Learner therapist (38)…… pathways to reconciliation

Torrey Orton

Sept. 23, 2013

“You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

I always offer the following six propositions to first time couples therapy patients. It is a perspective they can use to interpret and shape their relationship from this point forward. And it is the one I use.

1. The responsibility for the current state and future of the couple is joint
2. This responsibility has varying levels with different issues because individuals value issues differently
3. We can never fully meet all the needs of another person, hence our need for friends while coupled
4. We can never fully know our own needs at any time because:
1. they are partly hidden in our unconscious, and
2. they emerge as we transit our life stages, or
3. they are subordinated to the needs of others.
5. Consequently, conflict is a necessary part of relationships (not just marriages)
6. This conflict usually takes a repeated form – the systemic communication dysfunction – which can be seen early in couples work, and which the couple immediately recognise as ‘what we always do…’ (see point 1 above)

The systemic communication dysfunction, however, is the hurdle too high for some couples. It brings them to me – this barrier which looms up between them with reliable consistency about a well-known set of issues. These are also facts, but mainly emotional ones about the status of the relationship. Helping them to be shared is my first task. I’ve written elsewhere (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/learner-therapist-18-systemic.html  ) about the techniques for doing this – exploring needs and wants, building a shared agenda for joint exploration and creating resolutions to the agenda.

Usually there are emblematic hurdles which have years of unresolved injuries* attached to them. Often these hurts are so big that some form of reconciliation is called for, though usually it is me who labels them as such. Even the mention of reconciliation expresses a level of optimism for the relationship which the traumatised couple may not easily rouse early on in the work…

…such issues attack the central confidence of the relationship – usually matters of fidelity, though not always sexual. They corrupt trust and embed suspicion while accruing a nest of reinforcing experiences between the couple, eventually becoming self-reinforcing to the point of crippling their basic relationship assumptions. The common verbal form or corrupted trust is the accusation: “You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

Reconciliation for a change

The offer of a reconciliation process - which assumes that everything relevant can be (1) truthfully acknowledged, (2) apologised as appropriate, (3) recompensed if necessary and, finally, (4) prevented from recurring - is often heard by patients with mild to serious wonder, edging into disbelief. Here’s roughly what I say about it, set out as a presentation which ensures, when well executed, that a clear idea of a clear process is available to both parties. It can take numerous sessions to get to the detailed implementation, though it often has been pre-empted by their engaging with each other with that process in view before formally arriving at it. The power of applied suggestion.

An approach to marital reconciliation:

Step	Purpose	Process
1 Acknowledgement	To build an agreed version of what happened, so that the ‘facts’ are mutually endorsed. This will be essential to achieve a credible apology and to establish appropriate recompense and relevant prevention strategies	The person responsible** writes out what the facts are, with guidance from the person harmed to assure they are all there. The final document is read by the writer out loud, repeatedly if necessary, until an acceptable tone of seriousness is achieved for the person harmed.
2 Apology	To ensure that the acknowledged facts are taken up as the responsibility of one of the other parties – credibly and authentically (the latter contributes largely to the perception of credibility)	The writer apologises for their role in the acknowledge facts, again repeated until an appropriately authentic tone is achieved for both parties.
3 Reparation	To restore a sense of balance in the relationship where damage is seen to be high by both parties. May be material or services in nature…	In civic life we have community orders as a form of giving back for breaking the law. In private the same concept can be applied. For instance,
4 Prevention	To ensure that “it never happens again”.	If the acknowledgment is full about the damaging behaviours, their triggers should be clearly in view. Consequently, pre-emptions can be designed jointly (!) to interrupt recurrence opportunities.

 

Any system like this actually reflects participants’ unreflected understanding of violations – their sense of justice.  So, they often have begun the reconciliation process implicitly. For example, at the start they may already have ideas about recompense and prevention…very likely in fact, because these two steps are the imagined results both are looking forward to. Failing to do the pre-work on acknowledgment and apology is what prevents progress on the last two. Fear of the last two inhibits progress on the first two. Similarly, getting good at the first two means falling into distress deep enough to call for recompense and prevention happens much less often and the cycle of re-injury is broken up front when precipitating events occur – as they will!

Note there’s a practice of reconciliation for criminal invasions of personal and property safety. It is called Restorative Justice and has formal state, national and international proponents. In these the guilty are encouraged to confront their victims and engage with the damage they have caused. The focus is on acknowledgment and apology, with occasional acts of reparation.  Restorative Justice is associated theoretically and practically with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in various places – e.g. Canada , South Africa, Australia – with heritages of systemic and systematic colonial violations of indigenous families (among other violations of indigenous life!). All  from marital reconciliation to inter-ethnic truth and justice are means of engaging the past by working it through in the appropriate publics.

Forgiveness and forgetting. Matters for another time.

*unresolved injuries are deep historical relationship patterns which remain present to the view of oneself and others as how we normally behave under pressure. They are often not acknowledged either to ourselves or by others because they are the kind of behaviours which elicit automatic defences on both sides; empathy helps us conduct this tacit defence.

 

** Person Responsible and Person Harmed is the language used in Restorative Justice to identify participants in various kinds of proceedings. See Best Practice Standards for Restorative Justice Facilitators Copyright © Victorian Association for Restorative Justice, 2009

 

Learner therapist (37)…… Unavoidable hurts: damaging dilemmas of development
Torrey Orton
Sept. 16, 2013

“I have to send you back again…”

 

A few months ago I wrote here on “Disrespect without intent” (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/learnertherapist-30disrespect-without.html ), arguing that we are responsible for damages we have done to others without intending to do so. I want to extend that claim from the relatively benign damage of my inappropriate “Uh huhs”* to the decidedly malignant damages of long term childhood victimisation which often compose the backgrounds of the deeply anxious and/or depressed. The deforming damages may be experienced in self-harming and suicidal intents / attempts, with the crystallised defences of PTSD, OCD, body/eating disorders and the various social phobias along the life paths of the damaged – constituting a reasonable chunk of the DSM V diagnoses.

Occurrences and forms of unintended damages

In child raising - Catch 22’s

A mother, having been abandoned with three children, decided to start ensuring she never had to depend on a man again. She did this by getting herself an education and then the work history which made her highly employable and repeatedly promotable. Along the way she had to be out of home for much of the day. In the space between end of school and end of work home time her three kids were home alone and into this unsupervised space arose the sexual abuse of the youngest child (girl, age 7) by the eldest (boy, age 12).

Similarly, the mother with two female primary aged children split up from her first husband after periods of violence at his hands. Dad eventually remarried (quite soon in fact) and the divorce settlement provided child access for him a weekend fortnightly. Unfortunately his new wife was also a graduate of a failed marriage with children, who were living with them.

She was utterly incapable of managing the blending demands of the visitation weekends, leading her to victimise the girls persistently and intensively. The degree of verbal violence was sufficient to leave the girls crying on the way home to mother and pleading with her not to be sent back. She had to say: “You have to go. The family court requires me to share you with your father.” For my patient, one of the two girls 20 years later, this went on until she left home for a violent boyfriend at age 16 and the cycle continued down the generations.

In marriages / families

The couple nothingness condition – when there is a space between the couple into which both have learned not to tread because the ground is rough, the air frosty and the lighting undimmable. This kind of space produces constant low grade irritation with occasional outbursts of rage. The irritation signals the constant presence of nothingness, which the individuals express in a persistent sense the other disrespects, disregards, dislikes them  and the other’s failed coupling is described in negative absolutes (he/she always,  never does…) which imply catastrophic outcome expectations for the relationship. These cannot be resolved because both experience it as what the other should do – take a chance to change things.

Family nothingness condition – when feelings are prohibited and opportunities for arousing or engaging them are reduced to the minimum and yet they still stay housed under one roof. For example, the family which eats meals separately (I know two of these), where almost  no feelings are explicitly expressed and where implicit expression is severely repressed (making passive-aggressive anger the only OK public feeling and guilt the de facto private feeling when its private version rage is not in play). Alcohol is the lubricator of the frozen joints of these two relationship worlds.

The dilemma of engagement in recovery

These four examples are all violent, though not in the sense the genpub or popular press imagines them. In principal, they would seem to be easier to deal with than family violences as we usually hear of them – either by friends or news reports. However, they are not easier, partly because they are somewhat invisible violences, leaving no broken bones or cuts except the victims’ self-inflicted ones.     

The challenge for both victims and abusers is to engage with the part good / part bad abusers’ behaviours. The victims cannot escape this dilemma because it is constantly present to them in the viscous mixture of self-blame and self-defence, which sticks them to recurrent patterns of daily life ineffectiveness – in work, relationships, self-care, etc. Out of this sticky mix they often generate their own history of damaging behaviours both to themselves (the self-harming and crystallised defences mention above) and others (reproducing the violences they have been subject to), …and so the damaging passes from generation to generation it often seems.

That this is no mean struggle is attested by the society level discussion over historical guilt, notably the 20^th century German ones (World War II guilt and political guilt for the DDR for 45 years thereafter). Positions on the virtues and abuses of remembering and atoning are exquisitely set out by David Rieff in Against Remembrance and dramatised in Bernhard Schlink’s fictions of war and self-oppression - The Reader and The Weekend - and theorised recently in his Guilt About the Past. The apposite by omission example is Japan. These are all multi-generational matters. They do not go away in societies any more than they do in families.

The problem of blame and responsibility

The desire to avoid the dilemma of responsibility (which entails potential blame and praise one way or another) shows up in funny places like famed works of self-development and injury recovery that falter around holding the parents responsible for their injuries to children (assailing the victims with the need to deny their victimhood), failing which their children can never extricate themselves from the cycles of self-blame which bring them to therapy in the first place. Correct blame locates responsibility where it belongs, which certainly is NOT wholly with the child. It also helps to clarify those things which are not changeable by the child because they were not the child’s responsibility.

There’s another level to this struggle – a conceptual one. Dilemmas are those kinds of things which cannot be reduced to black and white, digitised, constructs. A very large part of human populations are not presently capable of holding two largely conflicting versions of the same story in mind at once. So maybe my efforts to get patients to engage such dilemmas are misplaced and the strategies of other therapists (see above) which I see as avoidant of the dilemmas are in fact intellectually and morally prudent. That is, the strategies reflect and honour the developmental potential of patients under stress.  However, they do so by starting from an avoidance - namely, assuming that confrontation with abusers is wrong because uncomfortable for the abusers and so not even to be raised as an option by the abused. This is a little too close to self-protective institutional procedures for my comfort!!

My impression is that many patients make only modest efforts down the pathway of historical reconciliation with their abusers. There are good reasons for this, but one of them is not that the abusers are blameless. Rather they may be now incompetent to play the role of responsible adult, either through moral weakness of the sort demonstrated by public figures and institutions of all sorts these days (or, has it not always been thus?) or the constitutional weaknesses of advanced age.

* by the way, that uncontrollable spontaneous dismissal of others seems to have almost fully disappeared in the last couple of months…sliding out of my natural communication repertoire with not a peep of resistant protest. How that came to be is a wonder for another time.

 

 

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.