Vainglory month hereabouts.  

One occasionally, judiciously, merely points out the event.

With every day, it grows more clear: the city is a thieves' paradise.  And if you aren't rich enough, the slaves will drive you from the gates.

Find the useful things.  Avoid the broad and heavily frequented paths.  

Live against the grain, and find what you can.

In short, live nobly, despite the nature of the time.

 "Whatever there is of hope, solace, and beauty in the world is discovered through the eyes of the vanquished, while the victors are blind, they shake and burn, and they have nothing other than their wild, fiery joy, which leaves only ash in its wake."

Ivo Andric, translated and quoted in a contemporary novel from Bosnia

I am acutely aware that I am more fighting a changing storm than trying to traverse the distance to safety from the corruption of this society.  Avenues that allowed me to work and think in the past will likely close themselves off -- I probably couldn't return to Romania, for example, as the rental prices have risen with the influx of capital.  Which is disappointing, given the culture, the theatre and the music that I had begun to make the acquaintance of.  But completely cut off from the basic ability to live and earn a living stateside, I have to find ways of both surviving, and making a worthwhile contribution to things with my life.  And that would seem to be through writing, as theatre is notoriously collaborative, and I'm not a musician.

So I must write, if I am to exist.  

It is very important to keep the upstream truths foregrounded: inside the industrial prosperity, there is a lot of corruption, and those who have fallen afoul of the powerful networks find it very difficult to survive -- not in the sense of having a normal life, but in the sense of actually preserving the life of the organism, together with the activity of the mind.  I'm clearly not the only person this has happened to; frankly, I think this reality has conditioned the experience of everyone in the culture, and they'll likely talk about it, if prompted.  The oddity in my case is that I stayed in the large city (as there was no other home), and stayed in the mix of things, intellectually, as well as in my specific fields.  

But I'm surrounded by very craven people, part of the healthy preponderance who live comfortable lives in what the democracy became inside the space of a single generation.  

I reach to older notions of truth, because I know the nature of the present time.  

Onward.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

The habitual reading of this, at least in every homily I've heard, seems to veer wide of the sense, but in an interesting way.  The original is "head of the corner", or the topmost piece at the angle, so it's unsurprising that a stone that wasn't used in the earlier construction is used for this late, critical purpose.  (And it would be rather difficult to add a cornerstone at the end.)  The usual reading, though, can be reduced to Homer Simpson shaking his head and muttering "Stupid builders."  And there's a genealogy to that thought.

But the point is that the stone that wasn't built into the structure of things connects the angles at the top, uniting the two directions, and inner and outer.  The Vulgate's lapis angularis captures some of this, perhaps suggesting the keystone of an arch, which plays a function in a vertical plane that the head of the corner plays in a horizontal plane.  The Old English (Thanks, Alfred) version of wealstone, the big flat thing that provides most of the wall, would appear to have taken the error and magnified it.  

The builders are building something.  It's not necessarily a good thing.  They use strong, flat rocks for the base, and as it ascends, rocks of lesser structural integrity can be worked into the mix.  But then they reach a point that has little to do with sustaining vertical pressure.  Another dimension of necessary integrity has arisen.  And there's this rock off to the side that they hadn't wanted to build into the mass of the structure.  

#notexpert #justwiseacring

Things are off-the-charts bad.  As they have been for many years.  

I don't know if this is generally the lot in this culture of an honest man, an artist and a scholar, who tries to live and work deliberately and honestly, but I do know that it is the lot that fell to me in this culture along these lines.  The folks in charge seem a bit craven, but the prosperity of the industrial mechanism seems to wipe away all sin in that regard.

So, you know, let's see where it leads.

 Everything seems very thriving and prosperous, but what percentage of the population is necessary for, which is to say, involved in, the mechanism?  And, contrary to the (fair) presumption, it's not remotely a meritocracy, or if it is at base meritocratic, the informal alliances and syndicates are apparently given carte blanche to mess with folks inside the mechanism.

Useful phrases which have come to mind:

prosperity for the healthy preponderance

minds idle and indolent, and open to malice at the drop of a hat

the social forms-- re-energized in the springtime

the hatred of the poor, or at least those poor who dare to walk among them.  jeering, vigilantes.

absence of civilizational context in everyday encounters

attunement to the flesh-- everything is about copulation, it characterizes every encounter

ritual refusal of traditional ethics and morality--the demonstration

---

Sage advice in every age: beware the winning side of the last big war.

---

Against all this: the discipline, the study, the focus.

 In the same revelatory discourse she can tell him how much he still has to suffer in his own house but: "Endure every disgrace in silence and do not resist the violence of your foes." The sufferings are ordered and laid upon him; their source is not enquired into, for in Homer they come from that depth which is the inextricable combination of the will of Zeus and Moira, but it is important only that the goddess knows the sufferings and permits them and thus cooperates in their ordering.

(Von Balthasar) 

It does appear that, much like last year, and for the same reasons, the theatre festival in Transylvania will be out of reach.  And, as with last year, my greatest regret is missing the travelling Noh troupe.  There are, of course, many theatre festivals in Europe, but when one moves north in Europe, the prices increase with each minute of latitude.  The reason I spent all that time in the Balkans was precisely that it was part of Europe, culturally.  The Humble Quarters in nations further south were much cheaper, but I am an post-Enlightenment Westerner, and must think post-Enlightenment, Western thoughts...

----

These sorts of dis-astres do divide the world, not between those who drew the short straw and those frolicking in the haystack, but, across another meridian entirely, between the time before, when the general view of things was believed, and then afterwards, when you discover that the world has to be taken and understood piece by piece, and that the larger logic was a fairy-tale of childhood.

Intense workout this AM, perhaps consequently a bit unfocused and behind the clock this afternoon.  Off to do some specific reading/annotation.

Things generally at the point when Odysseus glimpses Ithaca, and then is blown back out to sea, the forces bedeviling him apparently wanting even to possess his sense of escape from adversity, and even his return. 

Gently down the stream.  (And, separately, no running off of roofs, chasing the departing ships.)

A salutary example from literature: the fellow who ran off the roof after the ships departing from Circe's island.  Even when in extremity, in the city of the power of evil, an orderly and prudent retreat saves, and, perhaps more importantly, makes it possible to leave.  Statistically speaking, ships tended to founder when entering and leaving port.

 I need to keep my assertion clear.  My vindication is in the mind, and the art.  Incidental perfections (muscle training to strengthen for the winter, etc.) can distract as well as fortify.  The dull-eyed folks in suits who have cast their lot with the social forms have their own vindication.  (Cf. "And so they will be your judges.") 

As for me and my house...

 A beautiful springtime day in the city of the power of evil.  I continue to attempt to survive the circumstance.

After many years of this, I hope I have managed to preserve (the uncarved block, DT Suzuki's pail of water before the door), rather than be determined by the adversity.   I really have only one determination that might be said to be consequent from it, namely, not ever to serve any person or organization who could have caused it -- and to survive their reaction to that.

 Reading John Crowley again.  Basically the same reason I real Bulgakov: the possibility of representation.  If you are not able to summon the reality of the scent of the pungent orange drink on a summer's afternoon at Patriarch Ponds, the rest is nonsense, and you also will not be able to summon the reality of the religious scenes that follow. The possibility of representation is what the sacraments lead us to, but also the thing that the everyday, mimetic church, in preserving the sacraments, sometimes tends to erase.  

Yesterday: v1 of von Balthasar's Aesthetics, skimming most of the second half due to time.  At first, I thought Kant, a transcendental aesthetics laying the foundation for the logic to come, basically establishing the possibility of intuition, but Kant to Wolff is not Von B to the deposit of faith.  He isn't narrowing the field, but broadening it, sometimes frustratingly.  (If you dwell for so long on the romantics and the storm and noise folks, you really do need to contextualize them in relation to the rational Enlightenment against which they were reacting, especially when talking about the possibility of intuition of forms.)  But nonetheless, a rewarding read.

When I used to read Crowley, I identified with the characters. Not so much anymore.  Actually what prompted the shift was reading the contemporary Russians, esp. Sorokin.  To understand the representation, you can't be drawn into it.  You must be strong enough to stand above the characters, as opposed to drooling on cue like the experimental dogs in Gravity's Rainbow.

Hm, apparently, there is an interlibrary way to reach into the NYU stacks, perhaps two.  Hopefully, I won't have time, and the Holy Spirit will get the necessary texts to me wherever I find Humble Quarters, but I'll play it as it lies.

My facility with etexts and interlibrary arrangements has grown much since the first (forced) acquaintance during the plague years.  Generally, before then, I just used the libraries where I was, and shaped my interests to their collections.  The nature of the place.  And it's still difficult to absorb a text by PDF.  But I should have improved that skillset faster.  A few years in which I had only a small fraction of the books that would have been useful.  (The big step was ordering the e-reader, which I was able to do b/c of discounts and a friendly Montenegrin import/export policy.) 

We peripatetic exiles can't choose the means by which the word reaches us.  Or, for that matter, the word that reaches us.

 New York.  Where people bring their dogs into cafes and grocery stores, and (contemporaneous event elided, in the interest of not developing a habit of reporting annoying things directly to the internet). They call it a "power move."  It has to do with will, yes, and ascendancy, but more -- a belief that breaking the rules is the rule.  It would never occur to them to make new rules, or fashion a civilized basis of encounter that accommodates all of these anarchic impulses.  It therefore relies on a set of rules to be defied on the basis of the personal will to power.  A demonstration.

Nolite confidere in principibus

One of my more unorthodox beliefs is my strict aversion to organ transplantation. The literature on market-based organ donation is genuinely frightening, and the stories about hastened death and forgone attempts to revive are clearly more than apocryphal.  Add to that its frequent use by authoritarian regimes, and a categorical bar seems wise.

At any rate, "as for me and my house," I would certainly never agree to it for myself, either as to giving or receiving.  Let the mechanism go as far as it can, and then bury it entire.  

To be plain: under no circumstances would I permit my organs to be donated, revoking any other indications to the contrary (drivers licenses signed in youth, etc.).  

/s 

6/1/2026

#blogofrecord

 Don't equivocate as to whether the sense of a clear injustice might be illusory.  The time-frame of such perceptions is like the last moments of Priestley's An Inspector Calls.  These are present events, and your present action or inaction is the only question presented.  If you choose inaction, choose it according to your present understanding, rather than trying to shape an understanding to accommodate your present inaction.

 What it comes down to, I think, is that there's a sort of churning froth that keeps the 'animal spirits of the marketplace' going, and provides prosperity for a healthy preponderance.  Which is a much better ratio than in the past, but I suspect the resources of the continent are capable of far more.

The difficulty is that this nature of things lives in the minds of the people, and it creates a certain way of dealing with people, and a certain way of going through life.  Formal philosophy has recognized this with the pragmatic turn, but one doesn't have to have any philosophy to recognize that the people don't have faith in a larger picture, and that people who stand or think outside of the commercial mechanism get dealt with fairly strongly.  It's not just the spectacular cases, though.  It's in the mind generally, and the most quotidian interactions of the most average people are entirely determined by it.

Now, if you're one of the 60-70% (by no means meritocratically selected) and the only thing you want from the shared life is material possessions, you'll probably live in safety and have backyard barbeques and a large "entertainment center" with the customary Orwellian viewscreen.  Quite likely in Ohio.

If the mechanism was entirely self-concerned, and the philosophers and artists could do their thing untroubled by it, that would be one thing.  But the ubiquitous monoculture of the industrial mechanisms of prosperity actively seeks out those who aren't on-board with the notion, and treats them rather roughly.  They're all in this together, you see.

So, material prosperity for the healthy preponderance, but without faith, and without the transcendental perspective that faith affords, however comprehensible it might have been as a social objective, makes for a very problematic world within which many suffer greatly, and all lose their fundamental birthright as humans -- the transcendent understanding.

 I'd very much like to read the English translation of von Balthasar's Theo-Dramatics, but it doesn't seem to be available in any of the research libraries linked to my network (NYPL, Harvard, Columbia, etc.).  WorldCat says the only university in the city that has it is NYU, which, frankly, is like saying the Mayflower colonists are the only ones with the most recent copy of the Roman Catechism.  The wealth of the trade routes.

 To be clear, we've been off the charts now for several years.  Which is to say, all bets have been off, and it's anyone's game, to fling a few more idioms into the trope.

The closest analogy might be a space probe continuing to return data long after any theory of matter, space and time would seem to allow it to do so.  The control room, remaining calm, but necessarily at some distance from the usual discourse of their fellows, has merely been attempting to parse the data and respond appropriately, while keeping the pizza budget at a minimum, going teetotal, and putting in an industrial-strength coffee machine.

Another danger, I suppose is that a solution will appear through the diffractive lens of the residuum of kin and extended kin.  (See below for the difficulties there, which are actually a bit extraordinary.)  As difficult as life is presently, there's precisely zero possibility of going back into the world of those folks, or taking their views as veridical as to my experience and work.  They had their work, and the fact of a family presented certain difficulties for that, and so their relationship with their family was conditioned by certain outside factors.  (Something they might do well to think about for a bit, and orient themselves in relation to that work.  Even in memory, long afterwards, it might be spiritually useful, and even essential.)  But that time is past, and one can't (and shouldn't ever want to) go home again.  The answer is in the future, which is to say, the present.

Also for the list: this city, particularly in its more civilized areas, but by no means exclusively in those strata, is positively lousy with the occult.  Not evident at first -- you have to be in the spaces, watching what's going on, in order to pick up on the stranger things.

"Suffer no witch..."

I am forcing myself to be very vigilant, despite the exhaustion.  Having survived the headwinds of the winter, and not knowing exactly their source, I am acutely conscious of the fact that there are a great number of people in this culture with the means at their disposal of doing a great number of things to other people.

The way ineluctably seems that of Thoreau -- Walden it must be.

(The memory recurs of a production of Much Ado in conservatory--I was Dogberry, and during one rehearsal, I switched a malapropism a bit, and "Be Vigitant" became "Be Viagrant"  (this was 1999).  The director, one of the grand old men of American regional theatre, with a bit of awkward stammering, kindly suggested that I not do that.  Much of doing classical comedy consists of knowing when there's sufficient freedom to do things like that.  The opposite extreme was in Cincinnati one Sunday matinee, when some of the cast members (I conspicuously absented myself from the game) began swapping in names of social diseases for different character names.  As it turned out, one of the handful of people who had shown up to watch the fledgling classical company that Sunday afternoon was a Shakespeare professor at a local college.  That said, I have indulged in the odd game of "pass the penny" in outdoor drama (best defense: midarm handshakes) to while away the long summer evenings while playing the angry Indian.)

 The winds are beginning to pick up a bit.  

 In the past, like most folks, I think I was mirroring people a bit when I talked about the need to get away from worldly thinking.  The experiences of the last six months or so have wrought a bit of a change in that (and, perhaps conclusively disproved the notion that language is merely a game that one could play as if one played no other).  

The people caught up in the world are drawn into the energy of the social form, and have their being by fulfilling the purposes of the social form.  It is possible to be in the place where they are, surrounded by the things that they are surrounded by, and not be caught up in these social forms.  It is possible to have a consciousness that is sized precisely to the dimensions of a single person.  (Cf. Epictetus?)  

The visitors from the East have sensed this, I think.  Hence the emphasis to American students on dispassion and freedom from desire.  "Be here now," etc.

We speak of what we know, and testify of what we believe.

Slowly and deliberately advancing towards the prospects of a stable place to work and a living culture to draw forth the work.  I'm not the one to save the Republic.  Frankly, I might be the only one who has noticed the difficulty, given the general prosperity for the comfortable preponderance, and the power of television culture.  But I doubt I'll be able to do much here in the length of a normal human lifetime.  

A stable place to work and a living culture to draw forth the work.  

I actually doubted it myself, when I first started writing about it at the beginning of the springtime.  But it has proved to be true -- with the heat, the social forms arise, and there's something in the general mind here that is simply an attack on those thought poor or vulnerable.  Wealth is vindication, and a sign of favor from the divinity that is no longer thought to exist.  Add the corruption at the top, and it needs no Solomon to realize that Joseph would be better off in Egypt, given the mimetic fury of the elder brothers.

I must get back to modern philosophy.  I've been reading Dewey's stuff, and he's careful not to challenge the mind too much, and that has its downside.  If I'm not thinking as hard as I can, the day is wasted.  Dewey had the comforts of office and reputation (not to mention income) -- the fellow in the road outside has only his purchase on the world.

My mind is on a couple of Shakespeares, and how I might stage them in Bosnia.  As that's very unlikely, perhaps I'll work the images into something else.  People in novels make plays, sometimes.  Or go the Granville-Barker route and novelize the concept itself.

 Another beautiful summertime day in the city of the power of evil.  

Gently down the stream -- casting furtive and increasingly panicked glances at the inhospitable shores, as the faint roar in the distance increases ever so slightly.

 If you try to fashion a post-Enlightenment society without a care for knowing what it is that things are, and how it is with things (or, to use the older vocabulary, truth sub specie aeternitatis), the world goes on, some suffer, some are are rich, everyone is born, and everyone dies, but everything is veiled by appearances.  Which makes the tasks of the darksome folks considerably easier.

With each day I become more certain of this: the general condition of thought here is clouded, and the fabric of life is simply being buoyed along by the fruits of industrial prosperity.

If you have true work, focus on that work.  Then make connections carefully, based on perceiving a correlative attentiveness in the other person.  Don't encounter by anticipative imitation.

There are certainly people who can master the easygoing, craven sensibility -- I think they're in charge now, and their ethical sense is, for the most part, none too strong.

 It is not for us to know why we must do so.  Why we must do so is merely a private conjecture.

 For graces received, cont'd:  

For the last few rainy and cloudy days, when there seemed to be a generally evil vibe in the city, I've been surrounded by very peculiar and threatening persons.  The absurd extreme was at the philharmonic lobby jumbotron when some genuinely frightening characters sidled up and stood over my chair as I looked through the program annotations.  But also elsewhere.

And now, today, the sun breaks through, and as I try the patience of the baristas by plugging away at the the piecework that flew in through the transom on the holiday, I realize the fellow next to me is speaking Serbian, and is a film director of some kind, and he's speaking to an amiable LA film type in for a visit.  And then two French women in town for a vacance raise the civilization level of the nearby tables a few notches.  All with the sunlight.  Deo gratias.

Perhaps I should have cornered the very nice LA film type and pitched something, but I haven't yet figured out the dramatic angle on Hegel's Logic or Dewey's complete works.  And I'm in no place to be making friendships.  Eyes on the tabernacle, writing in the notebook.  

This city is evil -- but the nature of the time will change with the sunlight. 

The peculiar danger of post-Enlightenment corruption is the fact that it masquerades as rationality.  Look carefully at things, and at people, rather than trusting the categorical judgments of strangers. 

We aren't all in this together.

 I do need to keep mentioning this: I'm not pining for Belgrade or Sarajevo or Cluj, or Pirin, or aywhere else on political grounds.  In Belgrade, I know that I can get a cheap balcony ticket to the JDP and then head back to a small studio somewhere and write a long critical piece.  In Sarajevo, I know that I can go for a morning run to the Yellow Fortress (again from humble digs), and then sit on the cafe on top of the good supermarket with some kefir for a couple of hours and work through some philosophy.  Etc. etc.  

Over this last winter, a very difficult time,. I've come to understand the present nature of my country, and why precisely it is that there's no room for me to do my work here.  Being one of hundreds of millions, saving the Republic isn't within my power.  It is within my power to do the work that I'm trying to do, and for that, I'm going to need some space from these folks.  

We are responsible to the work that we are supposed to accomplish.

 So, how is this dialectical?  If we just use the medieval notion of dialectics, which reduces to the way that different ideas change with context, and the introduction of other ideas, then the interplay of the individual's will and the prompting of the spirit constitutes a small battle of ideas. (This is probably it, given the mess that follows.)

In the Hegelian context (my reading of the moment, not an expert, or even good at it), what is sublated out is perhaps the individual's notions of their own will and the notion of what the holy event would be.  These two things, in the negation (which is done by the individual) then suggest a larger world of the possible actions that might result.  I think that I might (1) buy chocolate ice cream, or I might (2) get some healthy fruit, and these two impulses illuminate the larger class of things I could get to eat.  The second is further sublated into the notion of action transformed into more beneficial action.  So I now have a world of possible things to get for dinner, and, further, a world in which the things that are better for me prevail.  And this is the sphere of the spirit's action: the foreseeable events, and the ways in which they could go well rather than badly.

By willing the collaboration with grace, the individual is negating their own impulse, while holding onto these spheres (c-classes) of possible actions of a certain kind.  And they are then open to something else happening within these spheres.  But the negation of their particular impulse (chocs, fruit) is valuable in that it brings these worlds of possible experience into their consciousness.  They are negated only because it was the individual that thought of them, so perhaps it's the individual that is sublated out as the one who acts well, past the particularities of their initial impulses.  The spirit is not the eventual action, but just the movement from that initial particularity, to the universal, and then the realm of possible alternate particularities.  The spirit is not in that realm of possible actions, but the fact of the movement away from my initial particularity to that expanded realm.  The movement, not the substance.  Which perhaps brings it much closer to the things that I can will, and prompt by my actions.

Frankly, I'm no dialectician.  Which, seen dialectically, is much less of a fault.  

Thenne the kyng stablysshed all his knyghtes and gaf them that were of londes not ryche
he gaf them londes
and charged hem neuer to doo outragyousyte nor mordre
and alweyes to flee treason
Also by no meane to be cruel
but to gyue mercy vnto hym that asketh mercy vpon payn of forfeture of their worship and lordship of kyng Arthur for euermore
and alweyes to doo ladyes
damoysels
and gentylwymmen socour vpon payne of dethe
Also that no man take noo batails in a wrongful quarel for noo lawe ne for noo worldes goodes
Vnto this were all the knyghtes sworne of the table round both old and yong
And euery yere were they sworne at the hyghe feest of Pentecost.

Pentecost.  Veni, Sancti Spiritus.

The great feast at Westminster.  The king wears his crown, and the King's peace is upon the realm.  Walked up to the enormous crypto-Anglican edifice for Evensong after lunch.  Music compelling, as always.  

Listening to the interesting homily at St. Pat's that morning, I had an odd thought.  The rector was talking about his fright and shaking when he had to serve the Mass as a seminarian, culminating in being drafted at the last minute to hold the microphone for the Pope at Yankee Stadium.  As he was telling the story, he mentioned as an aside that the Pope blessed the servers beforehand, and then returned to the main plot, in which all went well, and he felt an odd peacefulness during the entire service, which he attributed to the Holy Spirit.

I began to wonder at that point about the dialectical nature of the spirit descending.  I'm reading an interesting summary of Hans Urs Von Balthazar's Theo-Dramatic texts, and it increasingly seems to me that he's using theatre as a sort of dialectic of the image, following the old tripos of logic (aesthetics); dialectic (theatre); rhetoric (logic?).  The (very) old scholarly discourse confronted thoughts in their linguistic form, but the modern correlative of this is the image, and the form.  Perhaps.  At any rate, the notion of a dialectical, or theatrical, experience of grace came to my mind.  We do things that cause Grace because the Holy Spirit is acting through us.

Start at the beginning.  Usually, we think of the infusion of grace as a passive act, with the active portion limited to assent, to the fiat voluntas tua.  But the only way that we see spirit, or geist is by the changes, by the historicity.  It's not a substance, but a sequence of actions.  So, under the scheme of passive infusion, we would just say that after the grace is received, as it were, certain actions are marked by having received grace in the past, which seems to miss the point of the Spirit actually being active in the present world.  

If, rather, the Spirit is active with the individual act, then things get a bit more complex and rewarding.  I can act according to the way that I think I should act, and I can act in the way I think I would act if God were prompting my actions, but we're talking about something different from these two scenarios.  I am acting in a way that comports with my notions of right, which constitutes my openness to the Spirit.  My action is then my own will, hoping for the good.  That hopefully looking forward to the event turns my attention to the future act, and I have willed it without knowing what it was.  

The standard line is that we intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of our actions.  This means we have to imagine a world that follows.  Essentially, I'm suggesting that the world that we imagine is a different sort of world, one in which we don't foresee the mechanically logical consequences of action, but we anticipate something else changing the situation, which is a justifiable claim, since such things have happened before.  And--this is the important bit--the change in the nature of the world doesn't change my ability to will the subsequent act.

So, as Benedict blessed his server at Yankee Stadium, he might have willed to impart to them the peacefulness of a great spiritual leader, and also been open to the work of the Holy Spirit.  As the spirit is action, not substance, it can only occur in what he did next.  If I will to cede my volition to grace, I must act.  But I do not claim the authorship of the act, as I choose to imagine the world after the act as being a different sort of thing, which would make the usual sort of willing an act impossible.

This is a long-winded walk around the thought, but what I'm reaching for is that Grace requires us to do things, but with a different relationship to the things that we do.   We don't make the world in advance in accordance with the usual assumptions.  We imagine the different sort of world, and will something within it.

Perhaps.

 

 The choice of a shipwreck survivor: to clump as much of the floating detritus together, and attempt to survive in the current place for as long as possible, or to assemble a few choice pieces, and start oaring for the shipping lanes in the the distance.  A difficult choice.  Much would hang on whether the folks likely to make themselves present are there in the context of rescue, or finishing off the survivors.

(Incidentally, that's another bit of flagrantly violating basic norms that seems to be the norm.  I was puzzled as to why everyone wasn't talking about how much damage was being done to post-WW2 international norms and laws in the last few years, but then I realized that everyone involved was either working for one of the sides, or hoping to make it into the cadre of the working.  Additionally, since the law of war (and law of the path to war)  is being talked about much more than it is being adjudicated, it's become a given that one's own country is faultless -- simply the practice of honest client advocacy.  In short, many of the old norms have simply been disregarded in this free, populist, television-legitimated, unilateralist approach to foreign conflicts, and the post-WW1 norms, i.e., the basic statements of decency shaped after the catastrophe that defined the end of European aristocratic rule, are now in danger as well.  Perhaps there will be an exception carved out for global superpowers acting unchallenged, perhaps somehow under qui tacet consentire videntur.   But it's dangerous to make the limitation on state war crimes a fuzzy equitable boundary.  These laws that are being erased in boom times might result in a few rogue swinging booms down the road.)

One of my foundational educational experiences was learning constitutional law in Indiana.  (Between Indiana and Yeshiva, I have basically the full red--blue spectrum of American legal thought.)  The professor, an elderly, honorable fellow who had drafted the state constitution and volunteered on the side with the local public defender's office, made a point on occasion of showing where, even when courts made good law, in their effort to make good law, the actual facts of the matter were sometimes disregarded.  One example was the Kennedy's institutionalization of their daughter (not much constitutional law made, admittedly, but somehow it was germane to the legal standards we were talking about.)  Apparently, she was quite sane, but the political influence of her family managed to obscure that fact, and the court simply made good law based on false facts.  So, you can can have a country with good laws and honorable precepts, but still, when political power chooses, the necessary manipulations can be made.  A salutary warning for those of us getting the tar kicked out of us by influential folks, perhaps.  And also a more conceptual warning that when the laws (and by extension) the politics are too beautiful, the underlying facts might be drifting further and further away.

The philosophical genius of the rightly treasonous continental cabal in Philadephia was Locke.  Consider the phrase "we hold these truths to be self-evident."  This is not simply a marker of emphasis.  Locke said that there were two kinds of truth -- the deep, transcendental truths that required some thinking about, and were greater than any one person, and then the things that were simply self-evident.   Essentially, in speaking about self-evident aspects of liberty, the Founders are steering us away from the swelling patriotic rhetoric that so often served the European tyrant.  It is a loyalty to the obvious, and it works best when being spoken about in plain terms.  The swelling rhetoric that used to fill the orators' speeches has its correlatives in the war theme music on the television channels.  

My only contact with the primary political legitimation of modern politics, the television networks, comes in the morning at the gym, usually before dawn, between weight sets, when I glance at the lines of televisions in front of the treadmills.  Virgil was, from all tellings, a great enchanter of ancient Rome.  He caused to be built, in the basement of the Capitol, a room of statues, one from each province of the empire.  To each, a bell was attached, and when the bell from one of the statues rang, rebellion was simmering in that province.  Basically, as I glance up at the array of the political spectrum, I'm looking for any bells.  (Usually, when I see them, I read the Times a bit more closely, but they've stopped sending me absurdly cheap promotional subscription offers, so I've shifted to the Guardian.) 

In the same section of Chambers Book of Days from which I gleaned that, there is the anecdote of how the Capitol came to ruin.  Strange adventurers appeared, with tales of gold, enough to make the golden age -- and it was all buried beneath the Capitol.  They convinced the Romans to let them dig deep underneath (deep/self-evident is the thought being referenced here, to make it explicit), and once the Capitol's foundations were undermined, it slowly collapsed.

One of my greatest regrets about the destruction of my library during PhD work from improper asbestos abatement was the loss of my copy of Chambers.  It was ex libris from one of the northern  universities, Aberdeen, I think.  First edition -- very inexpensive, a very lucky acquisition via the UK used books website.  And Robert Chambers was a northerner, I think.  (Resisting the impulse to ask the Google AI whether that's true, as a fellow having a good conversation over tea at his country house might resist the impulse to call in his empirically-minded secretary to check a fact mid-conversation.  The beauty of the thought is what sustains the conversation.)  Incidentally, the piece listing the English country house opera seasons in the Times (non-paywalled) a day or two ago was quite envy-inducing.  One pines for things of beauty.

The weekend read is very rewarding. From a priest author at a UK university, whose homilies I've heard dozens and dozens of mornings, but the work he's describing sounds even more extraordinary.  Particularly to a theatre fellow who is currently working through Hegel's Logics. But not only does NYPL not hold the English translation, but the libraries they're connected to (Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, et al.) seem bereft as well.  Odd, as it's a major theological work.  Might have to get creative -- I must read this book (these volumes).  

So, then, to return to the moral quandary of the shipwrecked one that began this run of thought.  Adrift, quite wet, cold, becalmed.  To assemble as much of the beauty of the present place as possible, or to set out on a vector for the trade lanes.  Well, the American option of the two seems clear, even if my mind is much more on Hegel than Locke these days.  

In one of his early essays (obscure, not later anthologized), Dewey, who was trained in (St. Louis, un-alloyed) Hegel, before moderating his tone in line with the Bostonians, criticized one of the works from a reigning Oxford philosopher:

Mr. Wallace is more serious and thorough-going in his methods than Jowett was; but there is the same occasional complete inconsequence, the same occasional sacrifice of ideas to the needs of clever statement, and the same undercurrent of feeling that it is hardly worthy of an English gentleman and scholar to be too anxious about definiteness and precision in thought.

We pine for the beautiful, but then we drift further and further from the shore, from the sure.  Make your course for the way things are.

 Genuine darkness in the city today.  With the holiday weekend, mostly tourists about.  But the city genuinely rather dark, spiritually.  Perhaps the handful of righteous souls tasked with praying for its salvation headed out to the Hamptons for the weekend.

 Pressed pause on the piecework to finish the Jena Logic before the research library closed for the long weekend.

If I have this, the last bit, cognition posited is where the mind looks at the mess that it's made, say, in seeing an apple, which it initially knew to be an apple in an utterly uninformative way, and then understood by taking terms of opposites and using them to realize what it is that an apple might be -- and then, in contrition, the mind restores the initial negative universal of the object as unilluminated object, i.e., it knows what it is.  And this picking the mess up from the floor, this restoration of the negative unity to the one-ness of the object is what the mind is.  That's its function.

So, perhaps the point is that the mind's work isn't the mess-making of taking the thing apart, but the proof on re-assembly.  So changing that middle state of realizing what an apple might be by describing it using pairs of opposites, doesn't assist the mind in what it thinks to be its central work, i.e., knowing (in an unilluminative fashion) what the thing is.

Perhaps.

 Today, thinking of Belgrade, the trams down King Alexander, past Vuk's spomenik (which, I think, is an ironic name, as the pedestal is very different from your average spomenik), and down to Parliament Square.  On my last visit, before heading out to Zemun for a bit, I had a place a few doors down from the church, very convenient to Sbux and the JDP.  Perhaps my spirit is wandering abroad.

Travelling around and sleeping in many different places, I have frequently had the uncanny sense of encountering people or spirits distinctly from that place (micro-place -- that hundred yards or so) in my dreams.  (St. Mark's proximity to those Belgrade rooms might have informed a few dreams as well.)  I have no idea--if they are mind-independent to some degree--whether they are the living of the place or the dead.

More things in earth and heaven.  Particularly in the bits in-between.

 Oddly, I'm carrying around a book (in anticipation of reading it over the weekend, when the research libraries close for the holiday) written by one of the folks whose homilies I've been listening to from the academic chapel in the UK for the last several years.  I was reading a book by Schwager, SJ (re: Girard), and another theologian was mentioned in the introduction, one whom I've been wanting to read since I picked up a copy of one of his books while in university, at a debate tournament in North Carolina (a campus book fair, as I recall).  As it turned out, not even the research collections had the works that I was looking for, but there was a commentary on them, and it had been written by the fellow whose homily I had just listened to a former prior of the chapel where I eavesdrop, and it was just downstairs.  

The correlation between spring and the increasing life within the social forms isn't illusory, or a factor of my own increased perception with the change in the weather.  An entire city turns vicious, thinking itself neutral, or even good.  A discovery -- Passover was a spring holiday, after all, some two thousand years ago.

The one who would peaceably disassemble this place stone by stone would do humanity a great service, I think.

And I was quite fond of it when I moved here.  The fact of the action of the place broke the spells of my childhood home, which was a good thing.  But then one examines the character of the action and and the kinds of people who are becoming active.   There are good cities.  But this one is not among them, nor does it claim to be. 

To be clear, I don't think I will prevail over the craven and corrupt folks here.  There are simply too many of them, and they have the belief that if they don't stick together in a social manner, everything will fall apart.  The civilization gives material prosperity to a healthy preponderance through the (actually very robust) mechanisms of postwar industrial prosperity -- but it isn't a meritocracy, it's a party, and you will have to be liked in order to be allowed in the door.  So a good number of worthwhile folks outside the prosperous preponderance will find themselves in the cold, and given how interlinked and data-driven everything is these days (employment,, housing, etc.), will likely find themselves unable to achieve the basic necessities of life.

But the manner in which I will prevail, although not over them, has to do with them.  I prevail by the vindication of ideas and true understanding.

It is wiser to think of the the ship of philosophy as always afloat, but always needing, not, indeed, the impetus of any individual thinker, but the added sense of direction which the individual can give by some further, however slight, interpretation of the world about.

(Dewey)

 The spring appears to have shifted tactics from years past.  Instead of blurring the cold and the hot seasons, and averaging out the temperature increase, it's simply intercalating August days with October days.  Today, quite warm -- the social forms are very enervated.  Dangerous times for the son of man.

It's not just that the heat makes people who are associated under questionable notions of the shared good do bad things, although that is the case.  The very shared reality of the place is constituted by this increased life.  They wouldn't believe it if you told them that, as a seasoned observer of people in public parks and other areas amenable to reading books and drinking coffee, I can distinctly see that, compared to other groups of people in the world, they demonstrate less of a civilizational context and act in a more craven manner.  They don't believe that anything extraordinary will come of humanity, and refuse to acknowledge the prospect of God.  They're simply trying to get more things, and so their comportment towards the possibility of encountering others or understanding larger truths is reduced to commercial transactions and television.

Went for a run in the park, on the old route, before lifting.  My first run since arriving in mid-November (as it was warm enough to not need cold running togs, and laundry was to be done later in the morning anyway).  Very different crowd, and much more crowded than in the early Aughts.  The run to the reservoir and around (only one lap, as I was lifting afterwards) was very familiar ground.  But then, from the reservoir to the park gate, despite the fact that I had entered the park right at the opening time, I was surrounded a few times by the running clubs -- very annoying people who smell like unventilated New Jersey apartments.  Like the large agricultural operations in the Midwest, when you have that many organisms packed together, the smell is magnified.  But the first bit of the run was nice.

Apparently, the city running clubs are a worldwide thing.  Saw one in Belgrade on my last visit--the fact that an injury kept me from running every morning on Zemun quay still irks me.

Requested a few Bosnian novels from the deep archives of the library.  As I've been through all of Andric a few times, I thought I'd check out the newer stuff.  

Genuinely not just whistling Dixie when I talk about the character of the times and how much I need to get away from here.  A life takes on a shape, and after the childhood and early years shaped my my folks and their professional difficulties, and then encountering extraordinary corruption on the three paths I tried, I've developed a very private, but true way of working.  That is the shape of my existence, and travelling and exploring and working privately will preserve what this city is even now trying to erase.  Something will come of it, with respect to the larger world, but my focus is not on encountering or trying to change the world, but in clear-eyed study and writing, and deepening my knowledge of the time.

 With the six-month mark that passed a few days ago, I think another sort of threshold was passed.  Every day up to then, if Scotty had managed to get the transporter working, I could have popped back into Pirin or Bar, or somewhere and been up and running within a day or so.  But at the beginning of the last peregrination, in Bucharest, it was a fortnight before I was up and running at dawn and enjoying a bit of vino with dinner on the weekends 

(I have a rule when travelling that the vino (which is the strongest form of mind-altering substance that I enjoy) doesn't get added to the dinners until the day is fully in place.)

There will be a bit of repair time required, I think.  Perhaps not the full fortnight, but at least a long weekend at this point, ideally with some sort of sauna involved.  The human frame was not designed to accomplish the feats that I have been accomplishing over the past half-year.  

 It's odd.  Especially with the springtime, I awaken in a rather hopeful mood, despite the circumstances.  (As distinct from the winter, when there were other things going on when I awakened.)  But after walking a bit, I realize that this is a false condition of the mind, that I'm a bit like one of those waving toy animals you see in gift shops, waving the paw forward and backward with a stupid grin on the face.  And then I awaken a second time, and the process of focusing the energies begins.  (Especially when I'm up early enough for Lauds before the workouts. Latin focuses the mind.)

In the same way, I sometimes think of the upper-Midwestern college towns that I decamped to during the plague years -- Moorhead, Fargo.  Way above the usual American lines of latitude, and I rather liked that.  College libraries that seemed unchanged since the 1950s, which was fine with me, as I was looking for works in the hundred years or so before that time. (And the local library had interlibrary access to the state university library, so I discovered a few contemporary Russian novelists in translation.)

But these headwinds, the ones that have blown me off course three times and landed me in the present predicament, will also find me in these places.  So just as I focus the mind a second time, the second awakening each morning reminds me that I need to find the means and the strength to find a place over the waters.  I think I can do it.  I've been there before.  Twice, actually.

 One shadow that falls across my situation from apparently having encountered clusters of corrupt folks at the institutions that I studied at is that none of these organizations have much of an interest in my success.  Quite the opposite, likely, as I could describe a few events in all of these places that would make things rather clear.  And with the distance from the theatre crowd and art form that began this whole odyssey, I don't really have any institutional interests or social groups with much of an interest in my continued existence.  Even the folks with whom my family worked while doing confidential work for the government would likely divide along the lines of my family's breakup, and I tried to stay away from both factions, for obvious reasons.  

My reason for slipping this bit into this evolving blog of record (and it hopefully will scroll into the archives soon) is to explain why I place such an emphasis on my private work, and that my private work isn't a crusade against past perceived wrongs.  I'm working with the objective, intellectual ideas of the past in ways that can reveal things, while fighting to survive.  I keep my private work private because there are no trusted collaborators or institutional loyalties, frankly.  I do my own work, and my own work is valid, and there's not really a need for any institutional crusades against the fellow who is doing his best to avoid conflicts with institutional forces.

Onward.

 Odd, about a fortnight ago, it seemed that, in an enormous room, for some time, the only sick and coughing people were the ones sitting near me.  Since that point, it seems that every day, I'm sitting next to someone (different every day) who is pounding their keystrokes loudly, and similarly, it doesn't seem in evidence in the rest of the room.

It's good to vary one's annoyances.  Keeps off the monomania and fixed notions.