue which deserves the reinforcement of regulation.


We experience the codes as politeness, consideration … in fact, as personal respect. Their decline in Oz (partially out of immigrant ignorance of local habits or importing habits from other less polite cultures) of simple acknowledgments like the finger wave of thanks for letting another pass on a closefitting road is felt by some of us as the creeping edge of indifference or worse, aggression. I was pleased to find its equivalent is as alive in southern France today, as is its other face – the pass-on-any-corner culture of southern European (France, Italy Spain) driving.


We had a nearly terminally shocking encounter with that other face on leaving Cauterets down its 15 ks of winding, switchback, two lane road with 100-200 meter drops off one side. A turbo powered Mini, or French similar, popped out from a blind corner in our side of the road at 70-80 kph (we were under the limit at 70 kph) and a closely fitted line of four cars and truck he was trying to pass hedged him into our lane. That I'm writing now tells the outcome, but our driver lost a couple of lives in avoiding a multicar mush. Where does that madness, also an accepted code I've encountered in Italy and Spain, come from in a national transport culture with well regulated freeway driving which keeps slower vehicles consistently in the outside lane, and blocking the passing lane is an acknowledged sin recompensed by self-deprecating waves from those needing absolution?

Conflicting right actionsSomewhere in such contradictions lurks the changing dynamics of particular right actions at any time in history. Conflicting codes kept in mind without internal conflict it seems. The above examples are extended by the often impenetrable practice of give way to the right which make places like Place de L' Etoile and its many siblings in Paris actually work to move things. That code is a different solution to the power politics of human movement. People on escalators and streets walk to the right, too.


Reciprocity is a core value expressing the shared nature and mutuality of human (and other organisms!) being. Our everyday possibility depends on it, despite the common disregard by the simple-minded individualists of their various hues. How we learn reciprocity is a major challenge for our value-distorted times. Reciprocity does not equal mutuality, though they stand on empathy expressed partly and occasionally in compassion, underpinned by neuronal competence for recognising the thinking/feeling others. The oft cited downturn in close friendships between adults in the Anglo world in last 10 (?) years suggests an objective the decline in substantive mutuality and reciprocity.


So, as I wondered months ago, what are the young learning about relationships, both near and distant, and the ethics which sustains them??? Can it be the world of intergenerational fantasy promoted by Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Group in an article published jointly in Le Monde and the International Herald Tribune on May 28, 2010? He claims of his grandchildren "This new generation, activist and more inherently collective, is now taking the place of the post-Boomers, whose individualism and materialism may perhaps have contributed to the excesses for which we are now paying." I remember belonging to something like that 45 years ago, which shifted some social sentiments, but otherwise populated the Boomer world without a slip in the normal drive train. Levy's encomia for the young sound like those of my youth and with largely the same economic and social naiveté.

Does it matter?But anyway, does it matter? Is there any reason to believe that traditional virtues and structures must be maintained? Can people live in an untrusting world? Yes, of course, because the Germans, Russians, Chinese and hosts of others in hosts of places have done so, and do do so, now and they continue to be human, just less comfortably so. Our behavioural economists will tell us that the quality of life is partly (?) a matter of perception affected by personal expectations, so living in an Indian village or Caucasus city may have higher perceived well-being than your average denizen of supposedly advanced cultures, especially the Anglo ones….or so I read repeatedly.. and that's the latest research!!.



Most recently, yesterday, I read someone else wondering about the validity of various current social critiques because they are so often thoroughly ahistorical and so interpret the present as if there had never been a past with similar dynamics. He was introducing The Shallows (2010) by Nicholas Carr. Maybe the important learning of ethical basics continues persistently in the colourless undercurrents of living, driven by hard-wired needs for fairness, respect, etc.? And driven by ethical obsessives like myself who think the world is going to the proverbial in a handbag and so must thrash around about it, thereby keeping such matters in the public view a bit. This makes them available as materials for discussion later. After all, why did Plato write or Aquinas, or Confucius ... not for the past. Along the way a few perspectives on matters of what's right action and acting right provide us
not merely with an aesthetic diversion in the ethical spheres but difference with which to refine currently preferred decision equations.

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly
Torrey Orton
June 1, 2010 - Cauterets, France


Little goods may be great for others, for a moment
A guy is sitting back against a building with a hat turned up next to a small, handwritten plea for our consideration…$10 for a ticket to Frankston, $50 for a return to grandma in Warrnambool, anything for a meal… He's roughly dressed and generally unkempt, with spare clothes and potential bedding behind him. The right action(s) in such situations are thoroughly clear, and have been since the beginning of recorded reflections on acting right. These have always commanded giving to those less fortunate. Only late in human history have we arrived at societies which discourage caring for those in various perils. I'm perhaps somewhat afflicted with such thinking. I don't know. I do things like this:


I was coming out of the DHS building in Lonsdale Street a few weeks ago when my eye caught that of a panhandler* standing by the entry. He moved slightly towards me, at once saying "have ya got a dollar" as I glided nervously beyond reach, though I had a hand in my change pocket reaching for a gift which in mid-fingering I decided against and continued down the street. Just describing this is very difficult. What really happened? What did I /he actually do if we had a three camera video of the event to discover it from?


We haven't got such a record, but I know I went on down the street as he said "I only need $4 to get a …." (something inaudible). I headed off, pursued by my shame at having turned away from our visual engagement, to check out a camera at a place recommended by a friend. And fifteen minutes later I was headed back the same way with new camera in backpack and hand in pocket searching out the four dollars to give to the guy who I'd walked away from… thinking as I went up the street to the train to find him and make good my failed first response...taking out the loose change and separating $4 into my right hand held ready for giving … and not finding him where last seen and so wandering back across the street towards the train station holding the change still in hand for giving…by that time willing to give to any likely needy person to make good my lack of doing good when and for whom it was first needed … and therefore the more deserving in some way, I agreed with myself… and along some 20 seconds later he came, another gifting candidate, as I approached the crossing meters away from the train entrance, stopping for the light to change and, as with his precursor, catching an eye and receiving a request to which I responded with the prepared hand held backwards towards him as I crossed refusing to acknowledge (so it felt) his thanks or his look, disappeared into the station.


Protecting my professional distance?
Is my problem how to assess need on sight: what global personal look means what need, and comparatively which look is more needy at any time? And what's the individual's and what's the social responsibility for their need, and what are the mixes between them? These are useful reflections but perhaps not the central ones underlying my initial disengaging moves.


Rather my avoidant moves above may arise out of my need to protect my professional distance. This goes naturally with the therapeutic territory for me, though requires constant monitoring to reach and sustain the right level(s) for each relationship. The maintenance is usually done more or less explicitly with each client, and we both understand that it has to be there. Levels below that lie my relatively distant relationship style, too. An unscripted and spontaneous encounter with a needy other torsions both my professional and private selves.


There are other aspects. These come into view in the following events.


On a street corner in Pau, France. We were on the way to a week in the Pyrenees and an immediate lunch which was expected to be and turned out to be worth the travel for. I saw the guy (a French instance of the beggar in the first paragraph above – almost a clochard) 10 meters ahead and reached in my change pocket to pull out a 1Euro coin by touch and got a 2 instead, which I handed over to profuse thanks in mildly religious language. On reflection about this event I realised that part of my halting approach to giving in public is being in public, being seen to give…an apprehension which I can't yet source itself. At least now I know it's there in the feeling of the act. A vulnerability driving my distance?


Who deserves a gift?
Maybe there's an element of doubt about who's most deserving, or how much deserving, which is brought prominently into my awareness by the publicity and variety of opportunity for a perceived misallocation, a kind of performance anxiety which might afflict me at anytime where the decision I'm making is relatively uncertain for me. Hence the importance of automatic ethical responses to our ethical effectiveness?? …to our making a decision rather than none (also a decision of course, but..)?


What good will it do anyway?
And there's the question of gift effectiveness. One friend handles this with the rule that when approached he will give whatever is claimed to be needed – e.g. $50 last week on the other's promise it was required to make a certain practical change which would liberate him from certain difficulties. There's no follow-up or follow through to validate the method. But, it is a method with more than madness since the problems of authentication of need and outcomes to giving are such as to require bringing the other into the family or a relationship of long term friend to support it... and then giving becomes an adoption! Perhaps that's a feared (while wholly unlikely!) effect for me, too.


Underneath this concern is an objective social one about what makes good lives and how can we increase the number of us leading them. The distance some of us are from any reasonable notion of good life is obvious – often for unavoidably visible reasons which invoke the notional danger of "othering" (see Lyn Bender's nice review of these challenges here). The visible reasons -liked poverty, disability… - are accompanied by less visible incapacities of all kinds (hidden injuries of class, family history, etc.) which are not going to be repaired or often even vaguely ameliorated by a little good giving.


Guaranteed continuous giving strategy
Another acquaintance adopted the strategy of guaranteed continuous giving to the same needy person she encountered daily on the way to work, and no giving to others in need on the same trip. This approach was a partial fiscal adoption. It went on at a rate of $15 a day for some years. My acquaintance noticed the person had not been around for a while and eventually ran into her looking a whole lot better. She asked what the other had done with the daily gift and heard that it had provided a foundation on which to build a new life and kept her child in school because she was settled enough to ensure daily attendance.


Counterpoint: the accordionist with recorded accompaniment on a Paris Metro. I felt trapped on his arrival, knowing that an unavoidable request for money was coming, so was ill-disposed towards him before he started. More commercial versions of this tactic are the wandering musicians or their candid photographer colleagues in certain types of restaurants.


Trapped and relieved
His play was actually notably good with a suitable selection of tunes for an enclosed space and an unintended audience. A few others were tapping to the beat, and I resisted with effort myself, knowing the movement would be a tell for a prize I wasn't offering at the moment. When he stopped and came around with a worn cup one of my co-riders noted that he was better than average and that all wandering players were actually field tested for quality by the authorities. This moved me to reconsider and I drew out a 2 Euro coin and offered it to warm thanks (the average offer seemed less than a Euro).


Shame and giving
Looking back, I imagine that some of the size of my offer was compensation (self-punishment?) for my initial recalcitrance / reluctance to engage. Only I knew this thinking at the time, so the negotiation was entirely internal, except as it was infected with the potential shame(s) of my public exposure for so thinking. This is perhaps the other within me, a companion and competitor ever present to my daily activities. My other is often most present when real others are present, eliciting one facet or another of my being in the world.


I'm guessing now that I will try to work on doing little goods less conflictedly. Then I might see more clearly what mixture of thought/feeling is really occurring and build thereon a more effective contribution to decreasing the numbers and varieties of challenging others for me and them. I have to clarify my otherness to get there. I know for sure there are some others I do not want to be (nor could I be) and for these the struggle is political. For example, there's a shift of view in OECD and US policy thinking (Krugman) towards making the unemployed responsible for their joblessness by cutting off benefits. This raises once again an underlying individualist mantra – you are responsible for your fate, even if you are not!! But the policy argument is fiscal.


For me the struggle is to engage personally, which could include policy struggle but cannot be achieved by that alone.




*Not really such; we don't have a word I can find for a reasonably presented, but slightly down, usually male person who's acting out of desperate need.