Learning to act right (41)… a smile of shame

Torrey Orton

April 23, 2014

 It was a smiling shame, what I did…

...and the scooter driver picked it, but wrongly, the minute he pulled up next to my driver’s side window. My mistake enraged him and powered my shame more intensely, as he pointed out that my smile was an indication of my pleasure at his endangerment by my pulling in front of him as he was trying to pass in the curb-side lane. I had completely missed him in the blind spot of the rear-view mirror, partly because I was making a late decision to go for a parking space next to the bread shop and partly because I was coming off a reasonably intense couple of hours witnessing Catholic anti-abortionists harass patients at the Fertility Control Clinic.

Cause aside, I was so stricken at my near mushing of man and scooter that I didn’t even think to apologise and he was gone before I pulled myself out of my dumb smile in the light of my exposed incompetence – a variant on struck dumb in the lights of the hunter – now doubly self-condemned for not having acknowledged my fault.

But for this mistake, I would still not know that I, too, can smile at being caught out in error. Not something I’d ever experienced before, but never before had there been a possibly catastrophic error for an innocent other. For years I have thought and taught that it is a cultural characteristic of Chinese to stand in the face of a public event like a car accident and smile broadly at the remains of the victim(s).

I’d seen it happen often enough in Shanghai to know my experience wasn’t a peculiar oncer. My Chinese acquaintances and friends explained fluently that such smiling and laughing was an expression of embarrassment. So it was something recognisable to them, as well. Anxiety, guilt and shame are universally available in human cultures, but their expressions differ so conflictedly that imagining the ‘wrong’ other’s version is near impossible. They just don’t pass the knife/fork vs. chopsticks test – eating looking wrong can be intimately offensive from whichever privileged angle you look at it.

 

But understanding the feeling-behaviour connection has never been simple. For us (native English speakers?) a blank or frowning look is appropriate for publically played out personal disasters. Little have I ever thought I would be able to pull off with such precision what I thought a major cultural difference. Hopefully, unlike other differences which I have mastered with intent, this one I fluked through inattention will be the oncer. I suspect that the conditions of its occurring this time will not often recur and so cannot be pre-empted even with practice. The slighter flushed downcast expression of embarrassment (cousin of guilt and shame) warns only weakly of the overwhelming energy unleashed in my smiling shame.

Maybe this is what a thick skin protects for those prone to exposing themselves in public.

 

Learning to act right (40)… Skating on thin ice…

Torrey Orton

April 6, 2014

 

 Learning to predict a terminal fall at the boundary between solid and fluid

 

Learning to calculate risks is a basic achievement for the conduct of everyday life. I’m talking here of things like how many steps to take in one bite on the way up or, more saliently, down life’s stairways. How good is my chance of crossing the street against the lights between legal crossings without getting scrunched by the bus coming one way and the truck from the other? Cultural variants on this theme, and adult opportunities to re-experience childhood learnings, can be found here: http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/travel-funnies-2014-china-torrey-orton.html .

 

As these things do, the idea of my learning to skate on thickening ice came into recent view. Especially to skate on clear ice. Clear ice means this: when you walk on it you can see straight into the water. On very clear ice it’s hard to tell that the ice is there. It is the colour of the underlying water. I grew up looking down a hill big enough to provide an extremely beginners ski slope (20 meter rise) onto a small New England pond (about 200 meters by 50 meters), the sort which seems to make up about ¼ of the surface area of the region.

 

We started learning about ice when we were in nappies…which is to learn about the progress of winter from turning of the leaves to slight freezing of the ground with increasing periods of frost on grass and puddles along the way to earth frozen to a concrete consistency and ice carrying a hundred people sliding around with greater and lesser finesse. Snow may or may not appear anywhere along this transition.

 

So by age four or five we would amble down to check the pond’s willingness to be crossed dry-footed. New ice can be safe yet cracking, the progress of skating being a pushing along the wave of the ice flowing down and up as one passes. If you haven’t experienced this phenomenon, tough. I can’t think of a similar elsewhere in nature except for a lava flow which fails the similarity test by starting with death from the ride rather than ending with ice, though “ice is also great” as the poet said (Robert Frost, appropriately, in Fire and Ice, refusing to complete the implicit ‘nice’ for a rhyme).

 

Then, there was the problem of varying ice depth across the pond, arising from the faster flow of the stream part of the pond in some areas, and not just the obvious ones near where the stream ran into it and out of it. This danger is perceptible with practice (usually including some drops into the water). Skill growth is marked by a reduction in the number of feet dropped together and how far (also feet in those days!). Skill improvement requires the perennial favourites: cautious and a delicate testing touch with toe or stick, often noted by their absence among risk takers.

 

What we learned to solve here was a repeated pile of rice problem: at what height of added grains will it collapse. For skaters the collapse of the ice will be wet feet at least and drowning at most. Learning to judge the risk involves a lot of factors underpinned by the ignorant fearlessness of the young and sustained by their invariable superiority to adults in perceptual sensitivity and reflex action speeds, coupled with their relative lack of weight! A rice collapse will just be a mess, unless you are in a storage silo.

 

I don’t know that I’d try a newly glazed pond surface these days, but my chance of seeing one are slim. I don’t usually go north for winter. That dogs and deer often fail this learning test is one sign of its difficulty, especially when the ice surface is snow-covered – a degree of difficulty in discernment beyond most people’s capability.