Learner therapist (20)……Interpersonal politics of coupling, intimate or otherwise!

Learner therapist (20)……Interpersonal politics of coupling, intimate or otherwise!
Torrey Orton
January 27 , 2013

The blame and responsibility challenge – creating truth in shared facts

NB – this is a first go at addressing these issues. I expect it may not be the last because they are so difficult for me.

Michael and I have been having this discussion since we met 20 months ago. It keeps coming up so it must matter, at least to us. I'll call it the truth in relationship discussion. Mike might call it the responsibility in relationship discussion. I start from the question: how can we be jointly responsible for anything? He starts with the belief that we have to be responsible for ourselves first. The struggle between individual and group perspectives is the mental history of modernity, one prefigured in the outstanding lives of ancient individuals in all domains of human endeavour rising above terrain of their socio-historical contexts, without which they, too, could never have risen!! Some say, me among them, that the historical balance is out of whack now. Too much me, too little us.


Both are important perspectives and practices, but neither can stand alone. 'How do we get to be responsible?' is one question on the pathway of upbringing. It emerges from the WEness of family, community, and society in their various overlapping institutional forms. No surprise there.


Along the path of upbringing we may have experiences which compromise our capacity for being and feeling responsible for ourselves. Our social systems are as imperfect as our personal ones. Around this fact roils the search of many wounded individuals to parcel the responsibility (blame!) for 'bad outcomes' which they are subject to, and which they fear reproducing themselves in the next generation. This struggle can only be avoided by self-numbing – a long-term strategy bound for failure.


The compromised self develops distortions (I mean that, not disorders) in its capacities to relate to others and itself. Distortion is a normal occurrence because others' responsibility for us can never be perfect, or even close! As some poet roughly says, parents eff us up. We can only learn responsibility from responsibility; our parents learned theirs from their parents, ad infinitum. As well, the generally accepted contents of adult responsibility have changed measurably in the last century or so, and continue to do so now.


Unintentional offense and responsibility


M and I had been stuck in this discord for months, and amicably so, until one day:

M commented on his distress at my dismissive celebration ("Uh yeah…" w/self-satisfied tone) of him seeing something I clearly thought he should have seen before. (This is an often repeated verbal punctuation in the course of our acquaintance and a behaviour I was aware of; I had not yet gotten to the point of being able to interrupt it, only acknowledge it to myself as it irrupted once again.) I asked what feeling he was having after I said it and with some reflection he came up with "offended" or similar, to which I suggested "disrespected" and he accepted that, too.

 

I agreed he should feel "offended" because it was an inappropriate expression on my part…though I expressed it then, still do at times and not just between us. It is not my intent to hurt and wasn't then. But, I was to blame, he agreed, for his bad feeling about himself at that moment. His feeling included some anger….unsurprisingly. As part of our professional self-development, we have built a relationship of shared responsibility which contained the insult and the complaint about it and so opening another level of discussion between us. This experience lifted us up to the level of our relationship as the subject of conversation in a new way.

This article is a step towards formalising the difference in our understanding of responsibility so as to reduce the distance it provokes between us. Recently, I rediscovered on a back shelf Dr Harriet G. Lerner's book The Dance of Anger (1985) which includes a chapter titled "Who's responsible for what?" It brings together two of my favourite subjects – anger and responsibility in the context of intimate relationships. Here she notes:

It is tempting to view human transactions in simple cause-and-effect terms. If we are angry, someone else caused it. Or, if we are the target of someone else's anger, we must be to blame; or, alternately – if we are convinced of our innocence – we may conclude that the other person has no right to feel angry……

…We begin to use our anger as a vehicle for change when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions. We are responsible for our own behaviour. But we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours ...

I think this is Mike's view, too, though not his exact words… and the view of not a small proportion of my patients who've been exposed to modern no-fault processes which are under-pinned by attitudes / principles like those Lerner proposes above.



Therapy, for those who choose it, is one pathway to undoing distortions of the self. Some undoing takes a few sessions; some takes years. The principal means of effecting recovery is the therapeutic relationship – the most reliable, "evidence-based" characteristic of therapeutic effectiveness, regardless of 'school' of therapy! The relationship stands or falls on the ability of the therapist to be present for patients in ways their histories have not made available to them. In doing so, the therapist is taking responsibility for the patient's recovery…while recognising they cannot be responsible in the end!! This paradox will reappear later in fractured couples' relationships.


Offenses to the self


We had a minor offense to M's self by me. The vignette of its occurrence and our recovery through "shared responsibility" is exemplary of the relationship challenge, while barely noteworthy in the greater picture. A bigger offense might elicit feelings like this:

What is it that is so unacceptable, that I react with such a survival instinct style reflex? What is so horrific about my reaction to these words that has me revert to this primal state? or if not primal, infantile or juvenile, and has me cry ...

"Now look what you made me do!"

I'm particularly interested in childhood experiences which underlie chronic depression and anxiety. Pretty consistently these experiences are major abuses of trust by parental, or broader familial, violations of personal space and self-control – often co-occurring sexual, physical and psycho-social violences. These can be usefully considered offenses to the self, are classified as such in legal systems and labelled traumas in western cultures.


They are chronic for two reasons: one, the offenses are sustained into the present by the social system(s) (families, churches, schools, clubs, workplaces…) in which they were first committed and/or reproduced, and two, optimal recovery often requires some change to those present sustaining systems. Children are not responsible for these behaviours, though almost every adult with an abused childhood attempts to take responsibility for others' abuse of them. Efforts to recover must pass through the blame grinder.


'my pain is your fault'

One couple I have worked with off and on for 2 years found the perspective from which to rise above and hold the pains of their struggles: a place which they shared with equal interest and need. They are a couple both deeply injured in ways which when touched by the other regresses them to catastrophic positions – 'my pain is your fault.' Whichever gets there first on any given occasion, their catastrophic feelings incite the other. They have developed a number of effective workarounds and pre-emptions for many recurring circumstances they share, but not even these can stand up against the most conducive conditions for regression – co-occurring overtiredness, professional stress, excess drink, demanding kids and unbalanced, living parents .

 

The new perspective came into view as they were sinking for the N^th time into the fires of their respective recriminations about each other, dragged down or blown up by the catastrophic certainty of repeated disappointments, each with the other. I interrupted the rising tide of exasperation and suggested they stay with the very specific topic they were on…a matter of how physically close they needed to be when both were highly stressed by various things in their joint and separate lives at that moment. This is, of course, a quite sophisticated exploration already.

One, I don't remember which, verbally stepped back and noted that I had proposed on another occasion that their respective needs for closeness were almost exactly opposed when crisis struck: one withdraws and the other approaches, generating a massive reciprocating tension powered by catastrophic thinking. He/she checked that the other was experiencing it now, which she/he was, and the tension dropped. This was the first time they had created a respite from their struggle without leaving it in a heated rage or quiet despair. That creation remains as a shared platform for their struggle for a workable togetherness at their times of greatest vulnerability. Both acknowledged the achievement.

They had created a shared fact about their relationship which undergirds the potential for getting to new places in it instead of replaying the past, deprived places. This fact expresses and symbolises what the relationship is for, its purpose(s) rather than its product(s). Sometimes it's a revisiting of purposes still in play but lost from view which liberates deep motivation – in fact, the most important things about the relationship: its aspirations.


The blame and responsibility challenge


Now back to Lerner. She says our anger can become a source of useful change,

"…when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions."

The blame and responsibility challenge – people show up for couples work because they are stuck in patterns of repeating failure to meet each other's needs, especially those which make being a couple worth the effort. It is impossible to progress as a couple without transgressing in the view of one or the other, or both, at some times!! There are three domains of likely transgression: (1) style (intellectual, expressive, etc. - preferences of congenital origin), (2) cultural role determined behaviours (responsibilities, tasks, authorities, etc.) and (3) personal needs/wants arising from particular normal developmental transitions. The manner of transgression often includes violences of aggressive (hitting, yelling, betrayal) and passive- aggressive (withdrawal, sniping, silence…) sorts. Often a number of manners and domains are involved together.


Complicating the effort to connect is the fact that injured parties carry loads of self-blame which inclines them to expect they will fail the needs of the other (I'm not good enough, don't care enough….), and they expect the other to blame them for the failure – a self-sealing circle of partner-assisted, covert self-accusation. Someone has to break through that circle to change the relationship disconnect cycle. To do so requires confronting their own sense of failure and their sadness /rage about it and doing so in a way that minimally elicits the partner's version of the same system. This is what the couple above achieved.


It's all a perception…not.
It cannot be achieved from a perspective which says everything in relationships is just a perception, and nobody's perception has a better claim to attention than anyone else's. That perspective is the driver of irreconcilable differences in which the members of a couple stand on their "right" to their perception, and giving any of it up to have a joint perception is not on offer. It only takes one person with such a stance for the relationship to be doomed all the way to the courts and beyond. This is a small part of the broken relationship population, at least judging from the fact that 90+% of broken marriages do NOT end up in court. They create some kind(s) of shared truth out of their "shared facts".


And this is the area of personal development into interdependence – partnership as the playground for skill building in joint ownership, authorship construction and so on. There are no free kicks in couples development, unless the couple are already developed enough to provide them freely?!! There have to be stumbles along the way and some way to do better than build up personal grievance banks loaded with material to prove the justice of ones disappointments with the other, and vice-versa. A combustible collection.


And so couples therapy has one task above others, which is helping the couple to see their existing and near horizon emerging successes in interdependent functioning, a joint ownership where the boundaries of who owns what are dropped, melt, disappear…which is what the romantics dream of in the merger/ melding of self in love, etc. but can't be dreamed, must be achieved…and all the more difficult in our times because the jointness historically was given by roles, which have for some time now been corroded by modernity. They have to blindly take responsibility for each other. An act of faith, repeated.









 

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.

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action
Torrey Orton
Nov.16, 2011


A moment in the FCC defence frontline…


I lost it…my temper that is! About 8:30 last Wednesday morning I looked down the footpath towards the city just in time to see a couple coming along, the woman crying uncontrollably; her partner just behind her and a protestor ( "Purple Shirt" as she was called in TheAGE four days later) looking the woman in the face, seeing her crying and gesturing her away, and continuing to follow her towards the clinic gate with the standard "Save your little baby; you'll be a good mother" mantra beating on her back. As she almost always does to every patient. A perfect example of harassment of a visibly vulnerable patient.


The keyword is harassment – a perception of being persistently, repeatedly, verbally and visually attacked by another. I harassed back, stepping up to her (all 191cm/105kg to her pudgy 155cm) and pointing out as I came from 3 metres away "that is harassment; she was crying all the way and you saw her and continued anyway…" I can't remember how it ended but the whole sequence from go to no was 15 seconds. I became aware that I had been sucked in by her offense…enraged briefly, close to physical assault… and almost as the awareness arrived I was turning back from the protestor to see her colleague approaching…


In talking to the protest leader, David Forster, seconds after the event (which had drawn him towards me as if he were going to defend the harasser from me) I pointed out that she had harassed the patient and knew it, knew that the patient was already crying, had said no and been followed up by her partner in doing so. He started to run the Helpers of God's Precious Infants party line on the evil things done behind the clinic walls (which justifies their offer of "help" over any other consideration) until I interrupted with these facts. David accepts that this is harassment, knowing as he does that another male protestor has clearly drawn back from patients who arrive in tears. I also wondered to him: "Isn't harassing the weak unchristian?" to which he nodded assent with the scrunched look of a logically forced agreement.


Charles thought the elapsed time between my seeing the harassment and taking action was a couple of minutes…I thought a few seconds. Charles and the guard, Edward, had seen the same scene unfold, the guard more fully because he had noticed them coming before they got to the protestor…that the woman waited for her husband to catch up and was already crying, he having been completing a mobile call. TheAGE columnist Suzy Freeman-Greene's version appears here. It was built out of her own perceptions, and some of our three, gathered at the moment described.


I am surprised to re-learn (assuming I ever did really 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. My contribution sprang from my interpretation of harassment, amplified by my lifetime revulsion at any bullying, but especially of the weak. I was perhaps able to pull back from my spring by a borderline awareness that I was about to bully the bully ("Purple Shirt") and so earn a placeholder status in my own ethical bestiary.


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. I'm speaking only of myself in this accusation. If it fits, feel free to join it.

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again
Torrey Orton
May 18, 2011

Closed mind, open heart – a wonder about travel blindness(es)

Walking around LA a week ago, and driving a bit, too, I couldn't see much of wonder but a jumble of visuals of mildly disappointing grades. After a few hours my distress resolved into a recurring view of faux New England houses spread around varieties of Mission Revival. Mission Revival fit the environs. The faux did not for me. They reached out like an ugly stick in my eyes.


The faux had a number of features. There were the inappropriate window sizes and styles, as if they had been borrowed from a different genre. Their scale was wrong to my eye. Then there was the fault of interbreeding: colonial mixed with ranch – two regenerations from the post-war era. Again a travesty of proportions signalling a bungle, arising perhaps from architects mixing pages from two standard issue design playbooks. In a related, later discussion with the architect of my two friends, he mentioned a similar construct as the design process of another local travesty (in his view, which I shared).


I was in the in the hands of two aficionados of local architecture, hence cautious with airing my disappointments. Rather, I managed to enquire about what I was seeing – its sources, ages, and social implications. After a few more hours my automatic rejection of the offending mis-proportions retreated almost unnoticed from the front of my awareness. It then became easier to explore with them. What's going on with me and this?


A Kimberley experience.


A few years ago I spent two weeks driving and camping around the Kimberley. I had looked forward to the experience with a mountains-and-seas anticipation - that is, my normal expectation of pleasurable visuals which has applied to every trip in my adult life: local, interstate or international. I had forgotten those formative visual experiences like learning to love the Australian bush which opened me to previously unknowable things in the world. It's hard to spontaneously like the Australian bush from a Massachusetts bush background – almost no congruencies other than being bush.


The upshot of the first few days in the Kimberley was a lingering disappointment with its failure to be alps – Australian or European! Now, I had no excuse for this. I have travelled fairly broadly and sometimes deeply in Australia for 35 years at this point. I have done so with enjoyment from my first exposure to the flat lands between Melbourne and Geelong in 1971 (my closest priors being a few glimpses of the Connecticut River valley in the 1950's and a day driving in Ohio in 1967) and can champion the deserted regions with energy and commitment to newbie travellers down under.


So, in some sense I had lost contact with this openness in myself…amazing failing, even more so because I did not even know I had lost it!! I still cannot follow how this happened, but happen it did. I underwent a covert regression or created it somehow. As I am writing I begin to see how, maybe! I brought to the Kimberley an unintentional biased eye – the one that announces itself with an act of disapproval of its field of vision.


Maybe it worked this way. My experience of the European Alps over 35 years, but more intensely in the time before the Kimberley, had coloured my expectations about great visual and physical experiences. A moment ago I was about to write it had coloured my preferences in such experiences, but that is not what it was; it was my anticipations blending into my expectations: I was looking forward to more Alps because I was only getting a taste for them, and wanted more, but did not quite know that then. The Kimberley, by choice at that time, fell across the pathways to that acquisition. It required special organising of many others to do the Kimberley as we thought best to do it, and the others turned out to sometimes be an unexpected experience in their own right. Another disturbing distraction.


Like the LA experience, the Kimberley emerged from the overlay of my inappropriate anticipations and expectations as one of the most memorable of my travel experiences, marked by my continuing desire to return for another run under the cold night skies and warm day ones of early winter there. Maybe it will be on our grey nomad agenda one day.


So what?


This has been a long detour from faux colonials falsely accused. The explanation of my visceral resistance to what reality was presenting is adequate; the pathway to less resistance is not so clear; its implications are worrying for learning…or, just a naturally occurring stage/phase in learning?

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?
Torrey Orton
Oct 5, 2010


We were walking the local hills on the first real day of spring. That is, the first day two plus layers were not required on top by the effects of wind-chill at 15 degrees C or less (which is what we've had at sea level for three months straight). An hour and a half into the ramble, we were on the home stretch of a circle route around what passes for a water course with falls here. It had two virtues: it was 50 minutes from home and there was audible and visible water in it. And, we had not been there for 10 years or so, having given ourselves over to more highly invested (in time and distance) wanders to find ramble-worthy spots. Particularly lately, there are quite a few with major water and falls*.

 
As we were coming down a modest decline I noticed to the left of the path a small flurry of fluttering things which on first look I thought were spring seeds in dispersal flight. They were rising on a slight breeze – not enough to sustain the visible activity. But the numbers were constant and dense enough to seem, in some long unexercised memory of things past, a snowlike event.

 
A silly perception in fact since the temperature was 23C. Less silly in their mimicking the wandering rise and fall of big-flake snow in quiet winter air. The storm effect was intensified be a mid afternoon sun highlighting the individuals in its 45 degree rays.

 
So, I looked more around than up and spotted 10 meters off the track a termite-looking mound on which the storm seemed to centre. Only getting closer did I see the newly winged ones walking up the brownish, one meter mound from its base. They were slowly unlimbering their wings as they climbed, ending with a preparatory flap or two before jumping off on their one-way ticket wedding flights. It was one of those wonders of nature so far from my understanding that I'm still not sure who they were - ants or termites – partly because I did not know to look for the distinguishing differences!


* A week earlier we had visited one of the rivers burned out by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Many of these once camping and walking areas are still closed to public use, though one can now drive down the access roads. Along one such we saw one of our favourite cascades on the Murrindindi River running in full flow from the recent rains. But it was unveiled. Where for a couple decades of regular walking in near rainforest conditions along that part of the river yielded varying intensities of rushing waters over tumbled rock surfaces, we now found bare rocks and remnant trunks, everything open to the eye made prying by fire. A new falls, with a waiting period of 20-30 years to get back to 'normal' is probably beyond our allocated time….so we will learn to like the unveiled.

Perceptions and truth(s)

Perceptions and truth(s)
Torrey Orton
Sept. 23, 2010


I am struck these days by the various ways we can be deceived in our grasp of the world, and ourselves. This is apart from the consciously deceptive intent of our public world(s) and the conscious intent to create perceptions which our various artists demonstrate for us. There is also the unconscious distortion of our perceptions which arises from our premonitions of them in the form of 'previews' in the media, the reports of others about them, the interactions between the two and so on.

 For instance of the later, there was the Millau Viaduc in my mind from quite a lot of exposures at a distance, among them the BBC series of great modern constructions, a web page full of site clips and photos, some local (regional French) tourist encouragements – all contributors to a sense I knew what I was going to see. Almost all were taken from the level of the bridge or above. Our approach to the reality was from the level of the river Tarn 250 meters below the road way. Grand enough at that, but not the hanging in air glory that the previews supported. I was not stunned, shocked, shaken, uplifted….but thought I should have been, which added to the letdown. It did not occur to me that 90 minutes spent beforehand in the Roquefort cheese caverns 25 Ks down the road might have constrained my expectations to things just in front of me.

The reverse of this was my first sight of The Nightwatch through a small door on an oblique angle to the picture in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam 40 years ago… a view which amplified the commanding stature of the work, and which in turn was intensified by its unconscious comparison with two existing images in my mind: (1) that of the picture from an art history slide show screened in a format close to that of the real thing and (2) its micro version in the text book of the same course. Then I felt visually completed, fulfilled in an expectation I did not know I had until reality rewarded it with fact.Yet another access to the perils of perception is the very common experience of seeing something which at a certain moment looks like something it certainly is not. The rooster on the road is a web-honoured example of this, including its own self-test against variable perceptions.

Extending the avian theme, I saw a rosella of unlikely hues on the ground overlooking the Loddon River at Glen Lyon, Vic. a few days ago. This bird turned out to be a lichen infested rock declining in similarity to my first impression with every step closer to it. My focus of course was much more intent than the first glance which created the perception. My search for continuing likenesses to support that first glance moved with the insistence that self- justification demands. And, too, it was a very unlikely spot to find a solo rosella in the open, as my wife implicitly noted by immediately debunking my perception. I gave in two steps later, losing in the doing a hope that I had seen something normal in a very unusual way. Trouble is, it was wholly unusual and firmly no way. My point here, in case I lose it in short term memory glitches, is that it is very easy to see what we want / need where it is not. For my painter friends this is a good thing, for their work is to create what we can't see in what is there. Even a gathering of others may work against the clarification of the imagined when too much group membership is at stake in a threatened group perception. The research and experience on this tally fully for once.

So what is the effect of a world in which two kinds of realities are confused by misrepresentation? First the intimate is made public and then the public is made banal. Public intimacy is the content of "reality" TV …public banality is the censoring of human (and animal these days) realities like death, injury and other matters attracting notices of too dangerous to be seen without forewarning. Listen to police reporting road trauma, family violence, drunk violence, etc. Intention is the source of this misrepresentation – the intention to obscure our world and our worlds from each other. Among The effects are an untraceable paranoia, low grade fears that we are being got at…but by who? Obsessive vigilance sets in, with an air of preparation for battles. We know from the "fog of war" that persistent uncertainty in a context of potential threat is destabilising to selves and groups. The needs which are assailed by this dynamic are those for intimacy (love, care, etc.), affiliation (belonging, membership) and their facilitating ones (appreciation, acknowledgment, etc,).

The question is: is the misrepresentation intentional or consequential, or some of both? It really does not matter, except that apparently unintentional misrepresentation (deception) is an aggravated assault because it is unaccountable. The consequence is a sense of being either the authors of our own paranoia, or, as can be seen in exaggerated forms in cults and conspiracy theories (both which are massively facilitated by the Web), victims of veiled dangers. This effect is prominently on display in the US in the phantasies about Obama's origins believed by 20+% of the population, paralleled by the beliefs about alien visitors kept secret by the government, and the origin of 9/11 in the CIA, etc. Not surprising the Tea Party plays so well, hatched in a fog which we '60ers associate with another kind of tea.And, they tend to multiply and mutually reinforce. They are also untouchable by empirical truth, having emotional truths (the threats) already occupying the relevant brainspace.

 Woe are we, for these are the marginals. Woe are they because their leaders pre(a)y on and feed their paranoias. Under present conditions, the difference
between 'we' and 'they' becomes daily thinner.

Appreciation (27) … Learning to paint by painting

Appreciation (27) … Learning to paint by painting
Torrey Orton
Sept. 13, 2010


A client who is finding his way out of depression with a paintbrush was talking about his emerging experience of learning to hold the brush correctly. Though a graphic designer by trade, he's only recently started painting seriously. It's a gift he first glimpsed around age 5, but various things kept it out of the field of his life's play. Recently in a gulf between employments, he bought a painter's kit and started in.


He works at it three hours a day. Along the way he's learning the craft by doing. Brush wielding turns out to be a critical technical foundation. As he's learned to hold the brush ever further along handle, his view of the emerging picture has developed too. Grasping the handle just behind the brush, as if taking up a pencil, pulls the eye and body down into the picture. To see the point of application, to see the perception he was creating, he had to look around the brush tip.


I was sharing this progress with another painting client, who's further down the technique path. She noted that the shift from close to more distant application involved two other moves: standing while painting and painting from the shoulder not the wrist…demonstrating as she spoke with a solid but refined flourish of an imaginary brush …much as a conductor in a delicate slow movement in a classic.


….all of which put me in mind of my own painting career – for two summers between university years as an industrial painter, of schools at the time. . and what it took to learn to paint, especially "cutting in" or edging the boundaries of a surface; if attempted with too much precision, more slips occurred; a certain flourish lightly deployed cut the best edge, sweeping lightly in from the open spaces of the surface to the boundaries and then away again with each brush load. Most satisfying, even on recollection. There was a definite flow in the process, though we lacked the concept then. Or, rather, a flow was just what wasn't wanted in a painted surface, then or now!


By the way, this was edging in pre-masking tape times (late 1950's). Similar, but less delicate, flourishes were useful in coating the concrete block walls which made up the bulk of the paintable spaces with a 6cm bristle brush 15cm long and 4cm wide. Brush work was superior to rollers because the standard union contract of the time required them – brushing took longer. The technical argument was that brushing gave better filling of the rough surfaces. Compressed air spray guns were limited to painting obscure surfaces like the 15 meter high roof of the gym with aluminium based paint…. But I regress.


My emerging painter noted in passing that he can feel in the flow of his brush stroke that it is achieving the "look" he was seeking, that at once the body realises his unrevealed perception of the image he is producing. This has something to do with what is recently applauded as the muscle memory. The applause is only partially warranted since it takes the concerted effort of all muscles to train a few in a specific way, in other words a consciousness not just a body, arm or eyelids, among the subcomponents.


It has more to do with the relationship between perception and intention. Of this, more next week.