Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope
Torrey Orton
July 31, 2012

 

Some words for a wounded patient….

 

Forethought:

"…an object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function properly – a vessel, a chair, a house – one must first study all of its nature."

Excerpted from Bauhaus Principles at Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, Germany 230712

 
This principle can be applied to people. We are just organic "objects" endlessly in search of our nature (well-being?), which it seems difficult to agree on, either with ourselves or others. The initial stages of instructing students at the Bauhaus included a year of free-association, follow your inclinations and intuitions exploring of the nature of materials in their own right, free of prospective uses (in making objects).
This stage can be usefully thought of as play. Trouble with adults is they often have to be taught how to play in this sense. The Bauhaus was erased by the incoming Hitler government's early efforts to ensure no-one learned anything officially unapproved (and a few dozen other prohibitions as well, of course!). Even some Bauhaus students were probably relieved. Serious playfulness is tiring and challenging and disturbing to the accepted orders of things.
So what? Often enough to warrant writing this, a patient shows up with a major trauma of long duration and intensity – the kind which renders them repeatedly wondering why did this happen to me and elevating their pain by declaring themselves responsible in part for it, by feeling guilty about it!! In fact, I have such an issue arise about once a week and similar ones are working in the background with many more patients a week. In a way, people who show up for therapy think they have to fix themselves, not that others have to fix themselves. They sometimes come around to the latter view after a while, often quite a while.
To have hope of recovery from their injuries, some intrinsically positive signs are helpful, along with some acquired capabilities effective in keeping further trauma at bay. The latter are most important; the former are among the way stations to recovery. Without a good defence, hurtful patterns are recreated in dysfunctional present social, vocational and intimate relationships. To achieve such defensive capabilities often requires placing the bad part of one's life aside enough to appreciate the positives, or at least potentials and possibles through which one can get to decisions to move towards new probables.
Finally, to make a choice which implements a personal policy with some hope of meeting the requirements of the situation often, in turn, requires courage. The courage both pushes back against the lingering forms of the original hurts and counters the fear that stepping outside of one's relationship comfort zone(s). Simple so far, but often stepping out into the world of new, safe relationships requires letting go of some of the defences which helped one survive the original trauma(s) – usually a somewhat rigid personality structure which provided, and continues to provide, an internal and external space for development, but not for the next life stage development! This capability is assertion, going on the offensive….
I am aware that the terms destiny and fate cover overlapping grounds, often being used for the same aspects of life by many people. The reason for going into this is that part of a recovery, or a life, is a sense of its wholeness – a sense which does not come from techniques and skills alone. Wholeness has to do with ones place in the world, ones meaning in the world and meaning to the world. Fate, destiny and hope with courage is existing language for this level of self.
I think of the fated part of ourselves as what we are born with: our internal orientations, temperament, biological potential and so on, our gifts so to speak, plus the externals we arrive into: our family, social class/status, ethnicity and general surrounding socio-political-economic conditions. These externals are our givens. We can make no claim for our worthiness arising from our various inheritances. What we can claim is that we worked on our inheritance virtuously. We tried. This brings us to destiny.
I think of our destiny as what we choose to do with those gifts if we can get a chance to develop them, or how we respond to lack of opportunity to do so. Destiny is the chosen part of our lives, what we can answer for. We can be judged for our destiny, but not our fate. My various inheritances gave me a starting place and certain destinies I have never pursued. Many of those inheritances are absences of discernible capability. Maths comes to mind unless it's the intuitive kind that's good for guessing dinner tabs without calculating, but not for building or analysing at all! My brothers got the usable types.
Other inheritances are life opportunities arising from our fate which give us a head start in certain directions which may also be false. It can take quite a while to work out what part(s) of our fate are most important to us. We are often actively discouraged from taking on certain gifts. Especially those in esoteric activities like dance, writing, singing, playing, theatre, and painting are areas with a known likelihood to produce barely sustainable lives of noisy desperation.
That such gifts exist is powerfully attested by the numbers of would-be musicians, painters and writers who persist with their aspirations for love of them. They certainly can't be doing so for money. These gifts are also where fate and destiny overlap most clearly: not being able to / allowed to pursue one's calling(s) is experienced as a failed destiny by many; pursuing successes in the forms that are socially rewarded but personally inappropriate may be to accept ones fate rather than seek ones destiny.
In the end, from where I am now in my destiny, the question of worth cannot be answered by what good I have done, but how well I tried to do whatever it was I was trying to do. Put differently, being successful comes in many forms, the most important of which are the least visible. It cannot be the case that the basis for self-evaluation is "success" in any of the vaunted senses our commercialised reality daily espouses. Many lives never get a chance to be successful in those terms and so they cannot just be worthless, can they?!
Most religions recognise this explicitly and devote much of their energies to reducing the toll of various inequities on life chances. However, their pretending to Caesar that his success is most honourable, and welcoming all the little caesars into their fold while encouraging the less fortunate to interpret themselves in the mould of the caesars, who for all their success seldom get enough recognition in their own eyes for their achievements….this latter path is the one that guts religions from within. It needn't gut our patients.

Travel funnies 2012 (3)

Travel funnies 2012 (3)

Torrey Orton

July 25, 2012

 

"Trous en formation" said the sign on a Jura highway to Gex

 

In Melbourne we're accustomed to a sign which says "rough surface" in the most unlikely places, and just as often failing to be present in some pretty rocky ones in the city. This French one serves a purpose somewhat like the "Limbs may fall" of country byways in Victoria, or its mountain cousin "Rocks may fall". And it was exact. There were holes emerging into the road surface, as happens especially in deep frost regions like the Jura. It's really not such a special sign after all, but being French makes it sound so. I enjoy the obvious presented with a patina of culture.

 

July 16 - fire hydrants in fields sometimes full of snow

 

Wengen is a place not short of water, or ice or snow, as necessary. Nor is it short of wood. In fact, pretty much everything that provides cover for warmbloods is also of wood in The Alps. This is not surprising. There's quite a bit about still (thanks to energetic conservation amplified by the need to maintain a certain alpine visual aesthetic). So in the undeveloped and/or still cow supporting grounds of many local establishments, there were fire hydrants of varying vintages free standing among the grass and flowers. They must be a wonder in the cold months.

 

This reflection recalls me to the burning of a neighbouring barn one night around 1953 in our well hydranted New England town. Even if the local firies had gotten to it early (which they didn't because, we later heard, they lost the hydrant wrench in the drive 400 metres from the fire station to the blaze) a hundred-fifty year old cow barn is a fire's delight. Burns brighter and brighter. It would have taken a city's worth of red trucks to make a dent and Lunenburg wasn't a city. Imagine a town full of untreated pine hotels and houses shoulder to shoulder with each other. Not a great fire of London or Chicago but enough for a blaze. By the way, Copenhagen cooked itself twice in the 18^th century with the town stripped of wooden buildings by the end of the second round in 1795 (the medieval part in particular).

 

July 24, 2012 – Copenhagen and cultural differences

 

So I've been in Copenhagen for almost a day today and I can recommend it, but how highly is the subject of my thoughts, which are stuck in comparative cleanliness across three Germanic cultures (German Switzerland, Berlin and here) with a counterpoint of French for six days (Besancon, Dijon and Beaune and a stopover in Geneva, all traversed by self-drive rather than public transports).

 

Being a very low grade garden maintainer, I have to acknowledge that what follows may be tainted with projected self-punishment for my pathetic interest in maintenance, backed by an equal indifference in practice. However, I like externals which look kempt. Switzerland is great for kempt. They even have kempt snow on the peaks. The only snow dune I have ever seen (well, since I grew up in Massachusetts that is where the hills lack a bit by comparison, but then I'd never seen a comparison higher than 4000 feet til now) is a perfectly crafted one on the right flank of the Jungfrau, looking from north to south. Once again, my ignorance amplifies my interest.

 

It was amazing to both of us how scruffy the grounds-keeping was throughout the limited Berlin we saw in three days. Stray weeds poked out of hedges within sight of the Reichstag, road dividers were often uncut or if cut, the fringes were untrimmed. Streets ran to the detritus polluted. Contrast this with the efforts put in by one porter in our Wengen hotel to keep stray geranium petals (of which there were many cuz every window had a geranium jungle hanging off it on every habitation in town it seemed) off the bowling green fineness (imagine a #1 haircut all around) of the little bits of lawn that could be perched on the flats rent into the hillside to support the hotel driveway. He did it twice a day minimum (that's what I saw happen; maybe more times?) with a straw broom. I assume the brooming was doubling as chaser of petals and caresser of grasses. There was backup from a rake once some mass of petals had been achieved. These masses could barely be gathered they were so refined. Only their colour betrayed them.

 

I can assure you I never saw its equivalent, or even a remote suspicion of such an effort, in the Reichstag front yard. Contrast number two: Copenhagen this morning walking back from the train station at 8:20 AM and seeing a guy easily my age, or worn for his age, holding a 20 litre yellow canister in his left hand and a long hose with the fiery schnozzle of a small dragon in repose in his right.

 

He blasted with the characteristic blowtorch hissing whoosh any postage stamp sized grassy upstarts he could find between the endless cobblestones of the sidewalk out front of the massive opera building. Probably cleaner in the long run than doing them with Roundup. And quicker too. Roundup decimated greenery fades slowly. Not the thing for civic scrubbing. After another look around town a day later, I guess there's very large hectares of cobbled ways in this town and at the rate he was going re-growth could have started in the scorched earths well before he got to the end. Winter helps, of course.

 

An appropriately similar effort went into cleaning the nearest canal (also take off point for endless tourist canal trips) of the expectable detritus of so many tourists and cafes this morning. However, the water obstacle surrounding a 16^th century earthen-works fort beyond the Royal Palace had not benefitted from weed cleaning of any sort. Maybe because tourists mostly wouldn't walk that far for a gander, though the attraction of the famous Little Mermaid on a rock was 100 meters over the earthworks.

 

One of the commitments of the French – street cleaning –was on display in Copenhagen today, too, with an equally varied array of functionaries, in addition to blowtorch man, to those in Dijon and Besancon: guys with arm's length grabbers for dropping recoveries, street sweeping machine operators, industrial strength garbage collectors….but still a sense of mild scruffiness, amplified by the fact the every tenth street is under major repairs here.

 

So back to Berlin. Two thoughts: one, the Berliners have been recovering from 45 years of neglect and it shows in the old east which casts its architectural pall from close onto the Reichstag, and, two, the Germans have a resistance to their own discipline which shows in little disregards for public space of which indifferent grounds-keeping may be one. Another was an at the time startling discovery of ours while swimming in a 19^th century pool in Munich 20 years ago. The locals swam everywhere except within the lines, as if they weren't there at all, which they were. We were startled, unprepared and culturally committed to staying on the left, or right, depending on which of us was doing the staying! It made laps a bit chancy.

 

July 25 – Loos, again

 

Also not all of my concerns are roses; loos are in the picture again. For example, I paused not at the sharply named "pissoire" on the banks of a local inlet for a leak yesterday. I had already done so an hour before in a public facility at the airport on the way into Copenhagen. While one of two urinals was closed for repairs, the other provided this experience: my contribution was eaten by a blue gloop which rose up out of the urinal drain and consumed it (so it seemed).

 

The gloop looked oily but enclosed the urine rather than riding on the surface, as oil usually does on water. Hopefully a knowledgeable sewage specialist will point out what was going on there – both the chemistry and the mechanics (how'd the stuff rise up out of the drain to seize the urine, and then retreat back down the drain once all had been seized, so to speak.?). Given that everything within miles here is about 10 feet above the high tide line, the management of sewage must be a delight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2012 (2)

Travel funnies 2012 (2)
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2012

 

The eyes of the beholder win again, and not always funny

July 15, 2012

So we've been in Wengen, Switzerland for almost a week today and I can't recommend it highly enough if you are among those who derive great relief from looking out into endlessly changing views. I'm suspecting just now that this looking out preference is particularly driven for us introverts. Your thoughts?

 
We've been through a variety of views on the Eiger/Monch/Jungfrau massif in equally variable weathers surrounded by massed tourists, mainly Japanese and Chinese, also varying the eye level view, yet amongst which appeared periods and spaces of absence for solo and couple contemplation of the enduring physical realities about us. In each of Wengen, Murren and Grindlewald we had takes on the massif in which the solid hulks of the crowning peaks shifted with three perspectives.

 
There have been three kinds of perspective enhancing moments: (1) the continuous view of one angle or another of the massif from seats in classically posed cafes with uninterrupted views, (2) gaps through the often surrounding clouds which opened and closed unpredictably providing focussed visions of elements of a peak: a ridge, a snow dune, a glacier tongue - magnified by the exclusion of its real visual context, the whole peak, and (3) spontaneous illuminations of a sector of the visible field by a sunburst of focussed shape and intensity through the cloud cover. The sunburst occurs within a visible context by contrast with the cloud window effect.

 
Both of the second two moments were usually fleeting – they passed across our field of view at the pace of the ambient airflow, as if the god(s) were moving the visible field for 20 or 30 seconds.

 
A segment of the Monch (3900 meters) framed in a cloud window. Such cloud window events were the second most striking of the three. On a fully cloudy day wandering along the "Panoramic trail" from Maennlichen to Kleine Sheidegg at 2200 meters with promises of the whole 3900+ metre range in view just out there and an hour's puttering along in near fog to a terrace lunch service (beer and wurst/kraut/kartopfelen combo for the nth time) an almost square window opened through the cloud to a chunk of snowy cliff face. It slid across the face and then closed. Only by chance had we been looking up from that lunch then.

 
The whole of the cockscomb rock formation across the Lauterbrunnen valley above us at about 2500 meters was lifted from its dour background by an early morning sunburst. This one lasted for about 8 minutes without moving much, though the whole context for it – a grass land near the tree line rising up with greenish slopes – was visible in the shade of the clouds. A theatrical affair more than natural, almost, and anyway the only example of the 'spontaneous illumination' type of view.

 
Finally, the continuous view (the one we think of when contemplating views) up the glacial valley across from Grindlewald from positions on an unoccupied hotel terrace for an hour one noon…a view granted us by the hotelier's offer of the terrace despite their not offering the lunch we were seeking for the opportunity of the view. The latter we could get at the bakery down the road he suggested, and he would back it with a beer which they could offer. So we did as suggested and got the hour's look at the retreating glacier and its backing mountain walls totally to ourselves for 12 Swiss francs worth of quite passible local beer which by the way went at 4,20 SFr for 330 mls and 5,20 for 500. We took the bargain. Those walls ran up to 3500 meters as right in our face as such a mass can be. By little considerations great treats are granted.

 
It is the framing that's the thing for each of these experiences. Photos never quite get the scope and depth of a two-eyed gaze. Paintings sometimes do. We knew from pre-visit photos that this area was striking but not the striking we would experience. There's another lesson in here about constancy and changeability, but that's for another view perhaps. I'll just note that there is a real Eiger providing the (relatively) unchanging basis for the many views of it. At least one assurance of this is that two of us could enjoy pointing out scenes as we saw them which the other would spontaneously validate in ways which were checkable at the moment, usually by an elaboration of the original insight with which one of us prompted the other to look here or there, or in this way or that way, in the first place. That's a bit more than "I'll just note", but…

 
Finally, there was the cloud window which tried, and tried and tried, and failed to get itself together. It should have known it would fail because this was the last day and it was almost wholly clear. Yet this little cloud shaped up against one of the lower near ranges (2300-2500 metres), raising its head out of the valley below us into a near square which settled eventually for being a laggard capital G and hung around for 30 minutes refusing to collapse. There was no context to give it closure I suppose.

 
July 12 and 14 - Wild strawberries again…
From the fountain footings of a corner parklet in Murren there peaked out the slightest lustre of reddening berry, the first we had seen in the time here. Jane snaffled one with a slight twitch of guilt, while I noted its neighbour had a reduced bulk due to early tastings by local fauna. She shared the guilt with me from which I got enough to recall that powerful experience 6 years ago in the Massif des Bauges. It was scarcely ripe, but enough to fire a recollection of true ripe.

 
Two days later some more naturally occurring ones came into view on a path along the Wengen – Kleine Scheidegg cog railway line's Allmend station in tandem with. These were similarly undersized and underpowered olefactorally to the Murren exemplars, but more naturally presented often on the edge of small rock ledges which reduced the competition of raunchier grasses and such of the summer's herbal glory. The ledge also concentrated the afternoon sun, though not enough for our passing moments of appreciation.

 

 

Travel funnies 2012

Travel funnies 2012

Torrey Orton

July 14, 2012 (written June 15, 2012)

 

The eyes of the beholder lose out again?

It's that time of year again. Travel time. Well, not quite for another month, but then we did have a small trial run to Magnetic Island, Queensland a week ago as a warm up for the main event in July, of which more later.

 

The Supervisory Loo

 

I realised shortly after this experience that I had had it before – 6 years ago in a restaurant in Shanghai's Xintiandi district. There I discovered that the men's urinal was mirrored in the hand basin wall out into the passageway through which men and women approached their respective loos. For all these years I've thought this was a peculiarly Chinese design. Now I think more broadly. It's a peculiarly loo designer fetish, maybe.

 

The supporting evidence is:

 

This time it was a restaurant loo in the somewhat less salubrious port of Townsville. Here the supervision was of pissers by same sex washers, sans the intrigue of multi-sex passers-by offered in Shanghai. This urinal ran down the wall alongside the doorway in, with the stalls arrayed at a 90 degree angle to it down the room and hand washing along the opposite wall. Here's the rub – the string of washing up basins were backed by a 1 meter by 3 meter mirror which gave the first hand basin an unavoidable line of sight enfilade of the action down the urinal.

 

Weird. Seen anything like it in your travels?? Or, maybe, of course, the only fetishistic designer here is my beholding of the facilities, a perspective strengthened by the multi-cultural evidence of my senses. Travel good; truth a wonder.

Learning to act right (27)… I didn't see anything, really!!
Torrey Orton
July 03, 2012

"I did not see anything I could swear to in a court of law"

Six months ago I wrote:

I am surprised to re-learn (assuming I ever did originally learn this) how unreliable my perception of live events can be, how open to multiple interpretations, how filled with material lacunae such that a report of the event would be more holes than whole. …

…How easy it is for my reason to fly off in a rage where my righteousness rules the moment to moment equation of time seeking justification in worthy action.

A few days ago this happened on the same stage:

Dramatis personae – Eddy the Wednesday security guard, me, Purple Shirt the lone HoGPI and an FCC staffer; a patient couple were 100 metres away to the east. Not a single local passing by.

Action – Eddy trailed Purple Shirt over towards the couple and I stayed put at the front gate. As they were beginning to go through the offer, refusal, re-offer, push-off dance that happens a dozen times a morning, an FCC staffer ambled out and said hello, then wandered off towards the tree planter under which the HoGPIs stand for prayer and preparation to harass daily. There was a small, somewhat ornate, crucifix facing my way leaning against the tree planter. Purple Shirt places it there when she arrives daily.

I looked back up the street to the distant unfolding of the usual travesty of protest which is mainly punishment for patients exercising their legitimate rights. When my look returned closer to hand the FCC staffer was coming back my way with open hands, simple open shirt and a slight smile. Behind him the cross had disappeared. A few minutes later Purple Shirt got back from her latest harassment effort up the street and discovered the absence. Shortly thereafter a couple of her male colleagues of long standing arrived and a low grade gnashing of teeth and wailing set up at the loss.

One of the men suggested Eddy or I should go into the clinic and retrieve the absent cross. I suggested the guy go himself and denied with confidence that I knew anything of the matter. On the subsequent arrival of the first divvy van in 5 minutes I pre-empted the police enquiry of my awareness of relevant matters saying "I did not see anything I could swear to in a court of law" without any internal conflict. They accepted this for what it was.

I knew something had happened between looking up to see Eddy and Purple Shirt dance the patient harassment defence dance and looking beyond the FCC staffer as he passed by me towards the clinic. I ran it over three or four times to make sure. I still cannot recover any memory six days later. I am aware that my short-term memory has about a 5 second hole in it. Anything occurring in that sort of time frame may escape my notice unless lodged in a solid ongoing flow of attention – the kind which is characteristic of focus. I was focussed elsewhere at the time.

Resolution – Fifteen minutes later the second couple of police emerged from the FCC, walked over to the planter and appeared to wave their hands over the lily foliage and up sprang the lost cross. It was returned to Purple Shirt. Seemed it had been misplaced. At the time I did not know how it got there, and still do not.

The second cop couple had pulled up 5 minutes after the first and reran their interviews of those present who had been present from the start. The hands in the foliage foraged somehow from their efforts.