Interesting, when Beethoven was called a musical Kant by his contemporaries, they were alluding to a certain impenetrability, as opposed to the plain virtues of Hayden.
Ocean currents, not mechanical structures.
There is a strong Inspector Calls vibe to the present situ. It's taking all of my rationality not to smash the piggy bank and just have one of those flying aluminum contraptions take me beyond the horizon, and figure things out on on arrival.
Earlier, I (correctly) observed that a preponderance of the population of this city is composed of sub-human creatures who are trying to kill you. I'm standing by that, though I hope not to be vindicated in that belief.
Onward, carefully.
"Art saves lives" is not a slogan; it is the name of a Festival in a nation falling to pieces amid fratricidal wars.
Eugenio Barba
"Festival" sense from Holderlin/Heid, perhaps. I'm not sure what's become of Barba -- presumably he's still out there making things. I never met him (so far as I know), but I've always read his writing very carefully when working with his epigones. I'm no longer in touch with the friends of mine who are friends of his. I think he's left his theatre in the north, and gone off with his Xanthippe/dark lady. Long life and prosperity.
This is from the introduction to a text on a theatre in Belgrade that celebrated its 25th anniversary a decade ago, and with which I crossed paths briefly for a day or two as a visitor, spectator, and conversant some years before that. On the drive out of town, the member of the theatre pointed out the Baljoni market, which has been one of the places I've always returned to when visiting the city. (Excellent fresh fruit and durable long socks.)
That market is also a center of a book called Waves of the Belgrade Sea, which I found for $1 on the top-floor clearance racks of the large bookstore by Bansko bridge on a subsequent visit. Every bookish Belgrader whom I've talked to about it professed not to have heard of it, but it seems ubiquitous in foreign library holdings. Peculiar. There are some other similar offbeat neighborhood-histories in the English-language section of the larger stores.
I still remember, on my first visit, being gobsmacked that there was a large bookstore in every small neighborhood. The clerk of the one near my apartment was highly amused at that. Statistically, Americans read less than one book every year. Though, scrutinizing the B&N windows, I can't say that I blame them. But sometimes there are brief flashes of light in the windows of the independent stores.
At one of the other research libraries -- I try to do this once or twice per week to keep off the tunnel vision, do some reading in slightly different directions, spend more time cranking out CVs, etc.
The puritan sensibility is offended, though. Somewhere, on a bookshelf, there is a small pile of books on (mostly) Hegelian philosophy, silently glowering at me.
With the mounting fatigue, though, and the abundant sunlight, I'm wondering if I should wander even further afield. But if the mechanism comes to a shuddering halt, I'll be becalmed in bad climes.
Eastward ho. Second star to the right, and all that. The dutchman sails on.
Another post lost from the Blogger interface juggling things when the connection dropped. Recreation by various means follows.
-----------------------
To be clear, these socio-political notions aren't a case of kicking against the pricks, though there's plenty of the latter to be had. Especially with springtime, and their ennervation, it's clear that I'm surrounded by people who have grown to be what the vast majority of recent civilizations would consider very bad people. And these folks, in their manner of being, populate an industrial mechanism that provides prosperity to a healthy preponderance of the population -- a much larger fraction than past civilizations.
If this were merely a case of folks being bad people, I could abide it. But the difficulty is that collectively, people have apparently decided that (given sufficient niceness) good and bad are illusions of the past. That things are good if they serve the prosperity.
This might not ring true to anyone who didn't have the experience of reading blogs in the 1990's ("blog" is short for "web log") -- but I should note that there is no purposiveness to these captains-log-type records. Just a means of expression fashioned by the last of the Gutenberg minds, before the darkness began to fall. Occasionally, they're actually written to the accompaniment of Pearl Jam (Benaroya Hall tape).
But readers, if you do judge, do keep in mind that I am, at least for the nonce, and with strength not entirely my own, presently accomplishing the impossible.
Like John Rambo and Georgia Meloni, I take it day by day.
###
Again this extraordinary difficulty -- conceptual (though not servile) thinking in the afternoons. Henry James with breakfast after Mass is clear and distinct, but when I actually go into the library and try to start up the mechanism, it's almost physically painful in the mind. Something to do with the Mass, perhaps (a much bigger affair than the daily morning low Mass sans music). But a recent phenomenon -- perhaps associated with a measure of fatigue I've not yet sensed.
Two interesting pieces in the Times in the last few days. First, a professor offering a primitive view of the phenomenon of Trump in the context of the Enlightenment. Then, today, a piece with grudging admiration for the manner in which he had "bent the arc of [effective?] history."
Beware the recontextualization of the as-yet unexplained.
Thinking about the afternoon and evening I spent exploring Sofia by the subway. I almost never use mass transit -- the point is to walk through the world. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth month in Belgrade that I used the (free) trams and buses. But the point was to reach as many corners of Sofia as possible, and I found at least one rather remarkable area.
--
Have very much set my face towards the sea, like an early modern English scholar forced to abjure the realm who knows that the libraries of the continent are waiting for him after his long journey to the coast bearing the small cross before him. Within industrial prosperity, things have gone indiscernibly (as yet, for most) bad, and what I think is important to do in life isn't a notion shared by many others, especially those who would try to control my meanderings. The prosperity for the heathy preponderance is relatively harmless -- until you test the meritocracy. Then things can turn rather quickly.
It is possible to work, and think, and pray in a peripatetic life abroad, so it is logical that I go abroad. Auerbach wrote his book on mimesis in similar conditions. (Benjamin fared less well.) I haven't despaired of the Republic, but I also realize that, given the folks arrayed against me, I'm not going to be able to do much to help it.
At least vis-a-vis temporal things.
O Scotland, Scotland...
Thinking about Bucharest. Sort of mentally walking around Sector 2, around the embassies behind Piata Romana, the second Bulandra stage. Saw a very interesting Measure there just before I left -- wrote a piece comparing it to the very peculiar one at the Sarajevo War Theatre.
Frustrating. With my credentials and experience, I should be able to easily put together a survival gig that would allow me to travel through the Balkans and think and read and write, but all of the doors seem barred. Being becalmed in the midtown gulag is much more frustrating when there's clearly a way to do things and find things that's just out of reach. Tantalus. The panopticon scratch existence was bad enough in itself (before I discovered the possibility of this nomading thing).
---
Working through the Jena system Logic of H. I think I have it, after a few days of mulling the first bits. (There are no reliable Virgils for this mountain -- there's apparently one, but NYPL doesn't have it.)
Connection is simply Heraclitus and the Presocratics -- day and night are the same thing, as with all opposing terms. (There is no night without some day, etc.) Describing something with a term without an opposite leads to bad infinity. But otherwise, you find the meaning on the inside of both lines (visualize a sort of horizontal bar graph, with each end being one of the opposing terms. The meaning is on the inside of each line -- between.)
As for Relation, and I just got this moments ago -- it's two minds, not one. I was confused by the modality language into thinking that these were necessary/possible relations of substances, but it simply takes the infinite (which is the thing from part one, with all of the opposing terms cancelled out), and places it in relation to another mind. So what was infinite is now simply potential, and determination, and has existence only to the degree that the other mind cognizes it -- at the cost of its own possibility and determination (which it knows as the infinite).
Perhaps.
Springtime. The geist. Not an auspicious season for the son of man. Not just whistlin' Dixie here. The social forms come alive, and play their games, incidental and otherwise. Rough sailing for the SS Hostem Humanem Generis.
(The definite article in "the son of man" indicates not the singular instance (which would properly be another) but the thing itself.)
Thinking of Skopje. I happened into a rental of a small set of rooms from a local priest, theology professor and philosopher and his wife -- excellent people. Small, charming place with the exception of the noisy school across the street. But the UN had a mission next door, so it was safe ground.
I liked it because there was an enormous desk underneath an enormous window. Once, I heard music late at night, followed the sound, and came to a neighborhood block party. I learned later that the housing block was one of the well-known developments in the city. I stayed and listened to the band for a bit, and came back a few times later on, when I heard the music, perching outside a small Sherlock Holmes-themed bookstore and watching the goings on. Neighborhood parties have a different sense to them in places with a stronger civilizational context. It is the festival of the place, something awaited and enjoyed.
I remember one summer at Dan Boone, a group of us went wandering around the local neighborhood before the first readthrough -- land was cheap in that part of town, and it was traditionally the African-American quarter. We were welcomed heartily, had some food, and talked to the folks there for a bit. When we got back to the rehearsal hall (large cinderblock studio theatre, part of the complex), everything seemed very sterile and programmatic.
The rooms in Skopje were intimate -- I slept on a small couch behind a bookcase next to the desk. On one of the first nights there, I had one of the most powerful dreams of the peregrination. A large battle that I eventually realized was taking place in the future in that city.
I felt the difficulties of wing-and-a-prayer exile keenly, even though wandering through the Balkans for a few years was probably the wisest and most enjoyable thing I've ever done. The setup there allowed me to work comfortably -- and a decent private kitchen was just steps away. I shopped at the big grocery at first -- my normal first-week buy seemed to take the cashier a bit aback. That town has its difficulties, as good a place as it is. It avoided the wars, and it recovered from the earthquake, but the general prosperity of recent years seems not to have reached it in full, although there's an abundance of large-capital projects (statuary, shopping malls, etc.). None of my ATM/ travel debit cards worked there, so I had to keep wiring myself money. I made it a point to pick up the funds at a long-established local bank, which meant about 15 minutes to a half-hour of paperwork each time -- which was part of the interesting experience. I eventually found a discount grocery chain, and to save money on the wiring-to-self plan, was able to subsist on a staggeringly small sum each week, food-wise.
I was talking to a billionare once, a friend of some family members, and I boasted that I had heard a certain gala concert at the Metropolitan Opera for a very small price -- he had been there as well, I think, in one of the better tiers, both price-wise and seating-wise. There was a momentary oddness in the conversation, almost a Henry James moment of hanging fire, and I realized that paying as little as possible to hear a gala concert was an alien thought to him, and presumably to the others. But the performance was very worthwhile.
We are all doing different things -- like radiants from the center of a sphere, and it's a mistake to look over and try to calibrate your direction by any of the others.
The work is there to be done. The social forms are deadly. I'm still hoping to survive the spring.
In either of the two present best-case scenarios, namely, Humble Quarters near some source of books deep in the Midwest, or itinerant Humble Quarters in southern Europe, the only possible model is W. Camp bed, table, chair, kitchen, WC. Absolute discipline.
W was technically an enemy alien during the WW2, I think, though I'm not sure how UK law would have described it, given his faith (contra: his WW1 military service). He never visited Oxford for the duration of the conflict.
I sometimes have a similar sense. Although why a third-generation American who happens to be perceptibly of Slavic extraction should have the sense of being an enemy alien is anyone's guess, and probably requires thinking about world-historical forces and such. Too much for a morning. I've done the work, and made it generally available. The event determines the rest.
W is a decent model, I suppose. But it's wrong to utter things gnomically and gnostically, although disciples do gather. (W's included some prominent RC minds.)
It is important to stand apart (the distinction between standing apart and being standoffish) from the culture, and free yourself from the necessity of fully explaining yourself to some self-posited neutral center of shared thought each time you venture an idea. So the gnomic and the gnostic ends up happening anyway.
I'm not sure how Cioran and Brancusi managed to get to Paris and live and work there. B apparently walked from Transylvania. Certainly more impossible now, when rooms aren't let without online background checks, and you need at least a half-dozen connections to find employment. Computerization and "social media(tion)" has brought on an integration of society, which is to say, deepened the exclusion of those who stand apart.
But Vladmir and Estragon still have a carrot or two hidden in the jacket against a rainy day.
All that can be had. Enough for the nonce.
"Don't pine -- it kills." (Says the wise novelist.)
And yet, I'd give much to be in the sbux by the parliament building in Belgrade, sipping a $2 decaf Americano and waiting for the curtain at the JDP or national theatre. Maybe some bread and coffee in Studentski Park beforehand if the latter.
And yet, when that was my reality, I was caught up in the mental difficulties of peripatetic exile, and keeping up the work, while keeping the coffers sufficiently coiffed.
And here, despite the considerable (yes) difficulties, I have access to the books that I need.
In every place, a small grace. But the difficulties are extraordinary, and many years have now passed.
Time, thou must untiest this knot, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie.
Just when I had set my hand to H's Jena system and begun to grok it (the Logic, not the Naturphilosophie), circumstances require a detour to another library.
So today will be about returning to Rene Girard, and learning more about the arts in the Balkans, because I will get back there. Despite present circumstances, conditions, expectations, and constraints.
Tis not too late to seek a better world.
Feast of St. George. A ubiquitous image in the Balkans, the slayer of the dragon. (Although, in the Golden Legend, apparently the beast's life is preserved long enough to lead it into the town for a ritual killing, as opposed to killing in struggle.)
A message to their children, perhaps: Dragons be here.
Associated with this date since the 13th c., the feast proclaimed at a synod at Oxford.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06453a.htm
I'm honestly not sure how to think about these two random events. Perhaps just a coincidental overhearing in a city with global tourism. Perhaps providentially carried past a devisement of some kind. Philosophy of Mind teaches that we don't quite have the handle on the mental mechanism that we generally think we do, even with respect to physical actions. Perhaps this city exerts a peculiarly strong force, especially after surviving a rough winter in reduced circumstances.
It seemed impossible to turn around and inquire into the event. I'm not quite sure why that was. Perhaps I have sufficient freedom here in the writing, and had sufficient freedom abroad, but a different circumstance obtains in the city.
At any rate, Ulysses is free to ponder the Sirens, as his inner determination in any case won't affect the outer determination of the course already firmly set for other shores.
Another brief salutation, a word or two of Romanian, borne like a vapor on the soft (very early) summer air as I was going from one place to another and roundly execrating the tourist hordes sotto voce. Not quite sure of the event. I must trust the empiric. Booking, boarding and disembarking on a flight to Bucharest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, or environs. Then: work, culture, and freedom from the corruption hereabouts. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Browsing recent Scotus. This is puzzling.
Here's the statute:
(a) A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:
(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.
Structure:
Any apple pie made in the home kitchen and that is to be sent to or subtly gotten to any of the following people can be sent from the office.
1. Uncle Sam, or any divisions of his company, or anyone important in his company (or anyone acting under the important person) for or relating to any good deed Sam's done, or anything he's powerful enough to do, or for disciplining his kids or saving some funds in a piggy bank.
Here's the thing. "Relating to" here is talking about the res of the suit/reason for sending the pie, not the actions of the people working under Uncle Sam. There still has to be an act directly under the color of the office, rather than an act merely relating to the directions under the color of authority. Relating to doesn't touch that relationship, structurally. Or perhaps I'm missing something.
Odd. Knee-jerk reaction, likely wrong, don't rely.
He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary. We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2025/documents/20250420-omelia-pasqua.html
[at 4/21/2025 04:33:00 AM]
#archives
https://aktorpoet.blogspot.com/2025/04/is-no-longer-prisoner-of-death-he-is-no.html
#2025 #Cluj #Easter
This is very puzzling. I assumed it was a mis-translation when I saw it in a secondary source, but it seems that every translation of the reference to Aesop's Rhodus salta proverb in the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Law runs "One cannot jump over Rhodes." But, from my primitive Duolingo German (as confirmed by the great and terrible Google AI), uber can also mean "beyond." And if you translate it as "beyond," you retain the original sense of a fellow who claimed he could jump only in Rhodes.
Original German:
Es ist eben so thöricht zu wähnen, irgend eine Philosophie gehe über ihre gegenwärtige Welt hinaus, als, ein Individuum überspringe seine Zeit, springe über Rhodus hinaus.
And Google Translate of this gobbet gives:
It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy transcends its present world as it is to imagine that an individual can leap beyond his time, leap beyond Rhodes.
(I might change the first "beyond" to "outside".)
Undoubtedly, I'm missing something, but... peculiar.
A steady stream of unprompted memories from the travels (qua exile) of the last few years. Given the present lack of a proper situation, and consequent pressures, it seems that I only am living in these memories.
An illusion, of course. I felt the inconveniences of exile and bare-bones life in southern Europe keenly. And I am managing to do some proper work now (when not blogging). But an illusion is an appearance, and an appearance, at minimum, makes a proposal to the mind -- that it set itself in a certain manner towards certain things, and give none of them an absolute right to the veridical, and then take it from there. I survived then, I survive now. The truth as to the question of better conditions for survival and work is relevant only as to the times to come.
And yet -- the very welcome unprompted succession of these memories. It suggests a clear answer to the question.
Lasciati ogni speranza. No joy in Mudville. Dover beach.
(Bright side: it's a beach.)
Beautiful day, though. Odd two or three days.
Sunday, as I was heading in to the pontifical, there was a fellow at the bag inspection line with his bag on the table, standing there, fiddling with his phone. I waited a few moments, then asked him to move the bag. He moved it around on the table a bit, and shot me an ironic look. Then slowly removed it. He said something, I can't recall. "Friend, I want nothing to do with you," I replied. Then he said something ending in "God bless." "Be careful with that," I said, all the while showing the innards of my bag to the guard. (In NYC, this happens a half dozen times every day.) He took some umbrage at my not accepting the blessing, and said loudly "Do you know who I am?" "I couldn't care less," I replied. "I'm a CIA agent, and you're harassing me!" he shouted. At which point, the guard had finished his quick look, and I left for the nave.
Oddly, he didn't have the appearance of a crackpot. Careful appearance, conservative haircut, new backpack only slightly full. More like a law enforcement type than the type the laws are enforced upon.
Then, last night, at the cafe, a fellow walked in with an enormous, very hairy dog. I had seen a half-dozen animals there that evening--taking your pets into a no-pets area is apparently a NYC power move. But the shaggy mammoth was a bridge too far. I complained to the guard, who told me to go to customer service, who in turn told me to go to the guard. Eventually, the guard was paged, but he demurred, and an assistant manager type was dispatched, who oddly ignored both the dog and me, and walked to the back of the cafe. I went back to the customer service stand, and eventually the other fellow walked back around.
In the meantime, as I was standing right near the entrance, an older gentleman behind me gave me a sharp poke in the kidneys with what seemed to be three or four fingers, before walking past. I pointed out with some firmness that this would be considered civil assault, and asked him not to do it again. Oddly, a minute or so later, he walked back out of the cafe through the same entrance, and I repeated my injunction. I told the management type that I'd simply move to another part of the cafe, and headed to the back, finding a place just in front of a fellow shouting a conversation into a cell phone and a completely insane old woman in a facemask making rhythmic noises, hunched over her food.
Was sitting on a parkbench later when a peculiar fellow walked up and stood there looking at me, at which point I decamped to another area.
I've lived here for many, many years, and I remain convinced that the preponderance of the population is composed of sub-human creatures who are trying to kill you. But there are some worthwhile souls in the minority.
With the springtime, without the spiritual discipline and meditation practice, I'm certain I would have gone completely spare.
These aren't superfluous or discretionary practices; humans are animals, and if they are engaged in the unnatural condition of intensive cognition, certain artificial strictures need to be in place to defend the thinker from nature.
Another week. Certainly didn't anticipate this stretch to reach into April, though it's much to be preferred to January. When the editing revenues crashed without warning, I was thankfully able to get a cheap flight back from Bucharest, after a final stint in the Pirin mountains, but without reserves, the times have been lean and threadbare. And immensely difficult.
Coming back after a few years in these circumstances had the unintended effect of reintroducing myself to the American mindset from a position of extreme difficulty, and my prosperity-boosting country has proved to be a bit difficult to take at times. Not the extremes, the basic mindset. And to be the evidently un-prosperous one is to hoe a tough row here. The contempt of the craven is a peculiar thing.
Fortunately, I still have the spiritual grounding in the church, however alienated from the local homiletics and pew-chatter I might be at the moment. And the library work, now almost exclusively centering on philosophy. After the last few years of eavesdropped courses online and reading focused by Oxford Bibliographies, I'm inclined to claim a bit of a competence, especially given the scattered graduate coursework in philosophy departments. And the physical discipline, despite the difficulties of the inexpensive gym: "When the water is muddy, I wash my cloak. When the water is clear, I wash my head covering."
Onward.
In four hours of focused work, perhaps five minutes of thought. Very bad. At first, started in an empty room, but it filled up. Decamped to a second location when some folks arrived reeking of beer. Then was surrounded by a few tourists with respiratory infections. Likely that none of them were using the collections, of course, just there for the scenery and the free internet.
But five minutes is better than nothing. And perhaps whatever mental condition I was in after workout in the discount gym with the ventilation on the fritz and a somewhat dispiriting Mass required 3:55 of mountain climbing to get back to par. If course, I could have walked the miles to Anglican vespers the massive cathedral by Columbia, but now's not the time for idle descant. Only the work.
Thinking of the rooms I rented in Cluj. Perfect small monastic place, concrete walls, ten stories up, overlooking the town and the (small) mountains beyond. Decent kitchen, table by the window.
Never gripe about exile. The gulag might be next.
#onward
Against the erasure. Against the inability to think.
The physical struggle of the last several months, as described in this blog, usually with considerable understatement, is merely the engine-room difficulties. Scotty's bailiwick. The real fight has been, once I survived the night or the day, to focus the mind sufficiently on the work.
It is odd, to have a geist of which no one knows (or really has reason to know, or care), and that quite logically would be snuffed out by these struggles. But if that were ever the case, it would be better not have survived the difficulties.
My private understanding and reason will not have been in vain. That is the concept of the struggle.
Wing-and-a-prayer (hold the wing) technology cost me today. Windows kept trying to download a massive update bigger than the HD, so Word stopped saving, even with multiple Ctr-S. (And remote autosave was disabled for reasons too tiresome to mention.)
Luckily, lost only half of the 4 hours of work, as I found a local spun unsaved copy.
Considering shifting to wax tablets and abacus. Needless to say, I wouldn't be using Windows if it wasn't a positive requirement of the task. Chromebooks have been a much more robust option in these years of the lean kine.
To Whet Thy Almost-Blunted Purpose
On my way to the cafe for dinner last night, I passed the busy traffic circle, and then paused for a moment. I thought I had heard someone speaking in Romanian. Which isn't entirely unlikely, given all of the visitors in Midtown. But it seemed that it was a woman, and that she had been addressing me.
In the Comedie Francaise performance that I saw last year in Budapest (a show from the current season, not a tour), the scenic conceit was that the entrance and exit doors were composed of an almost invisible lintel and two half-beams for the sides, forming a sort of upside-down "U" when suspended from the ceiling. Moments before a character exited or entered the scene (or, I suppose, began a new scene, as it was a classical French piece), the frame would light up, seeming to come into existence just before it was required.
It was a difficult winter, yes. And I suppose that I've sort of of fashioned an ice-breaker that could make it through the time. Now, it's springtime, and the birds of the forest remind me that I need to change this back into a research vessel. (While, perhaps keeping some of the useful machinery in abeyance.)
We are like prisoners, being hastened to execution. And the way is so difficult, and we are so caught up in our own strength in traversing it, that we sometimes fail to notice the luminous door that appears alongside.
Perhaps I was carried past an inauspicious encounter, or questionable devisement. And it's much more likely that I simply overheard her addressing a compatriot in her native speech. But to have traversed the place of encounter without marking it was genuinely troublesome, and I gave it much thought last night night and this morning.
...und noch, wie ein Traum, war
Ihm das innige Volk, vom Gottergeiste gerustet.
Odd, the Sibelius violin concerto last night at NY Phil, and today, at St. Petersburg. Perhaps there's some common anti-springtime programmatic thoughts. Mix in some Part and Lygeti as well.
Comparing the two tapes would be instructive as to the cultures. Very clear difference, both in the reading and the rendering.
"And rays of light you cannot see are flashing through eternity." (Poe)
--
Given the length of time that immense numbers of very smart people have been thinking about how to control other people, it's likely that our personal sense of reality is a bit askew in ways that tend to nudge the mind in a certain direction, although the mind thinks itself its own master.
We return, then to the Cartesian demon. On the observational side, Rorty once offered the hypothetical of a machine that could know every thought that you have in advance of your having it, and posited that the operators of that machine would still not understand your thoughts. In the intuitive view, he's wrong. If you think more closely about the mind, certain truths become apparent, and the possibility of him being right about this seems to arise.
At any rate, the one thing you can do is set a definite marker, in the faith that the Cartesian adversary didn't have a hand in its conception.
In my case, I know that I need to get back to Europe, likely southern Europe, and within that civilizational context, and away from the corrupt folks on this side of the water who seem to have me in their sights, to read, think, and work, and perhaps make contact with some cultural endeavours. It's simply the task, and I've resolved to do it, even if it should suddenly seem to be a very bad idea, or impossible. We have life to do things, and while I have life, I will try to do this thing. That's simply the fact of it.
With the last kit resupply (knap, boots), given the sale prices, I did commercial/milspec as opposed to proper surplus. A mistake. Boots (a brand favored by security guards and police) were agonizing, shapeless lasts, etc. And the knap is starting to show hard wear after less than a month. Reinforced the latter with some nylon stitching yesterday, but I doubt I'll get more than another month out of it.
At the Philharmonic again, against my better judgment, as they're playing Dvorak's Seventh. I recall listening this piece on the outdoor speakers during the season-opening festival under Gilbert. Listening to the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth in sequence, usually the old Szell tapes from Cleveland in the Fifties and Sixties, or Bernstein at the NY Phil is a habitual choice of mine for writing music. Including the Ninth at Yankee Stadium, I think. I recall hearing the Seventh in Belgrade a few years ago, when the European war had freshly broken out. It was at their usual hall at the university, just above Studentski Park. The taut, focused energy of the playing seemed to put the politics of the moment into sound.
According to Grove, Dvorak used to write "thanks be to God" In Czech at the end of his manuscripts. I had head somewhere that he also marked the bottom of each page with a devotion to Mary, as John Paul II used to finish each page with a TT, for "totus tuus". Possibly not, but his Stabat Mater apparently went over very well in England. He had gone there at about the time the Seventh was written, which was his second published symphony. He was famous, though, for his Slavonic Dances. Even when rising into the rarified air of Vienna, Antaeus rooted himself in Czech folk music. At about the time he was received by the Emperor at court, he was conflicted about the loss of this distinct identity, this Czech sensibility. (Grove again.)
With the Seventh, perhaps in imitation of Brahms, the energy of poesis is engaged. The question of being one thing or another is secondary; music is change, and becoming. It defies understanding, because it revises understanding by its existence. Music, like all intuition, is the negation of everything we understood in stillness, and we must revise our understanding, or refuse the music.
Now, I'm not in Studentski Park. I'm in the lobby of the NY Phil, having been searched on entry by the security folks. There's noise from the cafe, people shouting. The upper west side retirees who were another part of my aversion to these JUmbotron sessions.
There was no menace in the opening, there was no sense of danger near. The first movement, which should hover on the precipice, seems an innocuous bit of embroidery. And now the thundering chords that should start the descent, but they're empty. Merely a well-crafted wall of sound in perfect synchronicity.
This reading replaces danger with grandeur. The latter is more salable as a luxury good, perhaps.
The seriously overweight old fellow in a white t-shirt sitting against the back wall of the lobby spent the intermission loudly discoursing on the Iranian war, and the f--ggots. I'm not sure which angered him more. I rebuked him on principle, and he quieted down.
I suspect that the Seventh would find a powerful reading in Tehran, or nearby countries these days. Music isn't something to be made in order to the desired and then sold to overweight retirees. It is a signal of the present time. The way that we seek out certain pieces, finding them meaningful for the present, makes that meaning palpable and perceptible in performance. (If the audience is paying attention.)
This, precisely this Jumbotron performance in a wealthy and occasionally ill-mannered neighborhood, with the cafe to the side and the sound a bit dicey through the overhead speakers, although the video images are clear as day on the immense triple screen covering the wall, with the lights turned off for some reason -- and then the musicians upstairs dutifully embroidering the luxury good to be desired and sold -- this is perhaps the death of music. Or at least the beginning of its noisy silence.
Again, the applause between movements from the folks upstairs who paid quite a bit of money for their tickets. Not a few confused folks, but a fair percentage of the house.
The scherzo, now. When it pauses to allow the brief idyll, there is no sense of the immense movement of the piece, nothing for the sense of peacefulness to oppose.
How was it that Szell and Kubelik and Bernstein found so much more in these pieces? Perhaps they all had the real understanding that nations can make the wrong choice, that forces can be unleashed against enemies without and within. The music doesn't invent this threat, it depicts it. And in the depiction, it shows the time its face.
Which, perhaps, more in the breach than the observance, is what's going on here. C.S. Lewis titled one of his books "until we have faces." We look at the face of the time and see only an emptiness. And yet there are these odd wars. But, unlike that night in Belgrade, I can't hear the Persian war in the music here. Not because it isn't there in any objective sense, but because it wasn't sought out for that.
But why was it sought out? That's the question.
Odd news item a day or so ago -- "Shakespeare's House in London." Which was odd, because its existence and general location was already known. But apparently, someone found a map that showed the actual structures of Blackfriars (or, as the Defender of the Faith called it, the horse stables), and based on the fact that it was said to be close to one of them, his London digs are rediscovered.
And now the TLS is all Shakespeare. (In fairness, 4/23 approacheth.)
Methinks someone is fiddling with the Empires of the Mind knobs again. Perhaps a production of the Tempest set on Chagos island next.
The inexpensive gym seems to have upped the karmic ante -- the showers were shut down completely, per a bright yellow note on the front door. Diverted to another branch, did the full workout, shower, then laundry, then breakfast with Henry James, and now to the work. In short, everything except in-person Mass, as that timing was inflexible railroad time. Accomplishing the work of time outside the constraints of time. And there's the time-shifted Mass from the academic chapel in the UK.
I have a peculiar relationship with the American church. Of necessity, much of it is picture/pauper bibles, but that's because of the general condition of folks here. From time to time, I've found churches with solid homiletics, canon lawyers, usually. So my sympathies are more with the publishers of the picture/pauper bibles than any enthusiasm for the things themselves. And it is necessary. Todos, todos, todos. If the Catholic church doesn't remain the universal church, it has lost its central legitimacy. The point is that a common road is possible. And perhaps the eventual union of the common road and the correct δοχοσ will bear much fruit.
It's my understanding that normal folks look at pictures of movie stars and other attractive people on their computers after work. As for me, I look at Brutalist housing blocs in the second world. Obvious reasons, I suppose. Concrete bunkers ten stories up that could be filled with paperback Hegel, et al., a wooden table, and a camp bed. And a proper kitchen, not the hot-plate-in-the-counter-and-a-fridge rooms that seem to be the default now.
It's human to imagine a better world. The difference is that I'm imagining a place with fewer things, and fewer ideas, and fewer charms of its own. The ideal, and one not hidden behind a cloud of ideas and marketing concepts. The thing itself.
One reservation: the concrete of 75 years ago might be of varying health now, especially the aerated types. Roman concrete lasts for 2,000 years, but ours is a bit more provisional.
When it was first built, I used to read the Sunday Times at the glass-fronted coffeehouse in front of Juilliard at Lincoln Center. One day, a fellow came by who claimed to be the architect. Seemed credible, so I played along. I asked him why they hadn't made something of stone that would last for centuries. He seemed more interested in expressive, windowed forms that would get a hundred years or so.
When we try to invest everything with art, and meaningfulness, we stop paying attention to what they are in their essence. These houses and apartment blocs have a life, but it's not the angle that is played up in the newspaper sections and magazine, for the simple reason that newspapers and magazines are limited to variations on the common vocabulary -- making the thing itself, of which there are as many as there are monads in the world, always a simple refutation.
(Rereading Houses of Belgrade, incidentally.)
Walked past a media-celebrity SJ at the inexpensive gym. Shot him a quick Christos Anesti! in passing. Polite smile in return. American SJs can be peculiar. Sometimes one wonders if the John Foster / Avery Cardinal line is as bright as it should be. But it all works for the greater glory. Insh'allah.
---
Continuing with the morning Mass at the cathedral, with the exception of laundry days (when I head to the parish). It is an exercise of will, admittedly. And to some degree agnostic as to creed and faith -- a Japanese cleric of an indigenous faith might do precisely the same, for precisely the same reasons. You do have to have the right disposition -- with the daily amplified repetition of precisely the same words, it is almost like the regular rhythmic bells of a meditation exercise, while at the same time you are focusing on the origin of the words in time and their present truth. Or, you know, simply repeating the same words over and over for the comfort of today's similarity to yesterday, as a child might listen to precisely the same audiotape day after day. (The last sentence should be read with some irony.) Kierkegaard on repetition and irony should perhaps be on the liturgists' agenda. Consider the phenomenology of the event, given that it has been newly instituted -- less than a century ago.
So there's the mental discipline of will, and there's also the hope for the extraordinary, something to break through the dull fog of the day. A philosophical insight into one of the texts read by rote in anodyne translation. A locution at the altar of the Blessed Virgin. (Difficult to authenticate in real time. Like wondering if the telegraph signal is coming from the Celestial City, or someone tapping into the line. Piecing out the truth from the party line. And not always at the altar--sometimes when sipping kefir and reading philosophy above a supermarket in Bosnia.) But these are all prefigured hopes, and the point of sacred ritual is that it is originary, and for this you need self-possession.
When I attended the 7AM at the cathedral (usually the Abp's mass in years past), I would go through the liturgy of the hours beforehand on the steps, and after that, and before the mass, I would imagine the place a century or two ago, the small SJ college, seminarians in the small building focusing their minds on the same things that I would be spending the day reading at the research libraries later that day. Otherwise, St. Pat's is a bit of a Disneyland for the tourists.
And it is tied to the book. I would usually stop during my morning run in front of the old medieval Hungarian church in Cluj, on the ab oriento centerline, and think about the book inside. And the importance of those ideas, and the way that the stone rose around them. One morning, a stream of SJ seminarians (still in predawn darkness) streamed out of a service through the front door. I was a good distance from the door, so what followed was genuinely peculiar. As I stood there meditating, they walked towards me seriatum, some going to my right, some going to my left. Partly perhaps the Balkan notions of personal space. But it is important to know the things that draw you to the place, the originary function of the place, and that which issues from the event.
Many mansions. The great societies and orders have their cruise ships (or perhaps convertible merchant marine ships like those before the two big wars of the last century), and I have my canoe. The general proposition is that all men are kings and priests in this country, and perhaps that's the issue being tried in the changes of the present hour.
Circumstances seem to be conspiring to keep me stateside and impecunious. Will have to rejigger things. Shake the snow-globe up a bit.
If I have the history right, many of the Irish folks who came over during the famine literally couldn't afford passage back, so they stayed here. I'm not inclined to accept that sort of augury and indication.
But always--the transit and struggle is to work, and think, and write (writing having now taken the place of making theatre after some years of alienation from those crowds). Everything serves that point. The entirety of the obelisk exists to hold up the small pointy bit at the top.
Onward.
Listening to the Valaam Easter night service as #workmuzik. Orthodox chant -- very powerful and clear. Near the end, they read the beginning of the Gospel of John, first in Greek, then in several other languages, including English. The last time I heard them read it (on broadcast) was last year, in Cluj -- I had just come back from the (RC) night Mass at the medieval Hungarian church, and had made a slight detour to visit both the Greek Catholic and the state church -- the latter was extraordinary, basically a large village, all were standing on the low hill outside the church, between the two roads (including some road workers from the nearby construction in high-vis vests, holding candles), like Blaga's notion of the Plaii -- the reciprocal calls of "Christ is Risen / Truly risen" in the local language, from the white-bearded folks around the altar constructed on the porch, calling to every soul in the village around them. Extraordinary.
I'm not quite sure how else to make clear that for a very long time (from the beginning, actually), I've been surrounded by very questionable people doing very bad things (and the degree to which they are questionable is not necessarily publicly apparent), and that for most of the last decade, my actual experience of the day has been comparable to political prisoners under authoritarian governments in the context of the gulags. Really, this isn't an exaggeration. Things are very bad, and are likely to get worse, and the reasons for that seem pellucidly clear. American corruption, like the corruption found in other places, is a real thing. Three careers torpedoed, and not even a basic existence for much of it.
Not to demonstrate my own virtue, but to make the lines of causation clear, I should add that I've kept to a very rigorous intellectual, spiritual, and physical discipline, and I don't suffer from any addictions or afflictions of which I'm aware. Except, perhaps freshly-ground peanut butter and coffee.
So, I'm not sure how else to make that point. Highway billboards, perhaps.
Spring in full fig. Social forms ennervated and alive, folks laughing and shouting in the city.
It's likely the case that a thousand years ago, precisely the same phenomenon ennervated the social forms of the time. And those with fortified homes likely knew that this was the time of year to run the portcullis down.
Spring comes to every social reality. It doesn't fix the injustice and corruption, but the one who makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust hopefully uses it to remind those caught up in the spell of the world that there is a much larger and more substantial world at hand. Life always serves life.
Notably, I didn't (and still do not) pine for Midwestern universities after my candidate's application to defend was summarily refused. Despite the immense libraries (of books in my language) and the reasonable number of arts initiatives thereabouts.
I have focused my intentions on the neutral place where it will be possible to work. And it certainly seems, that given the totality of the circumstances, this will have to be abroad.
So, not really the childish desire to go where the will inclines me. More the considered view of how to exist and work, given the personal attacks, corruption and mediocrity that have characterized the last decade or two.
I am not for all waters.
Rather difficult to think when sitting down to think in the last day or two. (At other times, cognition seems normal.) Hopefully a trifling and brief inability to focus, prompted by any number of things.
But I do have to get somewhere I can work. Present difficulties are possibly seriously compromising the mechanism.
Hm. Apparently about 90% of the wordpress site has been de-indexed. ("Crawled, but not indexed.") And this "ephemera" subsite has never been properly indexed -- Google is somehow unable to read its own sitemap.
So, if you're reading this, or any of the other materials on the site (although I can't imagine why you would), count yourself among the "few, we happy few" of Shakespeare's Agincourt.
More distressingly, lack of indexing generally leads to lack of archiving, making these words writ in water a bit more watery than most. I'm attempting to manually prompt archiving, and the occasional outputs to an Amazon self-published text seem to be a good idea.
Curiouser and curiouser. Onwards.
Ten minute wait for a not-out-of-commission shower at the inexpensive gym, so about ten minutes late to the Pontifical. Which, as it turns out, was all about Poland and JP2 on the occasion of Divine Mercy Sunday. White over red furled at the corner of the quasi-transept seating.
JP2 and I had very different experiences of the world of theatre, but share a liking for walking in the mountains. Understandable in both cases, perhaps, given the goings-on below. Levavi oculous meos ad montes... A great saint of the age.
In the world of appearances, this continues a remarkable string of incidental graces. Idyllic weather for the octave, skies clear and blue (one or two slightly chilly nights). Quite the change from some weeks ago, or a month or two ago. Still not quite sure how I made it, and if these incidental graces in the world of appearances continue, I might start to wonder if I did. There was a peculiar sea-change after the second blizzard that, and I'm confident that the changes were in the empirical world and not in my perception, seemed to re-order the word considerably.
Gadamer has the notion of θεατρον as angle on the action. Where we sit in the Lycurgan (of Athens, not of Sparta) stone theatre during the festival has much to do with the direction and distance from which we have come. For example, in the Triduum liturgies, I was uncharacteristically in the south quasi-transept, since I was coming from the research libraries for the daytime service, rather than the gym for the morning service. The angle on the action is uniquely a function of the σκενε of the Greek theatre; once the Romans double the theatre (amphi=two natures), there is no longer a directional sense to the action, and so there's no real corresponding angle from the audience. Literally, the word means "looking place," and so the phenomenological context is what the stage looks like from that seat. We have a relation to the event which isn't neutral or anodyne, but meaningful, and the beginning of the meaning of the event.
One of the interesting discoveries in looking through the (apparently paltry) published correspondence of Andric is his fondness for Krakow, and the Polish kingdom generally. A great interest in the centuries-old kingdom, perhaps a bit like my own interest in the Yugoslavian lands. Before the second peregrination, I was actually looking at Gdansk, but prices in the north put the ancestral homeland out of reach.
It has occurred to me that these stretches of difficulty, and less obviously, but still in a logically valid sense, the wanderings in the Balkans on a wing and a prayer (occasionally sans wing) might have been thought to be durations that would have a destructive effect. Thankfully, and due to strength not entirely my own, I have at least the appearance of having survived, with my discipline and spirit still intact.
So these graces in the world of appearances are welcome. Nonetheless, the world of experience, existing underneath the world of appearances, is what conducts us to the appearances and determines our condition within them. Any number of Cartesian demons might have put together the idyllic weather and amiable liturgies of the last fortnight; the reality of it is that things are still within the time of trial, and I still focus my mind and my actions on getting to a neutral country to read, think, write, and work.
Macedonian Pirin is the gate; I went there at the end purely on instinct, and it has proven to be the right call. The mountains, the trails, the foods and the waters have given memories of the place that are with me constantly as reminders that it is possible to live deliberately and get back to a basic sufficiency, outside the madness of greed, deceit, and corruption that has been my experience of my own country in recent years. It is the gate, and I now have some acquaintance with the lands beyond it.
But the point is the work, and I can accomplish a shadow of that here, as the gulag panopticon has excellent libraries. There is a stack of books in front of me that would be the stack of books I would hope to find had I access to all the libraries in the world, for the coming task. (Really, the collections here are excellent, though there are reasons for that. Robber barons used to think books worthwhile.)
To it.
One part of this third peregrination that I'm hoping to set off on (despite all likelihoods and present realities) would be the ability to engage more with texts. During the first wave of hard times, after the JD, I was able to read on a Kindle Fire 6 or 7, which is a bit like reading on a phone, but I made it work. But that sort of adversity in the reading condition itself (lit screen, small text array) makes for strain in the long run. The ideal would be an e-ink 10 or 11, some of which apparently can be found reconditioned for under 200. It's likely as much as the airfare, but I'd probably be using it 7 or 8 hours per day.
It's a bit like an early modern English Jesuit on the scaffold thinking about the coffee after dinner later, but perhaps that's the point. Imagine the contrary scenario as carefully as possible.
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