Armistice day.  On the morning run, tapped the rough stone walls of the building where the armistice with Hungary was signed a few days later, the mad Magyars having exited the Habsburg compact a few days before the Austrian capitulation.  I was reading Grey's memoir ("The lights are going out all over Europe...") on the stone bridge at Mostar a few weeks ago.  The run-up to the war was more complex that I had thought.  As is well known, Serbia essentially capitulated in its responses to Austria, but made one reservation, and Austria saw that as the cause of war.  This apparently caught the industrial behemoth of Germany by surprise, but they went along with it, and if the histories (considerably inflected by the debates at the end of the next Really Big War) are to be believed, that was the cause of all ills.  The depths of the Franco-Russian alliance also surprised me.  It's still in evidence today in these parts.  

But there is a sort of lesson in the end of the war as well.  When the armistice was signed, and the Germans lost their authority to shoot anyone who jumped out of their trench and started running the wrong direction, the soldiers held councils and simply left the field under white flags.  As the armistice wasn't to take effect until 24 hours from signing, though, the Italians were still under discipline, so they took the positions and captured immense numbers of POWs on that day, 70,000 of whom subsequently died in the camps.  The local domination had abated, so the soldiers trusted in the good nature of humanity and went into the woods, following Rousseau.  Circe's spell had lifted, and they ran off the roof.  The error was that although the local domination had abated, the logic of the world outside that domination still held perils.  Wiser to keep in the traces for a bit, not letting on that the chains had slipped.  Measure, time and place.

I'm still mulling a sort of Yugoslavian production of Loves Labours/Much Ado, under the same logic as the double bill in London a few years ago.  Not entirely a useless daydream.  For a fellow of the theatre, imagining scenes from literature and hearing the music in the mind is simply a means of perceiving the nature of the present place.  The island is full of strange noises.

 

"Mitrovdanak – hajdučki rastanak, Đurđevdanak – hajdučki sastanak."

 A brief meditation on adversity

When you're able to survive extraordinary difficulties with some measure of grace, and many of the people around you exist by constantly pretending everything is normal, a sort of cover story, certain contradictions arise.  It is important to fix in the mind that when you honestly engage with the work, the arts, the studies, and pass all of the tests, and gain useful understanding, but don't go along with the corrupt practices in the city, the schools, and, ultimately, the houses, you find yourself eventually in the cold, on the street, whatever objective correlative term comes to mind, and the expectation is that you simply won't exist for much longer.  When a culture's wealth is concentrated in its institutions, it is possible to encounter the traditions authentically within these institutions, but when the manner of running these institutions drives you out of the garden, the first moment after noon tends to be night, and the actual conditions of social life in the country (which to be fair, a very large percentage are able to isolate themselves from in suburban houses) start to take a sledgehammer to the intricately ground gears of the pocketwatch.  

It is important to fix this in the mind, though there's no reason for it to be at the top of the mind, and the first subject of conversation.  It does force an extraordinary discipline onto day-to-day existence, and it appears that few are capable of that level of discipline, which explains why many of the excluded don't make it very far.   And one does miss out on the wine of life, but that is the nature of the time.

It is important to understand that this is part of a larger history.  A generation won a world war, and devised a system of industrial prosperity for its children, and that generation grew very corrupt within the comforts of industrial prosperity.  

What is to be done?  Well, first, the work that has nothing to do with this social circumstance.  This matter must not be at the top of the mind, or you'll simply give the old mistakes life by arguing with them.  But there is a very important point that has to be made.  The claim of right for just going along with things, that being part of a group in power is its own good, is a very old lie being given a new claim on truth.  The claim is that simply being effective is greater than any notion of the good, or of higher truths, because it ultimately reveals truths that are greater than the higher truths, presumably because all claims of truth are false.

The chief task of those in difficulty is not to get onto the right side of the corruption, or to tear down the machines that guarantee the prosperity,  but to point out the false claims of right where they arise.  Ultimately, the wealthy won't be troubled by losing that argument.  But the point isn't being made for their benefit.

 Tosca  at the capital's national theatre.  Soli surprisingly strong.  $7.50, top balcony, stood off to the side rather than risk the actual seat. 

When I was going to the orchestra concerts in Cleveland during the MFA, I favored the absolute back row, as the sound was caught perfectly against the wall.  (They've renovated since, so I'm not sure if that's still the case.)  Same, to a lesser degree with the family circle standing at the Met.  (Which I hear they've restored, after doing away with standing room for a few years.)  In the large Balkan cities (Bucharest, Belgrade, Budapest) I've actually had better luck right next to the plaster line, far above the orchestra itself -- you get the full force of the sound rising from the strings, even if most of the stage is hidden from view.  But even though I'm a theatre fellow, I go to the opera for the music, not the scenography.  

The litmus of any production of Tosca  is the Te Deum.  If Scarpia is the center of everyone's attention, it's not right.  The point is that he's off to the side during the central liturgy, forgetting about God.  But I discovered a new error with this production.  They took the liturgical music as an emotional cue -- dimmed the lights, the supers on stage took on a serious aspect.  The music is an interpolated liturgical action -- it plays out within the event of the opera, but it's not the underscoring or the emotional tenor of the moment.  In the emotional world of the opera, we are with Scarpia, not the liturgy.  The Bucharest Te Deum is quite memorable.  Dark, massive cross rising from the stage after the stageful of laity file on through the house in Romanian peasant blouses.  (But if memory serves, they make the same error with Scarpia.)  

But again, surprisingly strong soli.  Very worthwhile evening.

One entailment of the metaphysics of presence and encounter is that people tend to think that the encounter with danger will be characterized by the perception of danger, or at least its near approach.  But that's simply not what danger means.  The awareness of danger is an awareness that we don't know what's going on, and to expect to know that that you don't know what's going on is simply an ontological Escher drawing.

There's industrial prosperity, of course, thanks to the grandfathers, the postwar structures of industrialization, but the people running things now, and the character of these industrial forms now, are making things very difficult for a large number of people.  (Not incidentally, including myself.)  For six years, we've had basically a Bond-villain government of the American continent, and the robber-baron redux of the tech boom has left a legacy of a mechanical infrastructure that could conceivably be used for the most oppressive widely based authoritarianism in the human experience.  (This was largely accomplished by allowing people to play the lottery using prime numbers, and cheat on their homework.)

I suppose the most problematic point is yet to come, in the next few months, while the present faction still controls all of the hall passes in the corridors of power.  The structural reversal in the recent elections was always going to happen, of course -- the popularity of the scapegoat is always prelude to the alignment against him or her; a king is simply a condemned fellow with an indeterminate commutation of sentence, as Girard says.  The point is that it happened after three-quarters of the presidency in question had elapsed.  The art of power sometimes involves not annihilating your opponent, because then another one will arise, but in cultivating both your opponent and his or her weaknesses.   

I cultivate my own garden.  Like a Franciscan friar in a Shakespearean play, I'm coming to understand that knowing what these flowers of philosophy and thought can do is a worthwhile task, not because of their uses in the world outside the garden, but simply because there is a garden.  Logic enough.

 

 

 "Ide Luka, eto vuka"

https://www.rts.rs/lat/vesti/drustvo/5817436/sveti-luka.html

 One note I made at the beginning of the present journey seems relevant.  If you arrive in a mountain meadow (there were many of these in Macedonian Pirin, including the principal, majestic one near the top of the great mountain), and you see that the trees are stunted or bent in a particular direction, you don't assume that the trees of the place have gotten things wrong from the beginning.  You assume that there has been some climate or soil condition that has affected the species, that given the expected conditions, would otherwise grow straight and true.  Similarly, if you arrive in a place and see that the people have a certain general character, you don't assume that they've just gotten it wrong from the beginning, and existing in the wrong manner has gotten wrapped up with basic existence in their minds.  You assume that these trees have grown within a certain spiritual climate, and that this is what a tree looks like that grew up within that climate.  Not necessarily in the encounters with each other; it might just be the long, quiet hours when fears rise inexplicably to the mind.  Something about being here results in this type of person.  That's the lesson, I think.  Futile to look to genetics; genetics mends itself, that the nature of it.  Nutrition is relevant, because the manner of eating is an action, and can be inflected.  Exercise similar.  Bad social networks are an element of it, but these arise among people of a certain spirit, and the spirit of the people is the question.

In the Old English Exeter Book, there is the story of St. Guthlac, a hermit in the muddy fens.  Our civilizations have drained the swamps and built the concrete living places after decades of struggle, but stories like those of the old Christian hermits remind us that it wasn't merely a question of mud, disease, and bad air.  (Though these things were rather important to work on.)  We only understand a small part of what our notion of understanding suggests to us that we should in fact understand.  Places have spiritual natures, and the essence of the Christian mission, as a religion of the light as opposed to one of the cultic mysteries of the shadows, is perhaps not to be affected by the shadows as they arrive, not to feel that our sense of truth commands that we be angry or disconsolate.  Three are many kinds of evil in the world.  Many of them are within concentrations of wealth and power.  Knowing that we only understand a small part of what understanding thinks itself capable of, it is useful to remember that, whatever the prognostications, intimations, or prophecies, the day itself will be sufficient, and likely prevail.

 

 #postprandial

 And Patrick Stewart as well.  From the RSC and working the verse with Barton to jumping in with both feet into the world of American sci-fi.  One is a pedagogy of the spirit, the other a slightly more shining example.  

 Commander Chekov died, apparently.  Now only Kirk and Sulu left.  Interesting quote in the Times obit, something along the lines of that he was proud to have been part of something that taught so many people how to operate in the world.  And now we talk to computers and ask them for information, and board vessels that take us to strange worlds where we observe the prime directive.  Which not so many people worldwide were doing back then, but American postwar industrial prosperity, together with some old world scientists, was pointing the way.  

There is the moon, and there is an apple above our head.  Reaching upward has many uses.

The vocation director of the society of priests that I discerned with some years ago was also a Star Trek fan, very hardcore, he was preoccupied with getting autographs at conventions.  At the time, I sort of dismissed it as the usual fandom thing, but there's also a message involved.  Concern for the humans involved.  The best sci-fi points us back to ourselves -- know thyself, says the oracle.  Consider the floating human at the end of 2001, or the figures emerging from the planet in Solaris.  Perhaps jaunting between planets isn't like a fly going from apple to apple, but more about coming to realize that our perceptions and thoughts are fundamentally about being on this particular orb.  Perhaps the journey between worlds is grounded in a different understanding of the way things are, and less about our thoughts on this world of falling apples and feathers.

 Two thoughts from the proverbial escalier.  First, because they were the only ones left, I had to go well over budget for that necessary Richard II after the election.  Still under $20, but not the usual $6.  As a result, I was downstairs, where I've only been once (for Tin Drum last visit -- I had a balcony ticket, but the house was very light).  Upstairs and downstairs are very different at the JDP.  It's likely I was surrounded by folks with a more complicated relationship to the present politics.  Perhaps there was a bit of catharsis up among the gods at the back of the balcony, where I usually sit.  But there certainly wasn't much of a reaction to anything during the play from the folks downstairs.  Very television mode.

Second -- one of the most memorable communications after the elections was from the rector of the university here, who came to some fame after giving a speech from the balcony of the administrative building, and I think went up to Brussels for some meetings afterwards, though I could be wrong about that.  A text card on social media: "The university has been defended."  (Two words in Serbo-Croat, et seq.)  

Interesting times.  And to be clear, I'm just here to read Hegelian philosophy and observe the theatre while sending out CVs.  Gently down the stream.

In 1601, on the afternoon before the abortive rebellion qua unpermitted parade of the Earl of Essex, the conspirators did something very unusual.  They went to the theatre.  The management of Shakespeare's theatre had received a certain financial contribution in exchange for staging (in midwinter) the play that the conspirators had selected -- Richard II.  The point was thought to be the deposition scene, where Richard (often thought to have been based on Elizabeth, including by the sovereign -- "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?") surrenders his crown.  

So, given recent events here, it was basically impossible for me not to attend the JDP's R2, staged two days after the historic election.  I gave it the late afternoon, went to the cafe at the bookshop next door and re-read the play and made notes over some coffee, and then walked next door.  I had seen that theatre's house-party production of Much Ado a few years back, and last year, I saw the national theatre's Macbeth, so I had some sense of the general Shakespearean gestalt here.  But I was completely unprepared for what happened.  Or, rather what didn't happen.  The play simply didn't function.  There wasn't the slightest frisson in the house at the critical moment.  Admittedly, during the curtain call, there were inspiring cheers, chants and banners, but the play itself was simply an anodyne entertainment with a very questionable staging that seemed at times like a Russian made-for-television bros-and-guns movie, and the audience simply sat there and watched it as such. (Perhaps playing Richard III during a production of Richard II is a form of progress in the materialist-historical sense.)

Rather disappointing evening in the πανανθροποσ department.  Of course that just means that the salient fact was that this sort of theatre doesn't really function here, which is a useful thing to know.  But this play was written to receive and express precisely this political moment -- and, whether due to the translation (that sounded like prose, though the local languages are notoriously averse to the iamb, pentameter or otherwise) or the staging, the event of the play simply didn't occur.  But the curtain call was very interesting.  Fascinating to be in a country when it's in the process of regeneration (this country has actually looked to the universities during its last few cycles of renewal), and observing the shared notion of community.  

But it would be better with a functioning Shakespearean drama, at least when staging a Shakespearean drama.

 

 https://www.prairiehome.org/shows/57395.html

#saturdayradio

 The Benthamite nightmare of an election being decided by the city's judgment of the choral odes...

 

 

Did he doubt or did he try?
Answers aplenty in the bye and bye,
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,
One man gathers what another man spills. 

 Interesting -- massive drone show in Texas, set a world record.  But there were no spectators, it was simply an exercise in developing the capability.  A technology is emerging that is perhaps being understood as spectacle, but fundamentally has to do with other things, much as bitcoin is understood as a lottery, but the machine that has emerged has little to do with scratching tickets. The quintessence of schein, perhaps.  What we perceive things as allows us to perceive them, but then it takes some thinking before we realize that the stick in the water isn't bent.

 The circular dances, which were possibly spontaneous celebrations by the students who had walked from the other cities of the country to the main university here (in fairness, there was also a full band and fireworks, so it wasn't exactly ex nihilio, or like the conclusion to Mnouchkine's Tartuffe), became part of the large rally the next day at the traffic circle between the temple hill and the old city.  Additionally, some of the professors apparently sang traditional songs as part of their speeches.  Possibly a reaction to the claims of the party in power that the movement was carried along by foreign influence.  The interesting thing about it is that these songs and dances aren't like the cultural songs and poems sometimes seen at American political conventions.  Unlike the songs and oratory of the American 19th c., modern political entertainments are always accomplished in advance, and generally have the same effect no matter whether they are real or mountebank entertainments, so long as everyone remembers the words.  (Carried to antinomy by the mindless dancing of the candidates to the background music, which runs the gamut from the U.K.'s demonstrably game (rhymes with tame) Member for Maidenhead to the peculiar dancing-instead-of-speaking of the fellow who won the last race in the US.)  Possibly, the songs here are different -- citizens are listening carefully to judge the nature of the singer and the song.  Something atavistic there, something characteristic of democracy, perhaps essentially so.

 https://archive.org/details/hhgttg-radio/HHGTTG.Phase2.Fit09.mp3

#saturdayradio 

 Interesting -- in the local press, one of the most repeated phrases is "the competent authorities" -- it can refer to anything from law enforcement to cutting the grass in front of a government building.  The Serbo-Croat term translated as "competent" apparently literally means seated-over, holding a rightful position.  So it's really the authorized or anointed authorities, as opposed to an assertion of fitness for purpose.  Competence is prevenient.

---

One interesting thing I noticed in the capital city of the last country.  There was a small fig tree growing out of the foundation of the Ministry of the Interior building, a run-down, graffiti-covered structure just across from the old Austro-Hungarian buildings that are the Whitehall of that country.  Not unreasonably, a tree taking root in the crevice between the sidewalk and the foundation was apparently thought to be a bit problematic, so it was cut down, leaving just a few small stumps coming up at the corner.  Something about that.  A problem and a structural danger, and yet -- a fig tree.  There's a famous line from a 19th c. British diplomat, something along the lines of -- everything in the Balkans is the opposite of what it might reasonably be thought to be.  In that spirit, perhaps the quintessential Balkan tree -- a trouble from the beginning, a danger to those around, and yet -- a fig tree.

A quiet evening, but my rooms are facing away from the street.  I see from the local websites that there were torchlight parades and scuffles on the streets nearby.  (In addition to the two large rallies, there was also a basketball derby down the street, apparently as tough a ticket as a Knicks game used to be.)  

My point of reference for the new city is a local novel about an odd fellow who watched it being built from his perch on the river in the old city, quite mad, a landlord who named his houses, and basically stood for the old ways of the city, and the culture.  The radical prospect of trees and fresh air, and simple concrete buildings that could be filled with strong tables and overstuffed bookshelves by folks on a working person's salary was quite a threat to him.  And this fellow has a modern correlative -- the spells cast by the modern real estate sections in the newspapers also look askance at these brutalist towers.  Though the only time the towers have become dangerous, to my knowledge, is when the old way of thinking decides to put up some cladding, causing a tragedy, and making much of the real estate in London unsalable for over a decade.

It's not at all a culturally determined thing, or even associated with left-Hegelian cultures.  Shaker Heights in Cleveland resulted from precisely the same instinct.  A clean place adjacent to the city, but not determined by its ways.

This is perhaps why there could be folks parading with torches and throwing bottles on the street below, while I was calmly looking out at the trees.  Instead of the city, where such things are centripetal, tending to the center and therefore resonating out through all things, the furore dissipates amid the trees and the stars.  And after having vented its anger, humanity awakens in the garden, and to a more civilized existence.

At least that's the concept.  But the reality is that there are very few overstuffed bookshelves these days, especially in my country, where most people read less than one book per year.  People stare into the flashing colored lights until it's time to go back out into the painful world of unrewarding work.  I can't fault them.  I recall how television shows used to provide some refuge from things.  But the whole point of this new, civilized world adjacent to the city is that we've identified the good things from the old world and tried to build a life around their objective healthfulness.  If it's just a place for the worker to sleep, the beguiling and anesthetic charms of the old city would have done just as well.

 

Big political rallies today, including in der nahne, despite my best efforts to keep to the periphery.  Interesting images on the local news websites of the students who had walked from the different parts of the country to the park in front of the university here spontaneously dancing cultural circular dances.  I noticed some similar goings-on in the Divided City, as I had to get a coffee to find a working WC on a Sunday before the 13 hour bus trip through the mountains, so Henry James and I held down a table at one of the bus station cafes for an hour or two.  I noticed a wedding party in the bus departure area engaged in a similar dance next to their chartered bus, with the accompaniment of an accordionist.  I noticed that musicians seem to gravitate towards the churches during wedding ceremonies there, apparently not knowing each other or by a prearranged plan, but presumably just to accompany the event.  

The uniforms of both sides seem to be conspicuously Western, the government supporters usually in all black (which presents some problems for visiting New Yorkers) with prominent Latin-text, Western commercial logos, the older ones with jackets and shirts with Cyrillic local insignia.  A dismaying percentage of sweatsuits among the younger folks wearing black -- not even the synthetic workout suits favored in the past -- completely cotton and shapeless.  Cost factors, perhaps.  The students tend to the polychromatic, but unsurprisingly distinctively Western cuts of clothing.  No hint (obviously) of the Turkish-inflected 3/4 pants seen in countries to the south, and more Islamic areas, and even the visitors from the East, and perhaps precisely the people from the East who have travelled here during the war, are usually in costly looking togs with Western logos and cuts.  Perhaps with the winter, there will be a few fur hats around, though my guess is that the ushankas will probably be limited to local military-surplus versions worn by the older folks who wear Cyrillic logos in summertime.  

There are a fair number of goons about (not the Peter Sellars variety), and it's a land of ancient darknesses, so one does tend to keep on one's guard.  But a very hospitable and interesting place.

 

There is, of course, the danger that with my surname and the recent times of peregrination in southern Europe, people in my own country will simply take me for an imperfectly Americanized fellow, in the venerable manner of the Midwestern social institutions of the 19th c.  Still quite a lot of prejudice about in that regard, and it overlaps with some other, slightly more recent, ethnic perceptions in the city.  

The reality is that, like a healthy plurality of Americans, I'm a third-generation American.  And Slavic/German heritage and Christianity, which I suspect are the actual reasons for the difficulties, are internal questions for Americans to sort out.  I've studied the common law and American philosophy for years, the former in a formal doctoral scheme, the latter largely on my own, with a rough infrastructure of graduate coursework in the field.  I've been an American actor in the largest city in the country for a decade.  Jim-Bob Bocephus, sitting on the porch of his prefabricated home development qua country club deep in the hills ain't got nothing on me in the American department.

Not all who wander are Europeans.

Looks like there might be some tense times in der nahne in the coming days with the elections here.  I had thought that keeping to the outskirts of the city would be the safest plan, but apparently, these are contested outskirts.  Will lay in some supplies, and prepare to lay low for a few days, if necessary.  No imminent risk of any real danger -- simply inconveniences.

As always, governed by the Prime Directive.  In matters not affecting my own health and well-being, political conflicts within other nations are best avoided completely.  It is an exercise in nation-building either way, and it is not my nation.  An example -- the absolutely abysmal recent production of Miller's Crucible by the Croatian theatre at the festival in Sarajevo -- all of the American tropes sort of blend together into one big cartoonish notion of the country.  (Fair disclosure, although I had a balcony ticket, I was crowded out of my seat by the folks piling in and standing nearby, and left about 15 minutes later, once they wheeled the crucified figure on.)  Knowing that country rather well, I know that many of these things are completely opposed to each other, but to the eye of the foreigner, there can be no complete negation or absolute dichotomy within a system that itself has a certain character.  Rather than two completely opposing things working together to describe the world, the foreigner, or the person looking from abroad, sees only two factions within a subjective entity.  And as Hegel teaches, terms are really only meaningful if they have an absolute opposite.  Leave the conflicts that describe the world to the people who understand them to describe the world.

So, long story short (too late), shifting into RHP (random hoopy frood) mode.  One side is chanting oslobodimo slobodu, the other side is chanting oslobodimo Slobodan, and I'm off on the side reading Henry James.

Ah, what wise fools these mortals be.

In the last country, I was staying in the older parts of the cities.  On the last peregrination through the Balkans, I invariably purchased the large jugs of water, rather than using the taps (generally, this is considered the way to go, as the jugs of water are very inexpensive, and the taps are risky).  But in the old parts of the cities in that country (where I've not stayed before when I've visited that country), large jugs of water generally aren't available in the stores.  Realizing this, I confirmed with the folks handling the rental that they considered the water safe, and that they and their families used it.  After trying it for the month and a fortnight or so, I'm fairly sure that the folks there have habituated themselves to bad water, and would be much better off if the stores (like the stores in the old cities in the country to the east) would stock the large bottles of water.  After running, I would be thirsty for the orange and the milk, but except on the warmest mornings, I wasn't at all thirsty for the water from the taps.  And it might have weakened me a bit -- I felt that after this most recent journey.

Nothing catastrophic, I'm sure that switching back to the large jugs now will wash all of the bad stuff away, but it was a good lesson in the need to keep to the inner discipline, even when the ways of the place are at some variance.

 Well, that was a difficult journey.  The difficulties, of course, are within, in the flesh.  A rock could have survived it without a second thought.  Or, for that matter, a first one.  

The old city was remarkable.  By the end of it, I was back to the morning runs.  I would run past the cathedral, down along the river to the university, and then turn around and run to the top of the hill above the bend in the river, called the Yellow Fortress, because it's yellow.  Actually, the toponym is a bit misleading, since the overlook is on the old city walls, which were far outside the boundaries of the building proper.  Walter Scott would have undoubtedly seen the relation though, and understood the nature of the fortifications.  Curiously, both of the early fortresses are off limits, without being ostensibly off-limits.  At any rate, then back down the hill (walking the first bit -- running up cobblestones is brave, running down cobblestones is natural selection), and into the old bazar, and back up the adjacent hill.  By the end, I could make it to the top of the second, whereupon I stopped in at the convenience store (like the 7-11 at the top of Everest in the cartoon adage) for a bit of milk and yogurt.  Then back to Humble Quarters for some brewed coffee and muslei.  The coffee was from an old roastery adjacent to the 16th c. mosque, ground in a pestle, and very reasonably priced.  Immediately across the alley was the 500 year old bakery with the excellent local circular bread (not the oily street food type that is filled with sausages, but the old country style bread), also very reasonably priced at less than a dollar.  

At the first overlooking point of the run, I could see the nature of the place, which was the telos of the run -- the old city immediately below, with the bread and the coffee just beyond the leaden roofs of the religious buildings, and then the city of the enlightenment, down the river, past the university, concrete towers rising into the morning mist, and then beyond, a different sort of world, and the mountains ahead.

After the journey, I headed right to my usual station at the Sbux across from the national legislature, to regroup and get the ducks back into some appearance of orthognonality.  It is useful to have a chain coffeehouse in which is is socially acceptable to appear a bit haggard at the end of a journey, and then show up in proper form later on.  Interestingly, the artificial restriction on the price of the Americanos appears to have slipped, they've gone up a bit, and a nonstandard item has appeared on the menu above the rest -- "home brewed" coffee, which I assumed to be the filtered type, but it turned out to be the local brew (domache) on offer at the other coffeehouses.  That stays cheap, and the Americano is an extra four or five bits.  Minor bakshish, but interesting.  There's also a Cyrillic version of the name on the marquee -- perhaps new, perhaps I didn't notice it before, though it's the primary version of the marquee at the one I never go to in the tourist center by the castle.  

On the walk back across the bridge, stopped to look at Andric's old rooms overlooking the river (near the vantage spot of the fellow in Houses of Belgrade, perhaps).  I didn't see a plaque or anything, just a nondescript cafe beneath.  Perhaps the Old Lady from Sarajevo moved in afterwards.  Said a quick hello.

Vistas and horizons.  Or, in the Greek Οριζον.  The limits of our view, the περασ, are the view in its fullness, so we see things most completely when we become conscious of the outer bounds of our vision.  The point, though, are the things within the vision, as they exist within the field of of our vision.  At play in the fields of the mind.  Between the chalk-lines traced so that meaningful action can happen.  A sense of justice within, one that largely comes from the fact of this meaningful action, and then above the horizons, still, or perhaps moving beyond percept or precept, the stars.

 Walked across the river to the enormous Franciscan church and the cathedral, and stopped in at the mall afterwards.  The Franciscans here are a bit peculiar.  Very different from the avuncular fellows stateside, to say the least.  Many young warrior monks--I half expect them to have a katana or something underneath the habit.  There was a bifurcation in the church here during the rule of the Subline Porte.  The ab-original church was apparently thoroughly suffused with the Bogomil heresy, and was the subject of some 13th c. crusades launched by the good offices of the Hungarians.  Then the Franciscans came in, and developed a good network among the people, who were distrustful of the more sumptuous offices of the church.  In the late 15th c. they gained an apparently very powerful firman from the Sublime Porte -- a copy is actually on the wall of the madras museum in Sarajevo, and it guaranteed them freedom from worship.  That said, life under Turkish rule was difficult -- there are a few popular histories of the province written by OFM authors -- I read them in the library in NYC, very mass-market.  Then, with the arrival of Austria-Hungary in the 19th c., a legitimate diocesan system was set up, something that the SJ's likely had a lot to do with.  Notably, though, the OFMs retained a parallel structure and didn't merge in.

One peculiarity of the Franciscan order here is that it is allowed to hold land.  This was apparently necessary under Turkish rule, and the formal Vatican permission to do so in the 17th c. (I think) legitimated a practice that had probably been going on for some time.  The main Franciscan churches in Sarajevo and Mostar are interesting.  Both characterized by the art of the 1930's, the sort of modes of expression that were popular among the more right-wing cultures in central Europe at the time.  The human form ascendant, but unlike the detailed musculature of Bernini's statues in Rome, or the quiet workmanlike dignity of the superhuman forms in the communist-era statues in Bulgaria and Romania, these figures have a distinctly unheimlich, numinous, almost radiant aspect to them.  It's dangerous ground, but apparently very deeply felt.  And the Austrian-built cathedral, in contrast, is very proper and Austrian.  

At any rate, some time with the Real Prescence at the immense Franciscan church, along with a fair number of tourists and tour groups -- it's quite an industry -- and then slipped into the back of the much more modestly sized cathedral for the Mass of the Faithful in a Saturday afternoon marriage Mass. A male voice choir in the latter was quite impressive.  There's something about a culture singing its songs at a marriage feast.  Exaltate.  

And then to the mall, which was quite bustling, apparently at least a good number of folks here are doing quite well, the stores filled with locals buying things.  

And then closed out the evening on the famous stone bridge, found a perch and read some of a Whitehall memoir about the run-up to the First Rather Large War (source of "The lamps are going out across Europe...").  Quite meaningful, to read it while sitting on a great stone bridge in Bosnia.  History is ultimately about the nature of material things.  Which is quite different from saying that it is determined by the nature of material things, or by our understanding of that nature.  Last time I was there, I read some Hegel criticism ("Dostoyevsky Reading Hegel in Siberia and Bursting into Tears"), which as it turns out, had been written by a theatre professor at the conservatory in Budapest.  Read some of his other work recently.  I well remember playing the Molnar Festival there as an undergraduate from Virginia.  (And on my return, the graduation speaker would be the undersecretary of state who had just brilliantly resolved the Bosnian wars in Dayton.)

The great powers of the north, the ancient cultures and rivalries of the south.  Europe continues.  And a random fellow from over the ocean sits on an old bridge in Bosnia and thinks about it for a bit.

Interesting, the name of the town in the last country, part of the first stop on this peregrination, comes from the word used for "reason" -- the south Slavic root common to the languages of Yugoslavia and nearby countries has a sense of things being visibly laid out, as in a vista of a valley between mountains, and uses it to describe a clarifying precept (not Reason writ generally, but a specific assertion).  In fairness, the views of the valley from the mountain during the morning run were invigorating and clarifying, but the town itself usually seemed to be wrapped in a bit of a haze.  I found the upper areas of the large mountain walkable from the nearby town to be much more mentally fortifying.  Something about looking down on a panorama of mountaintop glacial lakes while suffering from moderate oxygen deprivation and exhaustion seemed to clear the haze of the mind. (And inspire some odd dreams later on.)

I've taken a trick from Tenzig Norgay, who did a Tibetan milk sacrifice after ascending Everest for the first time.  I don't deliberately waste any of it, of course, but a half-thermos of milk at altitude does do wonders for the strength.

 Apparently, the undergraduate university is attempting to play big-league sports now, and like all arrivistes, is getting soaked for the privilege.  (At least relative to the larger downstate schools who socialized in these circles long ago.)  I have a complex relationship with my undergraduate school.  I went there because it was nationally strong in debate, and in-state, and I (mistakenly) supposed that the mountains would offer some respite from the circles of kin and friends of kin.  (Cf. Marshall's diary entry: Yesterday, I indicted Burr, and this morning rode for the mountains of Virginia.)  As it turned out, the theatre program there was also perfect for my work -- a very robust experimental theatre program, closely allied to the liberal arts campus.  Outside of the debate prep room and theatre rehearsal halls, though, I was a stranger to the traditional haunts of campus (the fellow who played at the campus bar every weekend became an international superstar), and I and my circles were very different from the sort of people who generally went there.  I made use of the specific things there that were useful, at in-state public school rates, and then headed off to work in the theatre.

I've been back there a few times, certainly not for the libraries, but it was possible to work in in the mountain air during the pandemic years  But it was pellucidly clear in those interactions that I wasn't the sort of fellow who usually went to the school, so I largely just found a room where I could, went for a run through the hills and cattle fields before dawn (trying to avoid the stale air from the poultry slaughterhouses), and just took the place on its natural merits, as opposed to its social sensibilities.  Being a large public university reasonably close to DC, the general norms did sort of have a corridors-of-power vibe at times, but far from the corner office.  

I suppose it was the first example of a pattern that has proved to be general in my experience -- I make use of specific things in a place, rather than trying to be the sort of person whom one might think was the sort of person that would be in that place.

 "...but the sky is the first thing that they divided."  

(Christa Wolff)

Orthodox Michaelmas, which isn't at all on the calendar, but rather assimilated from the Austrians and then kept up as a proper feast to warn of the impending autumn.  Apparently, the city turns on its heating plant today, though apparently that's just a coincidence, as there's a mathematical formula based on the temperatures.  I recall reading a contemporary Russian novel not too many years ago about a writer who returns to his Siberian hometown in an increasingly hallucinatory visit; I thought it was a brilliant plot device to have the entire town heated by the city's steam network, not realizing that it was actually how things were done.  In the context of collectivization, the built infrastructure is different -- Russia has electrified its long-distance train lines, largely because the state owned the whole mechanism at the time.  In contrast, there was an immense debate in the US at the end of the 19th c. about the wisdom of constructing public drinking water fountains in small towns, as it would attract the wrong sorts of people.  (While of course, the fountains and bridges in Ivo Andric are of a very different world.)

There are differences in the infrastructure, certainly.  But the spirit is the litmus.  The Sublime Porte ruled with a gentle and providential hand in the distant provinces, likely primarily because they were distant. And of course, they would show up to capture the sons of the families for their warrior castes -- a 19th c. British military history that I found at the foundation library here a few years ago talks about the legendary size of the warriors here, as seen through the eyes of the south, with women fighting while holding their children, etc.  

And bridges and mosques helped to win the hearts and minds. Interestingly, the religious foundations that are at the heart of the eleemosynary institutions that still endure here are distinctly transnational, and held to be valid until judgment day.  Apparently, that's an issue in a city to the south at present, but not enough to cloud a modern title.  Just enough to create a private sense of righteous entitlement.  The immense bureaucratic effort to unwind all of the wartime property swaps here is interesting, since virtually none of the people who reclaimed their houses crossed the lines and lived in the old place -- they simply sold it off or rented it.  But the odd thing is that both ends of the swaps were unwound, so you had immense transaction costs, with no real seisin for either party at the end of the day.  Might be an interesting law and economics inquiry.

Amusingly, Orthodox Michaelmas has a local association with mice -- if the mice haven't found their winter quarters by today, they won't survive the winter.  So tradition holds that foodstuffs must be kept sealed on this day, and no agitation in the closets and pantries that might attract their interest.  Agamben has an interesting thought about mice and prosperity -- it's one thing for a house to have wealth, but in a genuinely prosperous house, the mice thrive as well.  Apparently, local ethnographers also link the mice to spirits of the dead -- small forms flitting in the corner, scratching on the walls, just barely audible.  

(Sort of puts Mickey et al. in a different light.)

 The call to prayer at a nearby mosque in counterpoint with the "Taran-tara" from the Pirates of Penzance on the laptop.  One smiles, 'but not as sultans smile.'

 There is perhaps a vast invisible seam in the social life of the West.  On one side, there are the partisans of the thing itself, who see life as a bit of a mystery, and the language and actions of the shared life as a means of both getting along with each other and doing some worthwhile things together.  The other side thinks these things to be illusions of the mind, and considers life to be a struggle for wordless ascendency over other people, and all of the notions and words of the shared life not merely means to that end, but ultimately only having meaning in relation to these encounters of power.

This seam perhaps has its correlative in political theory: on one side, the partisans of the Republic, who think the forms of the state to be useful and noble things as we attempt to live lives worthy of the mystery in front of us.  The other side tends to take a more entrepreneurial view, who see the forms of state and the paradigms of international law as opportunities for personal ascendency, and more, as merely prelude to the ascendency of the power of the individual.  Clearly, the pendulum has shifted to the second in recent years.

So it's not entirely inconceivable that half of the people are thinking of life a certain way, in which every word and thought is ancillary to the struggle for personal domination, and the other half is attempting to use these forms to facilitate the inquiry into the things themselves.  In a timeless hour, perhaps the first way of thinking makes a certain figuration within existence, and the second a different type of soul entirely.  Perhaps the eschaton was always working among us.

With the caveat, of course, that because of the festival management issues, I couldn't really see the action, and I left rather early on.  But that did seem to be the way that things were going.  

 I will say this about the show last night.  (The Crucible, with a revealing local title.)  Miller's estate appears to have completely fallen down on the job.  An absolute travesty that appears to lump Miller's work in with precisely the things he was fighting against.  It was so crowded by my seat that I stood up and went by the side wall, where I couldn't really see, and just listened to it, with about 20% of the stage visible.  I could tell, though, that when they tried to do the play, they couldn't.  In my experience, method acting in the Balkans, with very few exceptions, consists of actors getting into fistfights and shouting at each other.  And then they rolled the big black Croatian voodoo Moloch muppet on, and some time later, the crucified figure on a large white cross.  At which point I muttered to the crowd around me "Well, that's as good of an excuse as any" and decamped back to Humble Quarters.

The difference between good regie theatre and bad is the difference between an eccentric philosopher and and a madman.  The eccentric philosopher doesn't act normal, but he has a great care for the way things are, and his actions illuminate things.  A madman doesn't act normal because he has simply gotten hold of the wrong notions of normality.

 Had a banana and a package of dates, and it was about a half hour before the theatre, so I decided to head to the Ivo Andric statue and read some Elia Kazan.  Just found out that it was the anniversary of Andric's birth today -- there's a divinity that shapes our snacking spots.  As it happened, the cheap Turkish dates were so sticky that I had to abandon the notion of pre-theatre reading completely, and head down to the fountain in front of the mosque to wash off the sugary residue.  

And then there was the theatre; or at any rate, the attempt to witness the theatre.  I could a tale unfold -- and I will, but in stereotype, as Henry Miller said.  Matters to be talked about in a considered manner.  

Measure, time and place. 

Frustrating day.  Two grocery runs, both surprisingly difficult.  One does have to really be on one's game to buy 16 ounces of cheese at a discount supermarket in Bosnia.  But the morning run was extraordinary.  The view from the mountain fortress encompasses the pre-Enlightenment old city, the concrete towers of Tito's Republic, and the post-Enlightenment world beyond.  Not to mention the mountain ranges stretching off into the distance.  This is the first visit here when I've been able to make the fortress without dropping down to a walk to catch my breath between the rises, something I'll credit to the mountain runs in Macedonian Pirin a couple of months ago.  Shifting to running from weightlifting in July and August, I worked the mountain runs up from two to four days per week, and in the last week in Bulgaria, made the scenic overlook that had been the goal.  And then a few days later, without really planning anything, ran to the mountain hut much higher up the mountain.  So the much smaller mountains here, even though the roads are fairly steep, don't loom quite as large in my mind.  At least until I take in the view.

Theatre - θεατρον, literally the looking place, cogante with theory.  Gadamer has an interesting notion of it, each person arriving at the Athenian festival from a certain place, which determines where in the theatre one stands, and by inference, what one sees.  We see according to the nature of the place from which we come.  

 #postprandial #justanotherfridaynightinbosnia

 

Oxbridge evening choral services starting up for Michaelmas term -- happened into a compline tonight after the Mozart in Hamburg.  So, if I do go completely mad in the coming weeks and months, at least it will be to the accompaniment of plainsong and fauxbourdon. 

I'm surprised that whatever chapel I happen to eavesdrop on in the evening, I'm invariably one of a dozen or so listeners. (Back in the city, usually at a table in the library in mid-afternoon.) YouTube seems to be vastly underutilized for the sorts of things that it should be used for.  I'm invariably working on other things at the time, but I almost always stop for a bit and listen.  Christminster and evensong.

Perhaps the travel, but I find myself living life naturalistically, simply making it a point to live as one lives.  Life itself vanishes after too much of that.  Our understanding of life is simply a collection of facile aphorisms and axioms to make ourselves feel in command of things.  "It's life's illusions I recall -- I really didn't know life at all."

Manet nobiscum, Domine, quoniam advesperacit. 

 Update, the pestle-ground coffee from the shop next to the 16th c. mosque is most definitely worth the extra $1.50/lb premium over mid-range industrial grocery store coffee (local pricing, so everything still well below states-side).  The opposite of the mochaccino/pumpkin spice latte tendency of some coffee chains (no name, no pack-drill), a more forceful taste that sidles up to bitterness, but never crosses over.  I suspect the quasi-caramelized tastes that the coffee chains seem to favor have something to do with getting as much of the sweetness out of the roasted/browning range as possible, but Balkan coffees, which are prepared in the Turkish manner with a few variations (sugar separate, grounds warmed first, first contact between grounds and water is at a boil) have more to do with creating the right blend of oils.  (Which are incredibly high in cholesterol -- even as a vegetarian, I've modified the practice to boil away much of the syrupy stuff that usually gathers on the foam and is traditionally considered the best part of it.)

 

 One truth that recent experiences have illuminated for me.  Adversity tends to prompt people to try to live as one lives.  The absence of a minimal existence can sometimes make the normal life a desideratum.  This is valuable to the degree that these norms are useful.  But the point is to continue the work regardless of resources or social position.  To do this, it would seem that any notion that social position or material resources are determinative of capacity or mindset would have to be guarded against.  Life conceived as a struggle against the pains of poverty is a poor life even, and perhaps especially, when it prevails.