Learning to act right (32)… Unveilings

Learning to act right (32)… Unveilings
Torrey Orton
Jan. 30, 2013

The ashamed will often out themselves,

even if they are sure their God is on their side

One of the interesting things about the HoGPIs is their aversion to personal accountability for their public actions at the FCC. Aversion appears in self-veiling in different ways. The religious wear trench coats; the laity are trenchantly nameless. They do not provide their names easily, or ever. They do not provide their associations – professional, social, familial, avocational – easily, or at all, if asked. And, yet, they see themselves fit to attack others (under the veil of "helping" or "counselling") about one of the most individual things in life…the continuation of it!!...or not.


Here's a couple I've recently seen.


Flywire screen veil


My wife and I were in Bunning's – a first in our lifetime joint venture – seeking and finding a broom and scoop set for brushing up the kitlit which our two fuzzy wonders spread around in their version of veiling their presences from the world. As we lined up for the getaway with our treasures I caught a recognised face outline to my rear right and turned slightly to confirm it. It took a millisecond (or 2?) to note that the old priest from my Fertility Control Clinic vigils was ambling by the outers of the checkout lines holding a rolled length of flywire on end to cover his face from my view. Or so it seemed. If I've learned anything from 18 months out front of the FCC it's the unreliability of my own perception.


So, I asked my wife to turn to her left and see if what I thought I had seen was actually there, describing him as above and so he was, as she reported, "looking like he didn't want to be seen" by me. I took another look and confirmed my impression. He has never met my eye while standing on the line at the FCC singing religious ditties, mouthing verses from a prayer book and supporting the women doing the Church's work of harassing patients. A few days later when I ambled by their morning protest post on Wellington Parade and I noted how nice it was to see him in Bunning's the week before, he didn't meet my eye then, either.


One of the grim-faced, superannuated men standing with him immediately threatened me (a feather's blow from a handleless duster) with the grimaced assertion that "we'll call the cops if you say anything we don't like". The priest in question already refused to support an effort by his HoGPI minions four months ago to sick the cops on me for offending him about the Church's paedophilic history and his potential shared responsibility for that as an elder – both facts, of course. I suspect they're working up for the new public offense legislation to roll in. I wonder if this post will be seen to be an "offense" in the meaning of the eventual act. There's nothing but the facts here, I suggest.


"I don't have to tell you…"


Then there's one of the five most harassing HoGPI women, also grim-faced, who I asked a week ago "what do you do", and then "what's your profession?", to which she answered "I don't have to tell you." Which is interesting for someone trying (98% unsuccessfully) to tell patients what their medical and social situations are with moral certitude of a remarkable order. Some of what she says is meant to be "evidence based" but isn't. I can read the evidence on social/psychological factors with some competence. I was wondering if she could, too. If so, then I could point her at the latest deep work on the areas she purveys.


She and her sisters are purveying false information to patients. Obviously their faith is weak since they keep advancing pseudo-science for matters which are items of Church dogma (and proudly proclaimed so for some authorities ensuring us that the Church has always thought the same things about matters sexual, without exception, etc. until it is overwhelmed by facts). Where faith treads science can have no say, unless it can throw faint lights of reason on the dull dim of dogma.


Anyway, through another Friend of the FCC I heard that she is a Billings Method "counsellor". It seemed useful to test this hearsay by offering it to her to avow or dis as she might. This offer – "I hear you are a Billings counsellor" – produced a gush of almost incomprehensible gabble about guessing I've done a web search and "it's better than putting things inside you" and…on unstoppably like a caught child…the babble of the guilty / ashamed confessing to she didn't stop to find out what accusation...which wasn't anything but an empirical observation…but, I did the search later and found that the Billings Method in Australia advertises three levels or domains of services, one of which is natural contraception…a little conflict there with dogma.


I think the nuts are cracking.


Maybe this stuff fits in my flexible travel category of "travel funnies" which I usually write on road trips. Friends of the FCC is a trip for me from places I know to ones I haven't entirely imagined, or sometimes even dreamed, and the end is not in sight nor is my motivation clear.

Appreciations (8) – Happiness is….an after effect!!
Torrey Orton
August 9, 2009

I’m not smart enough to figure something like this out, but I saw it, as I do, when I first started working on trust 15 years ago, and latterly out of a viscerally convulsed reaction to the happiness stuff. My psycho-colleagues have commercialised it out of the natural course of human existence by slicing and dicing (analysis, if we area speaking scientifically) so that it’s “evidence-based” but contains no more truths about being human than Plato, Aristotle and a few religious types and poet playrights have had a grip on over the last 2500 years!!

Here’s what I found in a NYTimes blog, called “Happy Days” of all things, by a cartoonist who’s also a writer quite clearly talking about the growth of his professional / vocational self:

"……
But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping
out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an
eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of
cross-hatching — I wasn’t conscious of feeling “happy,” or of feeling anything
at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently
achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses
were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something
entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of
music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time;
the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that
rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption
in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain
shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.

I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and
hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason
we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such
a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an
aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed
to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously,
fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted
vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick
out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space
just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. … "

From Averted Vision By Tim Kreider (emphasis supplied)
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/averted-vision/?ref=opinion

It’s really great to see someone else frame my thinking so finely… and we’ve never met and he’s probably young enough to be a son if I had one. Trust, too is an outcome, as are a host of values and virtues. The irritating thing is that the commercializers add another dimension of intervening conceptual mediation between the real object – which is living – and the questions which vitalise and direct it like ‘what’s it all mean anyway?/’, ‘how would I know the meaning if I saw it?’, and ‘how would I be sure it’s me who is finding it and not some caricature or simulacra thereof??’ Cuz, don’t we have enough intervening mediations thrown up by the commercializers already in the form of primitive emotional adhesions about sex and power and visual attraction and virtual affiliation with celebrity and on and on?

And it’s part of the analytic enterprise which is driven by techno-rational interests (see Habermas), that by taking things apart they can be illuminated in a way that transforms them into short-term learnables, tradeables, eventual subjects of ROI. It is forgotten that the acquisition of things like virtues and values of substantively applicable sorts is a life-time’s enterprise not a learning task in a curriculum. This is why business ethics is a joke,…but I rant.

No, I go on because the dream of technically solved needs overwhelms the possibility of finding / resurrecting them from the spaces between conscious life and the other than conscious. What would make them resurrectable would be continuing social practices of them, sustained in social structures (family, schooling and work come to mind) which are declining at a rate parallel to the failings of late capitalism.

This is another blog’s matters.