Learner therapist (46)…… Uplifting thoughts in times of down

Torrey Orton

Sept. 19, 2014

A cream pie in the mind

I’m working through very complex lifelong injuries with a very willing and able but psycho-spiritually compromised patient. At the moment we are picking apart an eating/body-image distortion which expresses a lifetime of deprivation of affection by family and schooling and….as we get closer to the core structure of the eating distortion, unguarded by its automatic functions (bingeing, constraining, etc.), the pain of sessions increases and cannot always be nicely balanced within the session timeframe. That is, we cannot often end on an upswing, or even a bit of flat earth.

 

The 42 year old female patient started introducing what have come to be known as cream pie diversions in the last minutes of a session still in its down (appreciating the pain of the past in the present) phase. She developed this tactic by chance a few weeks ago and it has become a signature skill for self-management around the hardest parts of our work. She can now confidently shift her mood out of obsessive / dark places in a few minutes before the end of a session.

 

The effectiveness of the pie in the face move initially arose from the summoning up of an image of pie smushing a face, but found enduring perceptual legs through my general vulnerability to desserts and ignorance of fine details of their contents. For instance, what really lies below the cream in a cream pie? Once opened, this doorway led into matters of cultural ownership of dessert types, with potential for pleasingly simpleminded explorations about what a real apple pie is, which naturally degenerates into memories of childhood pies, and we’re back in the lap of our mothers again. Which is where it all starts for her (and me in my way, of course)…

Travel funnies 2013

Torrey Orton

June 9, 2013

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, unexpected…in short, a threat to my normal preconceptions, understandings and values. The shock of the new is often a laugh of surprise, which isn’t what people are talking about when thy say they are just having a laugh. Now, here we go again…overseas that is, to France quite a lot, with a closing glance at Budapest, if it doesn’t get rained out, which it currently is on the flooding reports for this week.

“… verbalisation par camera..”

Having barely escaped the car rental company parking lot (learning to drive again – see below!) and started to navigate our way out of Nice we came to a series of traffic lights working more or less successfully to keep French drivers and foreign pretenders in line. Our attention was on the third ahead at which we needed to turn left. In the near distance an illuminated panel about 1 meter square next to the traffic lights blinked with neon intensity  –“ …verbalisation par camera…” I love the little wonders of our twinned languages and here was one. I haven’t checked yet whether “verbalisation” here means what being verballed means in Oz, but I’m guessing yes. That is, you can’t argue with this camera. Its sight is its word and the word is good…and you’re fined!!

 

Is this a case of French being eroded by English (a borrowing unauthorised by the Academie Francaise), by English usage (a real friend which turns out to have a bad family background) or just some unnoteworthy linguistic coincidence? Notice I haven’t considered that we borrowed the usage from French…. Ah, linguistic hegemony.

 

For the third trip in a row we are starting with a week in a rented car. The first two trips were outstanding successes, though the second of the two, a Skoda station wagon from their premier range, provided, on reflection, a forewarning of the vicissitudes late modernity has for me. It was a start by touch not by key machine.  Like many IT-innovated products the main usage processes were somewhat counter-intuitive. The rental company had no reasons to assume there was anything to warn me about. I’d obviously been driving a long time in a lot of places. While there was an on-board instruction module with screen (not touch screen and don’t wait for it) and all, I still thought driving a car was to be done by driving the car, not driving secondary screen-based systems enabling driving the car. Which brings me to now…

We have a Citroen D5 diesel 6 speed manual, four door plus hatch semi-RV with danger sensors all around and a rear looking reversing management system providing live video to aforesaid screen.  Whoever designed the thing clearly never drove on mountain roads like those of the Parc Mercantour in the French Alpes Maritimes just across the hill from eastern Italy. They are almost without exception, if we are off the local inter-village routes in the valleys, a constant opportunity for life threatening encounters either with other drivers who zing around as if we’re on an autoroute  and/or with falling off the side of a mountain with 200-300 shear metres drop available just to the right or left. Much of this opportunity occurs with switchbacks as mentioned.  And much of the opportunity is on roads which really fit about 1 and ½ cars with a mocking dividing line signalling passing allowed down the middle!!

 

The Bren gun carrier school of design

 

Now here’s the design glitch. The D5 is out of the Bren gun carrier school of vehicle configuration – squat and heavy – with the added complication of a pretence to tank-lite slits for windows, aggravated by the blockages to all around vision which occur when these characteristics are joined in one vehicle.  The roof beaming is also squashed, especially in the driver’s line of sight around the squeezed sharp turns of switchbacks. The turns can’t be seen around. Fortunately we have a flexible driver assist system in the passenger’s seat who can see around, sometimes. Meanwhile I’m trying to gauge the sharpness of the turn and the turn space the road builders happened to manage on this particular switchback (highly variable!) while changing down to first gear and not end up under a cement truck which has appeared from the next switchback driven at local driver’s speed, a competence for which I have yet to receive my probationer’s license…but then, that’s a self-administered qualification. How will I know I’m deserving? By not succumbing??

 

The origin of this gun carriage design I think is the Chrysler 300C of about ten years ago when scrunching the roof down on the body got its first life, with a net reduction in visibility for drivers and observability for others. Maybe the Lexus 4WD four door station wagon / RV of the late 90’s was an unintended contributor with its scrunched down rear section detracting from a clear view though providing a notionally aesthetic marketing edge at the time.

Over the last 5 years the feature has spread across the motoring marques from the Subaru XV last year back thru the BMW and Range Rover, with less pronounced versions all around suggesting aggressive cool for your driving buck. It seems to be an offshoot of the muscle machines which have increased in availability in direct proportion to the unreliability of everyday life. In our Citroen version the crunching of vision is such that it is almost impossible for the driver to get any rear view except through the rear vision screen!! And the slight bit available is squeezed by reduced rear window size and shape and oversized anti-whiplash headrests.

A stray left arm, or the return of the phantom limb

 

I’m always learning, sometimes by force of choice, as with unlearning my automatic driving responses to make the shift from right to left hand drive. I’ve on the whole done better this time than earlier when I had nearly irrepressible tendencies to turn into the left hand lane given any chance to do so. Not that unlearning here. Now it’s the one about shifting gears right-handed.

 

When a gear shifting need comes to mind, even after four days driving here and dozens of the switchback turns that dominate the mountain landscape demands to shift up or down to make the needed turns without having to stop hallway through and back up to gain the curve, my left hand starts lightly waving towards the non-existent shift lever in the direction of the car door close on my left. This happens before I am aware of the need thought which drives it. And the countermanding order arrives almost in tune with the phantom limb’s gesture at controlling the car, but consciously telling my right hand to reach for the shift lever which is, correctly for a left hand drive car, to my right!

 

I haven’t driven a manual car for 7 years, except that first drive in France three years ago. Not an excuse. Rather, perspective on the embedded habits I am dealing with. Plus, while I’m at it, here’s an acknowledgement of relevant prior experience in these matters. I grew up in a right hand drive world and spent my first 14 years as a driver driving in it.

 

The feeling of being here - Squeezed

“Squeezed” was the word that came to mind reflecting on the events and scenes above. Driving is an endless squeeze to pass by any other vehicle, to resist the temptation to speed up to local rates and to stay on the roads when the vertiginous attraction of the deeps just off them are at their strongest.

 

 The countryside is actually squeezing in a way different from the other alpine areas we’ve visited in the last 10 years. Though only averaging around 3000 metres at the highest, the Alpes Maritime of the Mercantour are a dense impression sustained by the depth and narrowness of the array of valleys between them. Another take on the feeling of being here is embraced… on an easily accessible walk yesterday we got closer to the highest peaks than we ever did in the Pyrenees or other French Alpes and so giving the experience of being surrounded by them. I took a video sweep of them which covered about 270 degrees.

 

Travel funnies 2012 (6) – Istanbul items

Travel funnies 2012 (6) –
Istanbul items
Torrey Orton
Aug. 22, 2012


One background thing of note
Istanbul was a much better event than I had ever considered it could be. My expectations were discoloured by my resistance to new major cultural differences, mixed with a sense that I already have enough such differences well-lodged in various parts of my being. This is not new for me in relation to travel options going back years. My China world started this way 35 years ago. The only really foreign place I ever spontaneously chose to live in was France 40 years ago, and of them all (visited and inhabited) it's the most unfinished for me, so it's always on the annual travel list.



Shoe shine guy
On the afternoon of our last day we were returning to the digs we had occupied for five nights to do a quick shower and final pack. At the top of the hill we climbed to the hotel we started passing a shoeshine stand – a guy a bit younger than us perched on a small stool purpose-built for the height requirements of shining a shoe on his polish box foot step – and he offered his services for the third or so time in our five days in the area. He was certainly right that my walking boots were more dust than polish and more scuffed than smooth. Jane and I did a quick visual negotiation and I agreed. The polish was the best I've ever had, commercial or self-applied. Along the way he talked about his present life, numbers of children and grandchildren, enquired after ours, and went back to the life of a lifetime polisher…not at all good that day; nil clients until us.


Back to the box. It was an art work in its own right – each polish container topped with a well buffed brass mini-minaret and set in a wood-framed tray. The whole box was carefully oiled, modelling the service on offer.


The melodious muezzin
On our last day about 1:15pm during lunch at Pandeli in the far southeast corner of the Spice Market the call to prayer broke out with penetrating power from the nearest minaret (all projected with full volume loudspeakers) in the finest of the 10 or so such events we'd heard in five days…a tuneful and peaceful rendition of a routine most locals would know, of which the most we could pick up was the "God is great" punctuations for completed phrases… but the guy could sing a chant in tune and in time. Plato was right – music is the voice of the gods, or was it the demons?


Magna chartas at Asa Sofya
This grande dame of churches was taken into the Moslem fold somewhat after the conquering of Constantinople in the mid 1400's. She had already been in service 700+ years by then. Her conversion was simple. Declared Moslem it in the name of Allah, add some minarets and de-decorate and counter-decorate a bit. Now a museum, its history is all on view. Apart from some mosaics defaced and partly reconstructed, there was a stunningly large series of what would pass for billboards if they were promoting local fabrics or eats rather than the Koranic phrases they contained - massively larger than the same kind of verbals to be found in the purpose-built, much younger Blue Mosque just across the plaza.


Touts with taste
More than once I had the almost joyous experience of seriously competent salesmen of fabrics or edibles or visits to parts well known or post card representations of what I'd missed or seen but not noticed should be signalled to others. Many of these guys (a pretty men-only scene, the streets of Istanbul) had perfect first moves which personalised unintrusively what we all knew was a commercial dance. For example, the café owner who remarked, "Nice shoes", as we padded by his establishment around dinner time, directing my attention to their aged colouring (NOT the boots of the polishing encounter above!). There followed a three or four step natter about the virtues of shoe aging which tailed off into a pleasant reiteration of his unspoken introduction to dinner services and untroubled acknowledgement of our not being quite at the dining time ourselves. A really striking characteristic of the tourist area touts wherever we went…just plain competent and human(e). A case of an unexpected personal truth as the medium of relationship building


Afternoon at the baths
The baths we visited were 500 years old give or take a few decades. The marble floors were smooth and slightly carved out from the passage of feet all those years, much as the portals of the Aya Sofya and Blue Mosque were …smoothly rutted like an old unmade road on clay based soils, with something like the same danger of slip-sliding around when wet. I'd never had a Turkish bath experience and wouldn't have on my own initiative. Like most things I do under some duress (that is, because I can't be bothered otherwise), I find interesting and enjoyable. Such it was with this. The heat was dense and carried in all the media supporting our presence – floors, walls, humidity… Relief was startling. Water at 20 degrees is a slight slap in an ambience of 40+C and 95% humidity. I'll be looking for its equivalent in Oz, but preliminary searches are not encouraging.


Driving in alleys – everyone's cutting it fine
About the only scary thing in the whole Istanbul experience started and finished our time here – driving. Taxis are chauffeured with a manic intensity ramped up by two entwined factors: drivers' need for speed and proximity of collision opportunities. Around the central tourist parts where we mostly were, streets mostly dated from a horse-drawn era. Mostly one way and mostly bordered on one side with parked cars and 3 foot wide footpaths and packed with wandering masses of other cars and pedestrians, a fluxing tapestry of moving metal and bodies, the latter flowing in all directions across the roads with a minimalist approach, from our Melbourne viewpoint, to personal safety.


You know that experience in Melbourne of people who step off a curb to the edge of traffic and start moving into the space which hasn't yet actually appeared in the traffic, failing which they will be scrunched by the same actuality? Well, Istanbul was that multiplied geometrically. I'm sure locals learn to judge where the pedestrians are going by those slight twitches of preparation for movement. They take a lifetime to learn to the same level of unconscious competence as the pedestrians, usually by early pedestrian experiences of their own. Remember learning to look left first when you are used to looking right? That's the level of the challenge.


Being on the starting edge of that trajectory was not entertaining. For us here, it's usually a simple 90 degree crossing of our direction of movement. There it's a 360 degree potential. The people we could see, and those who hadn't yet appeared in view, could go in any direction at any time and come from any direction at any time. Or, so it seemed. I haven't done the Istanbul road accident stats research yet to see if our apprehension in the act of travel was warranted, for our sake or others'.