Learning to act right (30)… I did do something, really!!

Learning to act right (30)… I did do something, really!!
Torrey Orton
Sept. 4, 2012

The nuts are cracking…

Two weeks ago I wrote: "I did see something, really."


Four days ago the following happened on the same stage: The police were called again for an act of mine deemed assaultive by another of the regular Saturday HoGPIs*. I was reported to have badmouthed one of the priests on duty at the clinic by calling him a paedophile. The policeman (one of another bunch of two) said I did not have to comment on the allegation and I was not being cautioned. So I said nothing.


At the time of my notional assault not one of the non-religious HoGPIs had objected to what I was saying, nor said they did not want my commentary on their work, and nor did the supposedly offended priest. That is, they did not establish the condition for a harassment allegation. Nor had they two weeks previously. The priest in question, one of the trench-coat-masked pair who show up regularly, refused to pursue the matter when the investigating officer asked him what had happened. Perhaps he was surprised it had anything to do with him because the complaint had been made on his behalf it seemed.


For the record, what I had said was that the priests present were accountable organisationally for the church's paedophilia problem and maybe they should be doing something about that since they couldn't guarantee the safety of the children being born now. I've been saying this in roughly this form for months now. And, I say it to the assembled HoGPI multitude of the day, not just the priest(s). They gather under the umbrella of the church's dogma so they can live with its results as a whole.


All the evidence is that they do not like that connection to the whole of the Church's sexuality struggles. One priest (the other of the trench- coated pair) has actively dissociated himself from the struggle by claiming accusations of paedophilia are a matter for the police. Victims should contact the police, he said on another day to the security guard who was pursuing a line of thought like mine above. The same priest subsequently saluted my contributions to their work one morning with "Sieg Heil", a perspective on me I'd not imagined before. Guess it goes with "devil", "Satan" and "murderer" that are typically cast on me by HoGPIs.


The parishioner protestors (the larger part of the HoGPIs) are often even more incensed than the priest to be compromised in their absolute virtue by its undeniable roots in the priestly corruptions (don't forget gay priests and married priests for two other reality assaults on the Papal Bull).


One side effect, I noticed afterwards, has been a reduction in my normal response to authority figures – a feeling of generic guilt which produces a tendency to offer information that's not been asked for and generally to behave collusively. This day I felt less shaky. The slight bit I did feel dissipated in a half hour or so. I take this to be a result of my professional development program in conflict management – our counter protest. It followed a session in which I had made various remarks on the HoGPIs activities (which were not subject to police complaint, but were of similar character to the paedophile accountability ones above) in a coherent way, with low anger and little disturbed thinking on my part (usually the main product of high anger).


Perhaps I'm getting closer to cracking the nuts by being less cracked myself?




*HoGPIs – Helpers of God's Precious Infants - Google for details



 

Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!

Learning to act right (29)… I did see something, really!!
Torrey Orton
Aug. 23, 2012

How close are the nuts to cracking?

Six weeks ago I wrote: "I did not see anything I could swear to in a court of law" about a missing, believed to be stolen, cross out front of the Fertility Control Clinic.


A few days ago the following happened on the same stage: The police were called for an act of mine deemed assaultive by two of the regular Saturday HoGPIs. I had held up in the view of them and their associates the front of THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIANMAGAZINE August 04-05, 2012. The cover story was a self-outing by a Catholic priest of his married status while an active pastor. Its title was: "Sins of the Father - Why this Catholic priest got married – and kept it secret from his flock".


While holding it up, I also mentioned that there was another front page story in TheAGE that day of yet another unreported sex abuse by priests in the 1990's. This presentation took about 10 seconds, twice. Once to show it to a group of 3 HoGPIs gathered at one end of their prescribed protest ground and the second time to the lone male at the other end of their ground. He said something at the time about calling the police, and he did so, but did not specify what prompted the call. He was more than his usual angry self at my perceived disrespect for their enterprise.


A two officer divvy van showed up from the nearest station about 30 minutes later. One male, one female in their early thirties. The woman conducted the formal discussion with the complainants and then came over to see me, which was the moment I discovered I was the object of their complaint. I acknowledged having the allegedly offensive magazine and that I raised it in front of them, along with a remark about the morning's front page revelations in TheAGE of 18/08/12 about priestly misbehaviour with children. Such news seems to me germane, since the HoGPIs are claiming an absolute high moral ground for their objection to abortion. For me, their ground loses some altitude in the light of the Church's failing, so I have been making this point regularly over months, but not so effectively it seems.


Their reported complaint was that I had provoked them by raising matters that were not germane to their self-appointed task of "helping" patients at the FCC. Hence, I had assaulted the complainants. Of course, it is a bit of a wonder that something un-germane should have been so provoking, but then I quibble. I offered not to do it again. I was not commanded not to, nor formally cautioned against doing so. The door is open to argue that it is germane, and that might well be worth doing sometime if we have some cheap legal service with which to pursue the issue and make the total behaviour of the Church germane to this part of their suite of offers to the local world!!?


One side effect, so I'm told, has been to have my image raised in the FCC security community for having lived down a "we'll call the police" threat from the HoGPIs. Didn't even know I was lifting my profile. Since I didn't know what I was doing, I can hardly claim any honour for it. Maybe effectiveness is more important than intentions. It's often unclear how many things come to be.











 

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'.



 

Travel funnies 2012 (5) – Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…

Travel funnies 2012 (5) –
Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…
Torrey Orton
Aug.1, 2012

 
One thing of note – Istanbul is cat city

 
Just outside our hotel – the slightly overstated Ottoman Imperial at the side wall of the Hagia Sophia mosque/church – a squad of local cats of various ages from 4 months to indeterminate, but nothing looking over 5 years, hangs out. They are not alone in feeling they own the place, have no fear of humans or anything else and no obvious reason to. Their only possible natural enemy, us, are at worst indifferent and best vigorously supportive, running feeding campaigns on the mosque enclosure wall tops or from concerned local eateries around town. There's only been three dogs in sight and they were moving on thru the square between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at a moderate pace. Cats, on the other hand, snooze pretty much anywhere including a stool almost obstructing the passage of mosque visitors ambling into the Blue Mosque yesterday. And given a small chance they'll schmooze up to passers-by, when awake and feeling needy, with normal head-butting moves. Cat heaven or haven?


Background note: my understanding is that dogs are conceived as impure in Islam, hence the cat heaven milieu in Istanbul, perhaps! Google says: there's a history of cats in Istanbul. Even Obama scratched one on the Hagia Sophia pathways a year ago. That I would discourage, but then I'm probably an emerging animal disease vector kook…And, on the other hand, cats have a more promising history in Islam. Google "Aya Sophia Cats" for a sample of who we saw daily, including the mosque enclosure feeding grounds. We saw at least three dead ringers for members of our historical cat menagerie. Now that's genetic constancy for ya.


Jetonsmatik
There's a quite well done tram network which joins the tourist centre of town with neighbouring touristy areas. It looks a bit French, an impression amplified yesterday on the other touristy side of the water (the Golden Horn) as we were gearing up for a return from an arvo at a Sufi "Whirling Dervishes" event. There in the access path to the tram stop was a large cabinet boldly labelled Jetonsmatik, which clanged my French bell with authority. A jeton is a token. So, our hosts have a token-mediated payment system, as did NYC for years in its massively less salubrious subway system
.
However, as you've been expecting, there's a hitch. The jeton cost is Turkish Lira 2 for a ride to anywhere on the line. TL come in 1 and 2 TL denominations. But, the TL2 jeton can only be bought with TL1 coins. As I was trying to follow the obvious path of using my TL2 coins unsuccessfully a guy came along and said clearly "Nyet" when I held it up helplessly. Thank gods for other foreigners. They often have an intuitive understanding of gaps locals can never perceive.


"620 kgs gods"
A nice language twist. The Danes are just a few breaths away from English in many ways, and here's one. Looking at the guidelines for usage on the door of our hotel lift in Copenhagen I noted daily the limit of 8 persons but not the alternative 620kgs gods limit until the last day of 5. I'm still wondering about the weight of gods given the known weight of a soul (21 grams isn't it?). Or, how many gods does it take to make a good? Or goods to make a god? Eight guys or girls my size would sink the thing, being neither gods nor goods.
Stop it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope

Learner therapist (21)……Fate, destiny, choice and hope
Torrey Orton
July 31, 2012

 

Some words for a wounded patient….

 

Forethought:

"…an object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function properly – a vessel, a chair, a house – one must first study all of its nature."

Excerpted from Bauhaus Principles at Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, Germany 230712

 
This principle can be applied to people. We are just organic "objects" endlessly in search of our nature (well-being?), which it seems difficult to agree on, either with ourselves or others. The initial stages of instructing students at the Bauhaus included a year of free-association, follow your inclinations and intuitions exploring of the nature of materials in their own right, free of prospective uses (in making objects).
This stage can be usefully thought of as play. Trouble with adults is they often have to be taught how to play in this sense. The Bauhaus was erased by the incoming Hitler government's early efforts to ensure no-one learned anything officially unapproved (and a few dozen other prohibitions as well, of course!). Even some Bauhaus students were probably relieved. Serious playfulness is tiring and challenging and disturbing to the accepted orders of things.
So what? Often enough to warrant writing this, a patient shows up with a major trauma of long duration and intensity – the kind which renders them repeatedly wondering why did this happen to me and elevating their pain by declaring themselves responsible in part for it, by feeling guilty about it!! In fact, I have such an issue arise about once a week and similar ones are working in the background with many more patients a week. In a way, people who show up for therapy think they have to fix themselves, not that others have to fix themselves. They sometimes come around to the latter view after a while, often quite a while.
To have hope of recovery from their injuries, some intrinsically positive signs are helpful, along with some acquired capabilities effective in keeping further trauma at bay. The latter are most important; the former are among the way stations to recovery. Without a good defence, hurtful patterns are recreated in dysfunctional present social, vocational and intimate relationships. To achieve such defensive capabilities often requires placing the bad part of one's life aside enough to appreciate the positives, or at least potentials and possibles through which one can get to decisions to move towards new probables.
Finally, to make a choice which implements a personal policy with some hope of meeting the requirements of the situation often, in turn, requires courage. The courage both pushes back against the lingering forms of the original hurts and counters the fear that stepping outside of one's relationship comfort zone(s). Simple so far, but often stepping out into the world of new, safe relationships requires letting go of some of the defences which helped one survive the original trauma(s) – usually a somewhat rigid personality structure which provided, and continues to provide, an internal and external space for development, but not for the next life stage development! This capability is assertion, going on the offensive….
I am aware that the terms destiny and fate cover overlapping grounds, often being used for the same aspects of life by many people. The reason for going into this is that part of a recovery, or a life, is a sense of its wholeness – a sense which does not come from techniques and skills alone. Wholeness has to do with ones place in the world, ones meaning in the world and meaning to the world. Fate, destiny and hope with courage is existing language for this level of self.
I think of the fated part of ourselves as what we are born with: our internal orientations, temperament, biological potential and so on, our gifts so to speak, plus the externals we arrive into: our family, social class/status, ethnicity and general surrounding socio-political-economic conditions. These externals are our givens. We can make no claim for our worthiness arising from our various inheritances. What we can claim is that we worked on our inheritance virtuously. We tried. This brings us to destiny.
I think of our destiny as what we choose to do with those gifts if we can get a chance to develop them, or how we respond to lack of opportunity to do so. Destiny is the chosen part of our lives, what we can answer for. We can be judged for our destiny, but not our fate. My various inheritances gave me a starting place and certain destinies I have never pursued. Many of those inheritances are absences of discernible capability. Maths comes to mind unless it's the intuitive kind that's good for guessing dinner tabs without calculating, but not for building or analysing at all! My brothers got the usable types.
Other inheritances are life opportunities arising from our fate which give us a head start in certain directions which may also be false. It can take quite a while to work out what part(s) of our fate are most important to us. We are often actively discouraged from taking on certain gifts. Especially those in esoteric activities like dance, writing, singing, playing, theatre, and painting are areas with a known likelihood to produce barely sustainable lives of noisy desperation.
That such gifts exist is powerfully attested by the numbers of would-be musicians, painters and writers who persist with their aspirations for love of them. They certainly can't be doing so for money. These gifts are also where fate and destiny overlap most clearly: not being able to / allowed to pursue one's calling(s) is experienced as a failed destiny by many; pursuing successes in the forms that are socially rewarded but personally inappropriate may be to accept ones fate rather than seek ones destiny.
In the end, from where I am now in my destiny, the question of worth cannot be answered by what good I have done, but how well I tried to do whatever it was I was trying to do. Put differently, being successful comes in many forms, the most important of which are the least visible. It cannot be the case that the basis for self-evaluation is "success" in any of the vaunted senses our commercialised reality daily espouses. Many lives never get a chance to be successful in those terms and so they cannot just be worthless, can they?!
Most religions recognise this explicitly and devote much of their energies to reducing the toll of various inequities on life chances. However, their pretending to Caesar that his success is most honourable, and welcoming all the little caesars into their fold while encouraging the less fortunate to interpret themselves in the mould of the caesars, who for all their success seldom get enough recognition in their own eyes for their achievements….this latter path is the one that guts religions from within. It needn't gut our patients.

Travel funnies 2012 (3)

Travel funnies 2012 (3)

Torrey Orton

July 25, 2012

 

"Trous en formation" said the sign on a Jura highway to Gex

 

In Melbourne we're accustomed to a sign which says "rough surface" in the most unlikely places, and just as often failing to be present in some pretty rocky ones in the city. This French one serves a purpose somewhat like the "Limbs may fall" of country byways in Victoria, or its mountain cousin "Rocks may fall". And it was exact. There were holes emerging into the road surface, as happens especially in deep frost regions like the Jura. It's really not such a special sign after all, but being French makes it sound so. I enjoy the obvious presented with a patina of culture.

 

July 16 - fire hydrants in fields sometimes full of snow

 

Wengen is a place not short of water, or ice or snow, as necessary. Nor is it short of wood. In fact, pretty much everything that provides cover for warmbloods is also of wood in The Alps. This is not surprising. There's quite a bit about still (thanks to energetic conservation amplified by the need to maintain a certain alpine visual aesthetic). So in the undeveloped and/or still cow supporting grounds of many local establishments, there were fire hydrants of varying vintages free standing among the grass and flowers. They must be a wonder in the cold months.

 

This reflection recalls me to the burning of a neighbouring barn one night around 1953 in our well hydranted New England town. Even if the local firies had gotten to it early (which they didn't because, we later heard, they lost the hydrant wrench in the drive 400 metres from the fire station to the blaze) a hundred-fifty year old cow barn is a fire's delight. Burns brighter and brighter. It would have taken a city's worth of red trucks to make a dent and Lunenburg wasn't a city. Imagine a town full of untreated pine hotels and houses shoulder to shoulder with each other. Not a great fire of London or Chicago but enough for a blaze. By the way, Copenhagen cooked itself twice in the 18^th century with the town stripped of wooden buildings by the end of the second round in 1795 (the medieval part in particular).

 

July 24, 2012 – Copenhagen and cultural differences

 

So I've been in Copenhagen for almost a day today and I can recommend it, but how highly is the subject of my thoughts, which are stuck in comparative cleanliness across three Germanic cultures (German Switzerland, Berlin and here) with a counterpoint of French for six days (Besancon, Dijon and Beaune and a stopover in Geneva, all traversed by self-drive rather than public transports).

 

Being a very low grade garden maintainer, I have to acknowledge that what follows may be tainted with projected self-punishment for my pathetic interest in maintenance, backed by an equal indifference in practice. However, I like externals which look kempt. Switzerland is great for kempt. They even have kempt snow on the peaks. The only snow dune I have ever seen (well, since I grew up in Massachusetts that is where the hills lack a bit by comparison, but then I'd never seen a comparison higher than 4000 feet til now) is a perfectly crafted one on the right flank of the Jungfrau, looking from north to south. Once again, my ignorance amplifies my interest.

 

It was amazing to both of us how scruffy the grounds-keeping was throughout the limited Berlin we saw in three days. Stray weeds poked out of hedges within sight of the Reichstag, road dividers were often uncut or if cut, the fringes were untrimmed. Streets ran to the detritus polluted. Contrast this with the efforts put in by one porter in our Wengen hotel to keep stray geranium petals (of which there were many cuz every window had a geranium jungle hanging off it on every habitation in town it seemed) off the bowling green fineness (imagine a #1 haircut all around) of the little bits of lawn that could be perched on the flats rent into the hillside to support the hotel driveway. He did it twice a day minimum (that's what I saw happen; maybe more times?) with a straw broom. I assume the brooming was doubling as chaser of petals and caresser of grasses. There was backup from a rake once some mass of petals had been achieved. These masses could barely be gathered they were so refined. Only their colour betrayed them.

 

I can assure you I never saw its equivalent, or even a remote suspicion of such an effort, in the Reichstag front yard. Contrast number two: Copenhagen this morning walking back from the train station at 8:20 AM and seeing a guy easily my age, or worn for his age, holding a 20 litre yellow canister in his left hand and a long hose with the fiery schnozzle of a small dragon in repose in his right.

 

He blasted with the characteristic blowtorch hissing whoosh any postage stamp sized grassy upstarts he could find between the endless cobblestones of the sidewalk out front of the massive opera building. Probably cleaner in the long run than doing them with Roundup. And quicker too. Roundup decimated greenery fades slowly. Not the thing for civic scrubbing. After another look around town a day later, I guess there's very large hectares of cobbled ways in this town and at the rate he was going re-growth could have started in the scorched earths well before he got to the end. Winter helps, of course.

 

An appropriately similar effort went into cleaning the nearest canal (also take off point for endless tourist canal trips) of the expectable detritus of so many tourists and cafes this morning. However, the water obstacle surrounding a 16^th century earthen-works fort beyond the Royal Palace had not benefitted from weed cleaning of any sort. Maybe because tourists mostly wouldn't walk that far for a gander, though the attraction of the famous Little Mermaid on a rock was 100 meters over the earthworks.

 

One of the commitments of the French – street cleaning –was on display in Copenhagen today, too, with an equally varied array of functionaries, in addition to blowtorch man, to those in Dijon and Besancon: guys with arm's length grabbers for dropping recoveries, street sweeping machine operators, industrial strength garbage collectors….but still a sense of mild scruffiness, amplified by the fact the every tenth street is under major repairs here.

 

So back to Berlin. Two thoughts: one, the Berliners have been recovering from 45 years of neglect and it shows in the old east which casts its architectural pall from close onto the Reichstag, and, two, the Germans have a resistance to their own discipline which shows in little disregards for public space of which indifferent grounds-keeping may be one. Another was an at the time startling discovery of ours while swimming in a 19^th century pool in Munich 20 years ago. The locals swam everywhere except within the lines, as if they weren't there at all, which they were. We were startled, unprepared and culturally committed to staying on the left, or right, depending on which of us was doing the staying! It made laps a bit chancy.

 

July 25 – Loos, again

 

Also not all of my concerns are roses; loos are in the picture again. For example, I paused not at the sharply named "pissoire" on the banks of a local inlet for a leak yesterday. I had already done so an hour before in a public facility at the airport on the way into Copenhagen. While one of two urinals was closed for repairs, the other provided this experience: my contribution was eaten by a blue gloop which rose up out of the urinal drain and consumed it (so it seemed).

 

The gloop looked oily but enclosed the urine rather than riding on the surface, as oil usually does on water. Hopefully a knowledgeable sewage specialist will point out what was going on there – both the chemistry and the mechanics (how'd the stuff rise up out of the drain to seize the urine, and then retreat back down the drain once all had been seized, so to speak.?). Given that everything within miles here is about 10 feet above the high tide line, the management of sewage must be a delight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2012 (2)

Travel funnies 2012 (2)
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2012

 

The eyes of the beholder win again, and not always funny

July 15, 2012

So we've been in Wengen, Switzerland for almost a week today and I can't recommend it highly enough if you are among those who derive great relief from looking out into endlessly changing views. I'm suspecting just now that this looking out preference is particularly driven for us introverts. Your thoughts?

 
We've been through a variety of views on the Eiger/Monch/Jungfrau massif in equally variable weathers surrounded by massed tourists, mainly Japanese and Chinese, also varying the eye level view, yet amongst which appeared periods and spaces of absence for solo and couple contemplation of the enduring physical realities about us. In each of Wengen, Murren and Grindlewald we had takes on the massif in which the solid hulks of the crowning peaks shifted with three perspectives.

 
There have been three kinds of perspective enhancing moments: (1) the continuous view of one angle or another of the massif from seats in classically posed cafes with uninterrupted views, (2) gaps through the often surrounding clouds which opened and closed unpredictably providing focussed visions of elements of a peak: a ridge, a snow dune, a glacier tongue - magnified by the exclusion of its real visual context, the whole peak, and (3) spontaneous illuminations of a sector of the visible field by a sunburst of focussed shape and intensity through the cloud cover. The sunburst occurs within a visible context by contrast with the cloud window effect.

 
Both of the second two moments were usually fleeting – they passed across our field of view at the pace of the ambient airflow, as if the god(s) were moving the visible field for 20 or 30 seconds.

 
A segment of the Monch (3900 meters) framed in a cloud window. Such cloud window events were the second most striking of the three. On a fully cloudy day wandering along the "Panoramic trail" from Maennlichen to Kleine Sheidegg at 2200 meters with promises of the whole 3900+ metre range in view just out there and an hour's puttering along in near fog to a terrace lunch service (beer and wurst/kraut/kartopfelen combo for the nth time) an almost square window opened through the cloud to a chunk of snowy cliff face. It slid across the face and then closed. Only by chance had we been looking up from that lunch then.

 
The whole of the cockscomb rock formation across the Lauterbrunnen valley above us at about 2500 meters was lifted from its dour background by an early morning sunburst. This one lasted for about 8 minutes without moving much, though the whole context for it – a grass land near the tree line rising up with greenish slopes – was visible in the shade of the clouds. A theatrical affair more than natural, almost, and anyway the only example of the 'spontaneous illumination' type of view.

 
Finally, the continuous view (the one we think of when contemplating views) up the glacial valley across from Grindlewald from positions on an unoccupied hotel terrace for an hour one noon…a view granted us by the hotelier's offer of the terrace despite their not offering the lunch we were seeking for the opportunity of the view. The latter we could get at the bakery down the road he suggested, and he would back it with a beer which they could offer. So we did as suggested and got the hour's look at the retreating glacier and its backing mountain walls totally to ourselves for 12 Swiss francs worth of quite passible local beer which by the way went at 4,20 SFr for 330 mls and 5,20 for 500. We took the bargain. Those walls ran up to 3500 meters as right in our face as such a mass can be. By little considerations great treats are granted.

 
It is the framing that's the thing for each of these experiences. Photos never quite get the scope and depth of a two-eyed gaze. Paintings sometimes do. We knew from pre-visit photos that this area was striking but not the striking we would experience. There's another lesson in here about constancy and changeability, but that's for another view perhaps. I'll just note that there is a real Eiger providing the (relatively) unchanging basis for the many views of it. At least one assurance of this is that two of us could enjoy pointing out scenes as we saw them which the other would spontaneously validate in ways which were checkable at the moment, usually by an elaboration of the original insight with which one of us prompted the other to look here or there, or in this way or that way, in the first place. That's a bit more than "I'll just note", but…

 
Finally, there was the cloud window which tried, and tried and tried, and failed to get itself together. It should have known it would fail because this was the last day and it was almost wholly clear. Yet this little cloud shaped up against one of the lower near ranges (2300-2500 metres), raising its head out of the valley below us into a near square which settled eventually for being a laggard capital G and hung around for 30 minutes refusing to collapse. There was no context to give it closure I suppose.

 
July 12 and 14 - Wild strawberries again…
From the fountain footings of a corner parklet in Murren there peaked out the slightest lustre of reddening berry, the first we had seen in the time here. Jane snaffled one with a slight twitch of guilt, while I noted its neighbour had a reduced bulk due to early tastings by local fauna. She shared the guilt with me from which I got enough to recall that powerful experience 6 years ago in the Massif des Bauges. It was scarcely ripe, but enough to fire a recollection of true ripe.

 
Two days later some more naturally occurring ones came into view on a path along the Wengen – Kleine Scheidegg cog railway line's Allmend station in tandem with. These were similarly undersized and underpowered olefactorally to the Murren exemplars, but more naturally presented often on the edge of small rock ledges which reduced the competition of raunchier grasses and such of the summer's herbal glory. The ledge also concentrated the afternoon sun, though not enough for our passing moments of appreciation.