“Mentally competent” and “asking for death” – can I rationally choose death?

"Mentally competent" and "asking for death" – can I rationally choose death?
Torrey Orton
October 20, 2010


Decisionmaking and death – irritated reflections on Ahmed, Gray and others.


"balance-sheet" suicide and "rational" suicide – way stations in the argument about how a choice to die can be justifiable. This argument hangs partly on an undiscussed dispute about what a 'rational' decision is. It swings back and forth because rational thinking is persistently misunderstood as affect free thinking. The standard model is reflected in Ahmed's (TheAGE, Oct 7, '10) discussion, which leaves him stuck and indecisive.


Stuck
I've been stuck for two weeks in this misunderstanding, too, which from my present perspective is no problem because I cannot influence it. I am clear myself where I stand on my own access to effective self-destruction. The details matter some. Nigel Gray's in THE AUSTRALIAN, Oct 6, 2010 alternatives, for example, are quite attractive to my needs to pre-empt an unfortunate death. But a well refined approach to what a good argument for my euthanasia should be will not increase my access to it. That portal is blocked now by a few others' (lifer kooks and gutless pollies) beliefs that I should not have it. By the way, by their default to inaction, the gutless pollies of course cast themselves as supporters of the kook believers. The pollies are a very special class of banal believers – swaying in the intemperate breezes of the various kooks (individual and institutional) for fear of losing something. That fear costs them their integrity and legitimacy, and the rest of us our representation.


Two rationalist fantasies
There are two rationalist fantasies employed in the euthanasia debate: both to the detriment of my rights.

1- that we can and should be able to make rational decisions about our deaths, unclouded by irrational affect; and,

2-that we can only make irrational decisions about euthanasia, because all reason on matters of death is always clouded by 'mental problems' about being close to death – feeling down about being ill, fearing our decline and tormenting ourselves with our pathetic state(s); that is, we are mentally ill if dying, and so unable to decide.

The emotional factors are not understood within the range of normal human emotions. So, the depression, sadness, etc., felt by the dying and the-in-danger-of-dying are treated as pathological rather than normal responses to perceived (and objectively real) dangers. Ahmed acknowledges this implicitly by referring to dialysis research where personal control emerged as a key determinant of patient depression and connecting it to related Oregon findings about euthanasia choosers and oncologists' observations of cancer patients. He then confuses his discussion by calling this mix of feelings and needs "personality factors". While his personal position on patient decision-making is never made explicit, it is suggested by his use of the term "saved" in discussing suicide by aged, near terminal patients.


Rational decisions = ?
What do we know about decision-making by everyday humans (not rats or undergraduates, please)? Simply, that rational or logical decisions mainly exist in digital systems like ICT, positivist economics and its social science affiliates, and the foundations of classical physics and chemistry. The latter have been withdrawing from the fantasy that a number is a discrete item, that data are clearly discernible from each other, since Einstein. And data clear or foggy do not, it is generally agreed, have feelings or thoughts except perhaps in some delicate metaphysics (electrons feel their neighbours and scurry off to a safe place at a nano-distance; planetary attraction is a species of elective affinity?).


Behavioural economics is the belated acknowledgement that Adam Smith was right about economy – it's not the numbers that matter, except to bankers and even not to them when they consider their "quality time". There's a place in human development where an increase in quantities of livelihood produce no gain in quality of living. Many of us are there now.


Judgment = intuition
Decision-making is making judgments. These are integrating intuitions, summarising whole experiences into actions. They do not follow iterative, additive pathways except in expostfacto reconstructions of the sort used in "evidence-based" medicine and its allied affiliates. Try mapping the decision steps in a serious life issue on a decision mapping system like this: http://www.austhinkconsulting.com/ . You will still end up with a judgment which cannot be rationally explained except by reference to supposedly non-rational, emotive factors. Judgments express values in relation to important facts. Important facts are the valued ones.


Individual rights only available fully to a group
If our rights were pure universal truths they would just be. When they are contested, as with euthanasia, abortion and just war, for example, their limited claims are made apparent in the act of their dispute. If they were pure and universal they would be substrate, assumptions, of our life processes. The pointy end of the rights stick these days is individual rights. The upshot of the contest in matters socio-economic, so far, is that a few get to monster the many in the name of the many's right to choices they cannot make.


Nigel Gray argues for euthanasia from a personal choice perspective. He stretches his case just as egregiously as he claims the pro-lifers do theirs, but maybe not for the same effect. He proposes a pure right of individual choice on the basis that "..this is one's own business, no one else's." He certainly has a right to think this, but that does not constitute a right to die with no consideration for the effects on others. It's an irritated right with which I sympathise but cannot honour as any more rational than those who say I do not have it (because it belongs to God for instance.)


Putting my hand up for certainty
A string of ways of dying from self inflicted euthanasia to physician assisted euthanasias – the actually occurring choice-based deaths - sit inside the over-arching fact that (so far) we will all die if we live. Euthanasia already exists de facto in physician assisted deaths, either by legally mandated turning off life-support or providing assured decline into death with family-agreed terminal palliations (morphine comas). This is where the individual choice wheels meet the highway of life – namely, with a hand-up if you want it, and sometimes if you do not. I could do with a bit more certainty in my hands.

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?

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


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

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

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

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


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

6 Views of death (3) – ‘Normal’ ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.

6 Views of death (3) – 'Normal' ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.


Torrey Orton


Oct.1, 2010

My life / death view: I am sure I have a right to live and die in as much as I can choose to do so. I did not choose to be born, but choose everyday to stay alive. I'm aware that I may not get to choose when to die, but I certainly will die. The same cannot be said for my birth; it was not certain. Like my birth, my death will be in the hands of others in some respects, the least of which, from my point of view, will be cleaning up afterwards, just as it was for my birth.

I deal three days a week with younger people (20's to 40's) who think /feel their lives are not worth living for various amounts of time, with regular recurrences and typical shared origins in excruciatingly inescapable traumas. Also typically, they have self-administered palliative problems (addictions) and often have irregular employments, housing and similar signs of fragmented lives. Quite a few sustain professional presences of great sophistication and substantial achievement. I have no trouble believing it's too soon for them to go. How successful I am in conveying that conviction into self-affirmation is a session by session challenge.


…unlucky not to die well.

 As for myself, on the other hand, I am quite sure I want to have the choice of dying when I see fit. That means dying before my natural time, possibly. That I may die as I write will do fine as my time, should it be so. It's a ponderous decline into multiple incapacities, worst of all a mental decline, which I will choose to avoid if I can. Given diagnoses of certain kinds, I would initiate a process of self-extermination, I hope. That 'hope' expresses my awareness that I may not be strong enough, which I may get a chance to test, if I'm unlucky not to die well. Next to a lingering death, a failed effort at pre-empting it is my greatest fear. I'd like some certainty in my own hands. Either this will be legal – e.g. running a car into an immovable object – or, at the moment, illegal by amassing a sufficient quantity of appropriate medications.


I do not have the time to read much of what's written in the so-called 'debate' about euthanasia. I don't really care about much of the detail, or to make arguments in detail which I am intellectually competent to do. I have patients to care for and other things to think. Not to write at all on this is dangerous and part of me knows that the fools in the religions and the politics of late capitalism and post-modernity are likely to lock away pre-emptive opportunities I am as certain I deserve as they are I do not. That's the making of rages, and even the fools I just mentioned must know these are growing day by day, just maybe not in the minds of people like me.


Natural right to choose…

 I know I have a natural right to self-extermination, but not a legal one here in Australia. There are those who would say I have no natural right, either, but they do not check their assumptions about the sources of right, being stuck in a system of presumptive answers which is historical, not 'natural'. This system is the Abrahamic religions of the Book. I really do not mind their believing what comes with allegiance to The Book, including endless to-the-death struggles about whose version is correct, true or The Word. I am amazed that a profoundly clear truth, like that the religions propose, should produce so much distress for believers, but not amazed enough to want to help them out by adding myself to one of their ranks. How could I choose?

"But our right to choose is important and is too often deliberately forgotten or conveniently ignored by those who evangelise around "the right to life"...." .Geoff Gallop, in The AGE 28092010.

The Australian politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. The latest pro-euthanasia figures are 76% in favour. The 20%ers get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in the most finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair


Fundamentalist convictions

 So what part of the anti-euthanasia arguments are just tactics to cover fundamentalist convictions? Such tactics might be expressions of moral outrage, pseudo-scientific or "evidence-based" facts and ad hominem assaults demonstrating other non-believers' attitudes descend from character faults or notional immoralities.… Where such tactics do not work there are only implacable demands or refusals on offer.


An example of apparent evidence-based arguments is Dr. Ruth Gawler in TheAGE, Letters 29/9/2010. In a self-described backflip on euthanasia, she notes that cancer patients "initially … are often confused in their thinking." She doesn't say anything about what happens to the initially confused after some work. Competent cancer treatment like the Gawlers provide must help clarity, among other things. Viz- people who start confused do not have to remain that way.


She adds to her evidence against euthanasia that population issues make getting clear about good reasons for dying unlikely. This is an argument carried by her professional status, not any clarity of fact or causal connection.


Because we can do it…

 Underlying the pro-life argument is a scientistic lie – that unnatural efforts must be made to preserve lives – at the beginning or the end of the life span, and in some cases before it (IVF) because we can do it scientifically. I don't think this is what the gods recommended in their times. Once again there was a sad letter pleading for families to let their elders die when ready and to do the legal homework to minimize useless resuscitations. (TheAGE 29/9/10).


This reflection yields another: that there may be a need to achieve something for my life in / thru my death, a clarifying of the moral ground…which invites a recollection of possible causes for choosing to end life, eg.: (1) to save the life of another; (2) to prevent a useless decline into a terminal outcome; (3) as a weapon of struggle (martyrdom); (4) to save precious resources for others (cousin of #1, but with no specific other(s) in mind or view).


Two self-destructions

 Finally, let's notice a matter of origins. There are two self-destructions: the Greek one and the Roman one. Euthanasia, the good death, is Greek; suicide, the bad death, is Latin, as are its familiars matricide, fratricide and patricide. But a death by one's own hand is self (sui) killing (cide), whatever the labeling. Some deaths we choose to label nicely and others not. The choice is a discrimination between those with an acceptable rationale and those without one (in the eyes of some others). I don't know that the Greeks and Romans differed that much on matters of life and death. The choice is moral, not factual of course, leaving aside the problem of determining if a death is by accident or intent.


A song comes along with this thought – "Suicide is painless.." and reminds me of the absurdity of life and death, except when we can give meaning to it. Generally the meaning achieved by making our own choices exceeds that by following others' choices for us. Perhaps the worst situation is that where making meaning seems impossible but action is required which only produces absurdity. There's a literature around this dilemma. Yossarian, where are you? Slaughter House 5, Catch 22, Mash...

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges
Torrey Orton
Sept.27, 2010



To my co-workers in psychotherapy:


I noticed recently that caring is an important core part of therapy…not because I had not been being caring. The research on therapeutic effectiveness shows a 30% contribution from the therapeutic relationship alone, regardless of therapeutic paradigm or technique(s). The core of effective relationship is perceived care, arising from relevant therapist attention, interest, etc. 'Relevant' means felt by clients as directed accurately towards their needs at the moment.


Certainly I vary / waiver in my caring at times, but underneath all is unconditional positive regard as I understand it. My patients should feel, not always at the same moment, that I am caring about them and taking care of them. They need both to be taken care of adequately. If my care taking is not felt as caring, as specific to them and personal, it will not work in therapy.


If you have not been in therapy, you may have experienced care-taking from personal trainers, nurses, doctors, and other health providers which felt careless in the personal regard sense – as emerging from an automaton, or worse, someone who really doesn't like being with you. The effect may be to make you doubt the technical quality of the service provided, and that may inhibit its effectiveness, even if declared to be 'best practice', best of class, or similar marketised appreciations.


Unmarked detour: I did not expect to come to the following observation here but this is how writing goes. It is already noticed in Australia that the increase in non-native English speakers in aged care and some standard nursing is leading to a decline in perceived care because some care givers cannot communicate adequately with their patients. Similar is sometimes noted in general practice, and certainly the written competence of some NESB* medical practitioners is well below local high school graduation level.


This is not to impugn the intentions of care-givers. Rather it is to highlight that care – given and received – is expressed and expected differently in different cultures. Learning these differences and being able to produce them naturally is often a more than one generation's efforts away from an immigrant. The first level of that learning is linguistic, but not sufficient by itself. Many NESB immigrant groups in Australia have long had aged care facilities for own community patients for this reason.


Back on the road again. Herein lies a primary psychotherapeutic boundary issue – that taking care and caring seem inextricably intertwined. Taking care is analytically separable from the personal connection of caring / being cared for, but for the patient it is not. Nor is it separable for therapists, though efforts to do so by adopting certain distancing attitudes to patients suggest it can be. Care taking feels like it is caring, lacking which it feels mechanical (you're giving me a treatment rather than treating me) or experimental (you are using me / seeing me as an object of study). Even behavioural interventions for eating disorders, panic, phobias, etc., require a caring relationship to be effective because patient motivation is the key variable in interventions aimed to bring certain behaviours like binges under control.


People in treatment for such visibly behavioural troubles are there precisely because their self-control has fallen into the hands of a destructive habit. Habits are behavioural recipes for achieving aims without thought. They systematically solve recurrent problems with systemically repeatable solutions. They embody recurrent motivations (energy to achieve needs / wants). Motivation, in turn, stands on the back of self-confidence, self-worth, self-efficacy – all products of appropriate developmental challenges and relevant, timely appreciation by others, parents first among them. The therapist's task is to rehabilitate the injured selves. The first step is care for the patients. Doing so both suggests more or less explicitly that the patient is worth rehabilitating and that they have some of what's required already in them – their worthiness!


The danger of care, however, is its personal character and the potential for it to feel or be extended outside the therapy space and time. The boundaries for constraining care to the spacetime of therapy may constrain it out of reach for some clients…that such boundaries are needed is certain, but how they should be configured is a case by case, and often moment by moment, therapeutic task. Their importance is reflected in the articulation of professional guidelines for boundary construction and typical dangers of shoddy construction. Breaching some of these is a matter for de-registration. Case by case, moment by moment caretaking is delicate work.

Linguistic note: we speak of care givers and caretakers as if they were the same thing, though 'caretaker' has a more manorial, landed sense to it, while in ordinary usage 'care givers' are workers in respite or aged care country. How did those two usually opposed verbs come to signify the same action? Perhaps, the 'take' suggests a focus on the worker, an attitude necessary to effective care giving; the 'give' focuses on the receiver – the patient or client.

*NESB – non-english-speaking background

Perceptions and truth(s)

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appreciation (27) … Learning to paint by painting

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Back to the Anger (2)

Back to the Anger (2)
Torrey Orton
August 30, 2010


Anger is back on my emotional menu, more by its absence than its presence. Maybe I have slipped into a higher state of fundamentally being angry (in the here that, being here kind of way). But it feels more like a slip back into apathy, indifference, ambivalence, abstraction, depression? For some weeks now I've been struggling to write. This would be OK if it were a struggle, but it's not. It's a muddle. I'm in a muddle with me and my world, wondering if the feelings are mine projected or prompted and sustained by the world around me.


I have felt this coming, in much the way that HH was saying of himself recently: feeling short of energy, mixed motivation, apathetic to some extent, though not to the point of inactivity. Aikido practice disappeared into the space of French/Spanish things two months ago – I travelled for the first time in three years without a jo. It had been slowing for a couple of months, attrited by a solo training regime which needed the spark of submission to reinvigorate itself. I haven't forgotten aikido, but the inner push flags in the cool of Melbourne dawns. Don't ask about the warmth of winter arvos.


What's actually arrived? One thing is inexpressibly fierce thoughts about our leaders of many stripes and competences in many places. These thoughts have stopped me even as I write. So powerful is the commandment against thinking them that the prospect of public shame for doing so inhibits my language, and so my fingers (with which I write these days, not the 'pen' I would have written just now). After a couple days' pause in the space between fullstop and 'A', I can say these are thoughts of retributive justice. Trouble is, I'm untested at violences of the bodyful sorts and quail in the face of bodily threats unless provided in controlled environments like ice hockey or aikido, in which cases I love violence.


What's behind this arrival? Nothing new, but the gathered load of years of obsessive anger, which CB reminded me today was long gathering hair rather than action.


A year and some ago I proposed that

"Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn't reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners' perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production."

I was wrong in the long term. For some, at some times, under some personal conditions the weight of others' disregard generates one's own disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself.


Back to the anger.


Here Michael Leunig surmised a few weeks ago:

Perhaps we are witnessing a historic moment when our politicians are ceasing to advocate our intelligent concerns and are beginning to openly represent our madness.

Maybe that's not why I started aikido training (self-training) for the first time in three months today. Maybe it has been mostly me and only somewhat 'them' that I have slipped into torpid laxities – TV, eating/drinking in compulsive ways – which I've always had a taste for but they are both more and less powerful these recent days. Watched more often but for total less time.


In honour of my honouring a monthly performance target for 17 months, I'm posting this in the last days of August, way behind on my notional monthly target, yet still keeping myself in the game. Will I lift it or leave it?