Learning to act right (35)… homophobia out
Torrey Orton
August 27, 2013

 

The challenge of recovering from inherited prejudices

 

How did I get over my adolescent homophobia? I think it just wore out from exposure to other realities. While I don’t think I knew anyone homosexual until I was in university in the early Sixties, I certainly knew “they” were somehow bad (mincing was bad, male or female, as was coyness or excess delicacy). Unmanly in any guise I guess. But by the time I was out of university, approximately, homophobia was a clear non-event for me. Along the path I was hit on by a gay guy (Jewish) in final year of university and another (Anglo) in second year of secondary teaching and in third year of teaching wound up rooming for a year with a black guy who came out a year later in NYC. I shared his flat for 6 weeks of a summer teaching program there (late ‘60’s) during which I met my wife. He did not hit on me and the prior hits had never elicited a striking response.

 

The above paragraph was a rough flow of consciousness prompted by the question “How did I get over…?”. This question, in turn, had been preceded by some loose wondering about how others might be unstuck from their frozen thinking / attitudes - namely the anti-abortionists of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants at the Fertility Control Clinic.

 

In exploring this question I discovered I was taken back to generic parts of my upbringing to do with cultural identities, approval and disapproval of options and endorsements of our own family identities. I realise that one stereotyping sits in a sea (?) of stereotypes that composed working knowledge of the world. And they are interconnected, both as content (the whats of our worlds) and construct or system (the learning and engagement of our worlds). And it’s not a straight line of sequences or consequences.

 

So, what first came to mind was that there was one notionally Jewish guy in my boarding school class in an institution which was resolutely non-denominational. There were a few Jews in the small town of my origin. While my mother and father (?) were low energy anti-Semites, it is clear to me there was nothing in their views which was more than a narrowly Anglo aesthetic affronted by different cultural practices and beliefs. Somewhere early in my university days I met quite a few Jews who happened to be my intellectual peers or more, and gay to boot. Apart from being quick, they were also combative, a trait or style I’ve always enjoyed in matters of the mind, and some others like ice hockey and street politics.

 

My parents held consistently dismissive views of the French Canadians, Italians and Irish who were around in reasonable numbers even in our small town (pop. 5000 approx. in 1955), all being at least second or third generation immigrants (hence native English speaking) and all being Catholic. The underlying rationale of my parents’ disregard was never published in our times, nor am I clear that they held the different groups in the same degrees of disregard. Blacks were unseen and Hispanics had never been heard of or seen in the small town Massachusetts we inhabited in those days. The Finnish population, which was large enough to be noticeable, was assailed occasionally for an imagined propensity for alcohol, though who didn’t have that? A couple of German families were treated as cultured Europeans…why, who knows? This relief from the surrounding condemnation was heightened by their use of a German nanny to support my mother after the arrival of number two brother.

 

And I still carry the externalities of this culture in a number of matters of taste which I have resumed in the last ten years…e.g. an essentially North-Eastern US “preppie” style of dress which which happens to be making a return for two generations below me I think…khakis, moccasins (now flashed up in boat shoe forms), button-down dress shirts, preferably tailored (which my China consulting life put me in the way of with great ease and little expense…). I have books in my house as my parents did in theirs, to an appropriately greater degree given my work(s). In the midst of the right schools and universities I acquired an abiding, to this day, sense of social justice from the very parents who carried racist, sexist and classist stereotypes so freely. I’m aware, I think, that I cannot give up my class any more than my race or sex or gender…though class, religion and ethnicity may be changed over a generation or two.

 

Both parents, in different ways, also rejected their class, having traversed the right school/right college/right occupation territory in the 1920’s and 30’s. I imagine that for them the idea of “right” didn’t apply, any more than preppie dress seems to me “right” then or now; they were just what one did, as I did…a fact announced to me when I was in year 6 primary school – that I would be going to boarding school in 2 years, so I started to work on my ice skating and stopped basketball (for which I would have been a much better candidate at the time…but then what did I know?).

 

Attitude seems to be an important dynamic in this largely unconscious life negotiation. Both parents were to some degree sceptical of many things and critical to dismissive of the normal life around them, apart from some degrees of gross decorum like boarding school and right universities. They were not personally well connected in their class system and often critical to condemning of their class peers. Finally, my mother was ahead of her times in many ways, most notably in turning herself into a high school teacher around the time I was leaving high school for college. 20 years later she also came out publically in a letter to her local newspaper supporting my sister’s self outing as a lesbian.

 

My version of their attitude flowered extremely in my 5 boarding school years where it encountered in the late 50’s two things: pointless formalisms (mostly left over from the inter-war period which the headmaster was a graduate of himself) and mindless rules mindlessly applied, both by teachers and prefects. The upshot was an NA (“negative attitude”) of which I was the first bearer in my generation of our family. Many of my boarding school classmates had robustly developed NA’s, too. This was in parallel with the Beat period and similar emergent streams which gathered force and publicity in the 60’s.

 

All this and more burbled along under the surface of the post-war boom’s material expression of what a happy and fulfilled people we Americans were – as parcelled up by Madison Avenue for financing by Wall Street. In the background of the white picket fence* universe of 50’s America was the slow public sexualisation of culture through rock and roll’s incarnation of rhythm and blues, and the emergence of diversities in most things and the discovery of government chicanery coverted in the Cold War demands to keep the Commies down wherever they were. Three great anti-war novels were published in the early 60’s – MASH, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five, ringing the bell on realities of violence in the music of humour. And James Baldwin in Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953 to The Fire Next Time, 1963 was opening the black (and gay) experience on one side while John Howard Griffin’s Black like me (1961) made it accessible to someone like me with neither the colour nor the acquaintances to pick it up first hand.

 

So, if our attitude was sceptical and dismissive / condemning, our feelings were conflicted and confused at the deepest levels of being – where our values lie in wait to drive or deride us. My conclusion about humanity around the time of my turning away from a baseless rejection of a natural sexual preference was, and remains, that we are largely potentially omni-sexual from which we are directed at birth to one or another more constrained expression.

 

There’s also something here about multiple stereotypes interacting, though not with any empirical ground for their doing so – vis. gays and Jews and blacks and assorted other ethnics and confessions arise together from my ramble through the woods of my upbringing. There must have been something cooking for me, my sister and both brothers to all have married out and stayed out ever since - a trend which intensified in the next generation.

 

*I don’t think there were any white picket fences in Lunenburg, Mass., and few in New Haven, Conn. Yet, this image remains a strong present one for a certain world view. Urban Dictionary defines white-picket-fence syndrome as:

a state of mind where a person blindly holds on to the idea of their perfect lifestyle, regardless of the inevitable life factors that make it impossible for it to be true.

Appreciation (51) – Sail away…a part memorial

Torrey Orton
August 5, 2013

Honouring them…

 I seem assailed by death these days – five more and less close acquaintances cut down in the last month by that fate which advancing age ensures: Adele, Adrian, Alistair, Barry, and John. Their all being within 3 years of my age probably amplifies the impact. Whichever, matters of the end game are more prominent for me and us these days.  After the most recent funeral, Jane wondered if I’d like particular music at my funeral. This was not a matter I’d considered, nor have I since her question.

 

I replied to that effect and corralled the issue of my funeral with a lasso made of my indifference. I won’t be around to enjoy it. But then, I did the same with my 70^th birthday, so maybe there’s a development opportunity in the matter of my recognising me. It just seems a bit clunky to celebrate naturally occurring events. What do I do to deserve any recognition for that?

Adrian

However, at Adrian’s funeral a couple of resoundingly nice things happened in his honour, which are giving me second thoughts, since funerals are for the living of course. One was the series of slide and music presentations which supported contributions from his wife, children, and eldest grandson. These provided well shaped, recognisable chunks of his life, the multi-media offers making the impact deeper.

 

The other was the finale, announced by his eldest grandson and marshalled by son Casey. For each of the 150+ persons present on the day there was a helium filled balloon from a small rainbow of colours, each with a long trailing ribbon. We moved slowly out of the meeting room towards the jetty into the Barwon River, taking 10 minutes to get assembled outside in the steady 20kph breeze blowing in the midday sun. Casey came last, gathering a cluster of a dozen or so mixed balloons tied together by the ribbons wound into a single dreadlock.

 

He urged us all towards the end of the jetty and closed an imagined doorway from the shore with his fullest self. Suddenly he led “three cheers for Adrian” followed by us masses and then said “go” or something sufficiently to that effect that the people at the furthest distance from him began releasing their balloons, the rest of us following until only Casey was left with his. He let his go and by then there was a flurry of tail-waving balloons sailing away to the south, with Casey’s cluster more grandly pursuing them, held somewhat still by it bulk and single tail…looking more and more like a person as it receded into the distance, preceded by the bits of us that belonged to Adrian. That’s an evocation.

Barry

A different one had occurred for me at Barry’s three weeks earlier. His was a traditional (is there any such anymore?) Uniting Church service with similar numbers to Adrian’s (not a competition; a sizing) which reminded me how far I am from such connections, while at the same time reminding me of my Protestant Christian background. It was, of course, the hymns which did that, though mainly by not being church music I knew. The impact was provided by an opera quality and volume female voice in the row behind me – the kind of voice which cannot be denied: right on all musical counts, strangely placed in a pew rather than the choir its quality. The service also reminded me of a part of him I knew about but which was almost never visible in our work 40 years ago or over last 5 years on psychology committees, except as a robust ethical perception of the everyday which shaped the world around him.

Learning to act right (36)… When we need someone to do it for us!!

Torrey Orton

July 28, 2013

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”

 

The other day I was out for a lunch bite with Mike. When he’s lunching at the University Café he takes a glass of bubbly red with it. I seldom drink midday, midweek unless on the road as in the Brasserie du Commerce in Besancon two months ago. This time, however, I was free after lunch so I started contemplating a glass myself and got hung up between a house shiraz and the aforesaid bubbly red, which I did not know other than by the repute his use of it lent. The waiter was standing there and I was uhming and awing.

 

My decision was all that stood between us and lunch starting its trip from the kitchen and I couldn’t make it. I was stuck in the roundabout of indeterminable differences between the options, pedalling and still.

 

“He’ll have the bubbly red, too”…

 

… Mike said and I settled in relief, as did the waiter. A classic of the situation where any decision is OK, if someone would just make one. I so much needed help at the moment that I didn’t know it until he provided it decisively. Either would be good for me if I could make the move. Thanks to Mike I was moved. It was an ethically vacuous event, but clear in its agency. I submitted to the push of his action, and needed to do so if the rest of the event was to unfold.

 

It occurred to me at the time that this was also a major purpose of close relationships – to share the decision load of life as much as the consequential work. And sharing is sometimes to pick up the bundle unasked…which requires a slightly daring arrogation of rights to oneself in the interest of preserving the participation of the other in the shared load!!!

 

There are two things in joint decision making (which seldom means both coming to the same conclusion simultaneously). It must be right in content and in process: we have to come to decisions in acceptable ways - consultatively, considerately, flexibly…and, we have to make the right decision for the task in question. The process is more important than the product since specific decisions can often be changed modified, adapted (usually do if they are substantive ones) and that requires effective consultation. These are mostly engineering problems, problems of having right tools and flexible application rules. The decision, however, is pure art - intuitive, scatty, quick – in need of a spark and failing the internal one, an outer will do fine. Someone has to move, and a hand is sometimes required.

 

Let’s run that by again in story form

 

Two months ago now I had been stuck in a decision muddle for weeks about taking a week to go to the US for a family reunion, or not to. I really was stuck in thinking which was dangling in the branches of multiple considerations of sentiment and logistics until I visited a now dead friend, Barry, who was clearly on the way to dying in his own mind at the time. I stopped by the palliative care place he had recently been consigned to and shared my small concern. “Do it”, he said almost before I got my considerations shaped up for him. His own brother, long separated, somewhat estranged, had just been down from another state to see him and they had talked for the first time in years. He was clear about the relationship priorities of late life. I could feel my mind slip over a cog as he spoke and walked out with uncluttered resolve to go (which I will be doing in two weeks).

 

 

Travel funnies 2013 (5)

Travel funnies 2013 (5)
Torrey Orton
July 3, 2013

A few late entries…a wind in Budapest

Each night a wind rushed by our hotel window, with unpredictable patterns, though greater intensity and frequency when the temperature dropped on our third of four days in town. It actually was a bus of pre-Liberation (‘90’s variety liberation) vintage which compete with trams of requisite modernity for the carriage of Budapesters about town. The thing about pre-Liberation is that it was pre-customer service and quality in vehicle production pretty much everywhere in the fading remnants of the communist world. So, a Budabus (product of the now defunct Trabant factory in the old GDR??) is likely to have a suspension which specialises in direct translation of all movement effects to passengers, both viscerally and audibly. Those passing our window (which we also used personally a couple of times) mostly seemed to exhibit these criteria, aggravated by the fact that the streets outside our window were paved with 4 X 4 inch cobblestones of significant antiquity and modest residual grouting.

The effect of their passing was to produce a wind-like noise which came out of nowhere and disappeared as quickly, much like a winter wind in a mild storm pushing against hard surfaces (houses and bare trees usually). On the last night I actually thought it was a wind which at times in fact it was - an aftereffect of the temperature dropping weather front descending on Budapest from the northwest in the afternoon before. The balance of the impressions was exactly the kind of perceptual fuzziness that leads to really serious misimpressions – like, a bus and a breeze hit you with disturbingly different effects.

And grandiose makes a late reappearance…

Dubai is a regular passing thru point for us, and occasional stopover, of which this was one. Passing through almost annually over the last ten years has made the persistent growth of the Emirates Airline hub unavoidably present to view.

I’ve not been to all the deserts in the world but I’ve learned some serious pleasures of seeing and being from venturing out into parts of the biggest one in the world which is

Australia, perhaps; certainly united under one flag.

The Dubai version of desert gives the whole genre a bad name, mixed with pretences to orderly modern living which are irritated by continuous efforts to reclaim land by dredging from the Gulf on the way to the next property crash after the recovery from the last one a few years ago is worked through. There is almost nothing naturally great or grand about it. They make up (is that what’s happening consciously??) for this by grandiosities of construction. The Burj Khalifa may come to mind, being clearly the biggest manmade thing pricking the heavens with no other intent (as communication towers have) than to prickle.

This time I’m thinking of their latest airport wonder which wows with its extreme approach. What most glares is the sunlight in the huge four story open spaces which are the entry halls, ticketing desks (well run, by the way), and more sales sites than your average mall. All air conditioned. That’s the bit which suddenly got me – the grandiose bit is showing off that electricity is a meaningless concern there by building hothouses which require it without growing anything but passenger through put. Without aircon, the throughput would wilt as the internal temp rose to the 50’sC.

The buildings are, of course, modern ugly with lots of glistening polished metal sheathing of everything standing over polished stone floors. It is after all just a hothouse masquerading as a country mall in a temperate climate. Remember, 40C-plus all day every day (with a drop to 28C at night) is Dubai’s fate 10 months a year approx… so hot that outdoor work like construction stops from about 11:00am to 3pm and workers do beach cricket in open lots (there was a five hectare one opposite our window, which probably was actually a manmade ‘beach’ like much of the waterfront of Dubai) from 6am to 7am.

Desert skating rink!?

One last thing: the Dubai Hyatt’s in house mall had an ice skating rink in it with figure skates for rent and easy availability …which gave me a serious pause, thinking how long has it been since I’ve been on skates (30 years approximately since I used my last pair on a small lake in Beijing in 1983!)? Yes, I was already thinking it, tempted by the double achievement of just skating again with that desert rink add-on. And, no, I did not take it up because they only had figure skates and I’ve never skated in them and I could already see myself stumbling forward on my nose as their toe teeth caught in the ice and I’d look like a beginner and probably break something too. So, I didn’t though I knew my skating skills would all be there (I’d done an inline roller skating run 20 years ago) and those skills would be what almost insured my falling to the toe teeth.

 

 

Travel funnies 2013 (4)

Torrey Orton

June 24, 2013

“Amber waves of grain…”

I grew up with this line incised in memory through a thousand singings of America the beautiful in primary school I imagine (because I can’t really remember) and finally in an unlikely place and time I saw amber grain waving in central France a few weeks ago!! And I’ve looked at a lot of grain in Australia in the last 40 years!! The waving grain struck me in two different settings: one, upland farmlets in the Parc Mercantour and, two, much larger broad acre plantings along the TGV pathway in Burgundy between Beaune and Lyon. I think the revelation of this obvious experience has escaped me in Oz all these years because the grain growing season is winter when we almost never go to grain growing areas and the grain grown in our neck of Oz is thinner on the ground per hectare than the dense covering of early summer French grain growth. It really did wave and look like waves as it did so…high enough to have peaks and troughs but not to break. There were no green or amber horses to be seen.

Seen, and then again…

We went out for a bite on our first night in Montpellier to a central city area called La Comedie after the opera house which heads up one end of the Place which is the main public open space of the central city, fed by a tram line populated with recognisable versions of our imported trams in Melbourne, save for the better paint work, cleanliness (nil tagging) and overall state of repair of their French originals. As we wandered around a bit before settling for a beer and a bite we were passed by a guy of 50ish talking somewhat impressively to himself in those exclamatory bursts which suggest a thrashing of insight is assailing him but felt like it was assaulting us. This is not too unusual in cities these days, and judging from some 15^th century Dutch paintings we saw in a museum on the Place a couple of days later, may have been typical of any level of close human habitation over at most times in human history.

A day later we were back for a shopping tour of the Pentagon – a wholly inappropriate modernity attached to the Place – and there he was again. At hearing/seeing him I thought: some people’s lives are to keep reappearing as a bad dream in the lives of others, invasively demanding attention they need but can’t get, yet we cannot just tell the dream to go away.

“man section”…

..it said on the right hand front side of a wooden drawer whose left front side said “pen knives”. The whole sat under a glassed in display of various products of knives used correctly. I was attracted to the weird usage with its implication of something hairy beyond the handle. Turned out to be an offering of hunting knives around the size of the one I carry in my walking backpack thanks to a long ago gift from a Chinese friend who noticed during our living in china 30 years ago that I always carried a Swiss Army knife complex enough to live off the land with if necessary.

Of course, the “man section” in question was in the local handicrafts section of the Buda Pest public market, a mid-19^th century iron and brick barn of railway station proportions, light and airiness so my expectations were roused in that blank but irresistible way that a sudden touch of hominess (the man section in this case) came into view. Foreign places produce in me a disposition to search, to find the familiar in the foreign while thinking I’m looking for the foreign.

The Antigone…a star of failed grandiosity

Finally, two last takes on the grandiosity theme. One, the Antigone in Montpellier is a roughly 70’s production leading off from the above Place and competing with it for grandeur but failing miserably, so much so that the cafes which line parts of its 1.5 kilometre of fading 5 story mixed use living and business buildings are barely making it and the infrastructure is

scruffy and needing renewal it may never get. The thing never worked and so is grandiose??

Two, in reflecting during lunch (which was quite presentable, as usual) in one of said cafes it occurred to me that this business of judging grandeur, greatness and grandiosity is very much a matter of taste, which in turn is very much a matter of those two enduring sources of human potential – gifts of birth and the inherited social standards which accompany them, often enough incongruously. Similar observations can be made about ethical as aesthetic matters.

Travel funnies 2012-13 - Grand, great and grandiose?

Torrey Orton

June 23,  2013

Grand, great and grandiose...challenges of appreciation seeking grounds for interpretation

 

Mountains are grand and great, but never grandiose. They just are and have no purpose. They cannot over or under express themselves. They can be more or less visible, but through no fault of their own. It’s their fate to just be.

 

People can be great and grand, and in the eyes of others, grandiose. I remember the first time I was accused (actually it wasn’t an accusation; it was an observation; but, I hear it even now as disapproval) of being grandiose. Well, I can understand why that observation was made without assuming myself as either great or grand in the equation. I can also understand that cultures may be and/or appear grandiose, while clearly being great and grand in various ways. Architecture is the most materially enduring expression of greatness and grandeur, and it may feel grandiose – an experience of something over-expressed out of lack of clarity or confidence, as a child does appropriately in early life achievements where a hurdle passed is experienced with joy and even ecstasy if the effort has been protracted.

 

I started writing this in July 2012 towards the end of that year’s Europe trip, late July.  Europe and its enduring cultures – Slavic, romance and Germanic, or Greco-Latin and Teutonic: the contrasts elaborate as reflection spreads across time and space. The contrast on my mind at the moment is the handling of public space in cultures,  brought to mind by spending 2 days in Besancon and amplified by realising that the historical juncture of the origins of these cultures lies where we were then, in Istanbul one morn having visited the Cisterns of the Basilica which collected the waters of a forest 10ks away in 500AD, delivered through a viaduct as were the waters of Rome to the famous baths and such 500+ years before that – the still visible beginnings of the terraforming of the world in the chasing of the waters to meet the needs of sedentary mankind, perhaps making sedentary a real possibility in numbers…

A day later and we’d spent a couple of hours in the Aya Sofya which dwarfs its neighbour the Blue Mosque both for volume and age, an impression amplified strangely by its comparative scruffiness, both in and out.

                                                         

…so, this is the basis of my great and grand wonders, and probably I haven’t gotten far enough back and should go to the first out-of-Africa migrants 50,000 years ago who went right at the nearest turn after the Red Sea. Their journeys eastwards along the ocean shores expressed among other things the mindless human devotion to looking around the next corner, not merely for something better but just wondering what’s there while able to find a consistently cheap bite of adequate substance to continue wandering. Wanderlust, perhaps, or wonderlust?

 

Besancon is home to the largest 16^th century fortifications in France (?), including a main central fort with a natural river moat on all sides built by the famous Vauban and supported by a circle of forts on four adjacent hilltops…all the more remarkable, when you think about it, for the fact that the fortifications were already superannuated by developments in cannonry…a line of development which still escaped military planners in France who built Verdun in the 19^th century and had a go again with the even more unlikely Maginot Line post WW1. The developments which outmoded them all before they were built were power and mobility, intensified with near factorial pace ever since – what’s a “hardened” site which cannot be blown by a bigger laser-guided missile?? Remember Big Bertha in WW1? And the siege mortars of the U S Civil War.? And the shift from sail to steam powered shipping and from wooden to steel…??  All bunker busters of their kinds.

 

Where has the idea of fortifications gone now?? Into legal fortifications and state boundaries, be they fluid (Australia comes to mind) or walled (Arizona and Israel come to mind). Even the Iron curtain failed in its heyday as the need to be seen to be in the world kept presenting inmates of the red world with opportunities to get out as representatives of their incarcerated perfection (Olympics from 1956 on).

 

So what? Well, all of the built history of great, grand and grandiose is a history…an attempt to preserve an original insight (include religions here, pls.) …and the effort to preserve sustains the image of the insight as irreplaceably great, which it had been when it replaced the previously great insight…and so on and so. But our need to believe that the newest insight is also the final one bonds us to them with an almost unbreakable strength…the kind which sends tens of thousands to their deaths in the face of machine guns…and resists its own demise with blind fervour (all those generals then; all our leaders now in the face of the failure of natural markets to ‘work’…)

 

June 2013 –and here we are in Besancon again with much more time to wander around and find it almost totally as it was 200 years ago within the barriers of its built and natural fortification, some of which go back 400 years or so and were built on the back of originally Roman ones still in view in the usual Roman forms: triumphal arches (Marcus Aurelius 175 AD) and theatres, baths and normal living stuff of similar origin. Much less fortified to exclude than dressed to attract.

 

And the place is grand, coherent, human scaled and liveable…though close to losing it all in the industrial turnaround from 1970 on (almost all of its large scale employment decimated; it had been home to the production of 1/3 of watches in France up til then!!). About 1/3 of the inner city is pedestrianized and the whole is so small (about 1.5 square kilometres) that parking outside the center is easily adequate to the mixed demands of shopping and promenading. The whole thing is four stories high, with a couple of cathedral steeples in excess of the four stories. This gives a humanly appropriate scale mix of enclosure by wall and openness to sky at once, plus the street level density of commercial and service offerings that only cities can provide at footpace.

 

Much of the building stock is grand even though hundreds of years old either because its origins were religious or public service – from schools to hospitals to local / regional governance with a broad spread of the ecclesiastical some of which was turned over to public sector use as church control was compromised by church/state separation in 1905. Building material consistency helps the impression of integrity and scale - a local stone which has elements of blue and yellow/grey in it whose original colour has been resurrected by a cleaning operation some years ago which recalled the original from the blackening of years of coal and wood fired heating, cooking and power. What it looked like before the unveiling is still on view in a couple of escapees from the great cleaning (one of which is a branch of an educational facility of some kind now defunct). Black is pretty much what it is…/

 

This is a line of report which keeps extending as we travel… a week later in Montpellier being appalled by a state sponsored excrescence called Antigone launched off the shoulder of the original Place de la Comedie with its 19^th century grandeur in tact. The 1970’s offshoot models grandiose to a T, with clear evidence of its failure to meet whatever public usage was imagined in its design and execution….lack of upkeep, etc.

 

Closing now with a visit to Nimes’s quite preserved little arena  modelled on the colossal Roman original but built for 24,000 public gore appreciators rather than the 60K its namesake supported. Grand and great but not grandiose it feels to us.

 

Travel funnies 2013 (3)
Torrey Orton
June 15, 2013

 

There’s always more bits… ‘You will be remembered…’


Ambling down a street in the old city part of Gap, France, a spot literally in a gap between two 2000 metre plateaus on the edge of the Parc des Ecrins to the east and the Vannoise to the west, I noticed a delivery truck pull into a two-car (two little European city cars, that is) space carved into the pathway of what was otherwise a one-way one lane road between 18^th century buildings.

 

No big deal, until I noticed that the 1.2 metre high pole next to the space had turned green at the top and a countdown had started from 15:00 on a visual display about 10 cm down the pole. So, I thought, this is what Melbourne City Council is threatening us with their ‘you will be remembered from the moment you park your car’ in the streets of Carlton, East Melbourne and so on. That is, they can tell when you arrived. However the Gap treatment was even more sophisticated because the broadcast timekeeper is visible from 200 metres away down the road to the next cross street so the touring forces of parking order can detect an overstay in a flash (and I bet the touring forces can do the entire inner city circuit of such short term stopspots in about 15 minutes guaranteeing the best rate of return for investment on two counts: more money and better access to short term parking for those needing it).

A clear social boundary drawn?

Watching the passing human parade is always interesting, especially when it is not too dense so that the manner of an individual’s or small group’s (couple, family , friends) passing can be observed clearly while also un-intrusively. Again in Gap, France, we were having our street café lunch (great fresh salads by the way) before entraining for Besancon via Grenoble and Lyon. I noticed a single woman encountering two other women, one of whom she knew well (broad smile and gestures from a reasonable distance before their paths actually crossed). The acquainted two did the three kisses greeting characteristic of French signs of greater (and, implicitly, lesser) expressions of intimacy. The accompanying, unacquainted, one was excluded, de facto, from the greater intimacy of three kisses and the lesser intimacy of two or even one. She got none, and when, almost as an afterthought, was introduced to the solo woman neither offered a hand nor was offered one in hello.

 

They were too far away for me to see if there was any non-verbal expression of rejection which constituted the determination of intimacy distance as total, apart from the fact that they were facing each other. And an implicit rejection was recognised by neither offering any acknowledgment of the traditional types to each other.

We do not have a word in English for someone whose role is to be excluded without being acknowledged by the players or observers in a specific social event at this level of simplicity and brevity. I don’t know whether French does or not. The fact was quite visible but difficult to describe because a number of relationship factors have to be captured without the relationship indictors to place all the actors.

 

I realised after writing this that I was attuned to such matters by the hostess of our Mercantour stay who insisted on two kisses on both meeting us for the first time and on our departure. For me this was inappropriate for two reasons. One, she isn’t French, and two I’m not inclined to kiss anyone I do not know, male or female, French or other, on first hellos anyway.  Probably something about the remaining edges of my Anglo upbringing where no one kissed anyone, in public anyway …?

 

Hotel de Police

Later the same day we were on the train again towards the north from Grenoble and closing on Lyon for a transfer to the TGV for the last step of our day’s travel. I like to keep loose count of the inactive business facilities visible from passing through the rail yards of cities. The industrial histories of the last couple hundred years are often to be read in their architectures and utilisation rates. One kind of utilisation is incarceration, often signalled by multiple levels and styles of razor wiring of the tops of walls, confirmed by lighting towers and guard posts in case the real use seems open to interpretation. Other semi-secure facilities make a pretence of looking like this but there’s always gaps in their razor wires.

I noted the real use before I read the title over the somewhat elaborate gate: “Hotel de Police” in large lettering. This confirmation was a bit much for my linguistic capacities again. I went for the implicit joke until Jane reminded me that ‘hotel’ in French has a seriously more diversified history than our adapted version of the same term, as in Hotel de Ville for a major local government establishment – certainly not an English usage but very French. Have a look at the Hotel de Ville in Paris for a reminder.

Still, the Lyon prison Hotel de Police! It looked in quite functioning shape, and had been for a century or so.