The only reason I joke about going completely mad is that it's a classic symptom.
#onwardsancho
Windows update continues to swamp the hard drive with files, making the apps unusable, which adds a good bit of keep-it-running upkeep time to the daily tasks. Additionally, something about the connection at the research libraries makes a DISM repair impossible, and it would require more than the hour or so in which I can plausibly hold down a chair at the cafe on the strength of some peanut butter and bananas. Will have to find another patch-in point for the matrix.
Today marks the six-month point of being cast back down into the city from the Balkan peregrinations, after the abrupt decline in work forced a hasty decamp via Bucharest. 11/15, Otopeni to Idlewild.
Through the entire six months -- difficulties, blizzards, storms, lack of sleep, etc., etc., I have kept my eyes firmly on the evils of the present place, and the hope to get back to a neutral and productive place of discovery and basic sufficiency.
I will not change my mind as to these matters. If I did, I would lose even what I have. My only existence is as the one fighting this battle.
Onward.
εἰ δὲ ζήτημά ἐστιν περὶ λόγου καὶ ὀνομάτων καὶ νόμου τοῦ καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς ὄψεσθε αὐτοί· κριτὴς γὰρ ἐγὼ τούτων οὐ βούλομαι εἶναι
Acts 18:15
If the controversy has to do with the words and names and law of your own, see to it yourself. I do not wish to be a judge of such matters.
The law ineluctably has to do with language. The modern word 'law' traces from the Old French 'ley,' which has the same sense as the poetic ley. It is a word remembered that helps us to judge the event. When we find the dead body in the library with Col. Mustard holding a bloody lead pipe standing over it, in order to judge the event, we consider whether we would use the word murder to apply to the event, or perhaps manslaughter or misadventure. So perhaps Gallio doesn't get off as easily as he does in the usual translations -- it isn't that the matter is merely about words, but it is about the words of a certain people, the diaspora Jews.
Wilde, on trial in England, was questioned as to whether a certain expression was blasphemous. He replied something along the lines of "I have no idea -- blasphemy is not one of my words." If someone speaks falsely about an important thing, perhaps there are two risks. The first is empirical--something might be done badly, the wrong button might be pushed, a nation might go to war, someone might go without dinner. The second, nonpragmatic and nonpragmaticist danger is that the speech held to be false might confound the reticulated structures of belief and understanding within people. If someone in a position of authority teaches that God is merely a harmless delusion of the past, everything in society will keep chugging along, and while there may be some incidental effects, such as a lack of Sunday church attendance, but that is not the meaning of the event. Each time God is referred to, the reference is shortchanged, and dismissed in the mind. The world becomes a dull, pragmatic affair in which we are to do the expected actions, and then die and be buried by our kin. I suppose you could say that the consequence of the changed belief is another belief, but this second belief also has a qualitative aspect in being more circumscribed, and bearing relation to fewer things. The world of our ideas can be either lively or dim, and the difference is merely an idea.
Gallio's expression is interesting. He doesn't use the strong form of decision and speak of will. Instead, he uses a word corresponding more closely to 'wish,' as if he were a Homeric god looking down on the matter from Olympus. Now, a diligent and empirical fellow with general jurisdiction over the cases and controversies arising within his area of control might seek to keep the peace (note the locals' subsequent attempt to create a genuine matter in controversy by beating up a synagogue official), despite the risk of entanglement in religious questions. Religious questions, at the time, stood proxy for matters of ethnic law and order -- each people had their god, and the ways in which they spoke of their god often had very much to do with the character of the people. Gallio's abstention is prudential, apparently not compelled by his own law. In matters between nations, perhaps there is no guide in our own law or custom as to how to interfere in another's law. To do so is not a crime, but a mistake. So to stand between nations, or perhaps between groups of people using different words to describe the world, one has to have a robust personal sense of right and wrong, and right words of one's own at the ready.
Again, all of these thoughts of the Balkans are about places in which I can think and work, and write, and have some connection to the culture. My own country is facing some trouble with corruption, and I'm unable to find such a place in the place where I was born, so I am forced to a life of discovery rather than comfort. Adorno, Auerbach, Mann, and Benjamin, among many others, faced a similar fate in the last historical era (taking a stadial view of history is always risky in the near term--one can only know when a reversal happens, not precisely what it is), with varying results.
From the chyron on the news channel feed at the inexpensive gym, it seems the Chinese are reading Spengler (decline of the West, shadowlands, etc.). I've never actually read him, but the way the contemporaneous philosophers speak of him, it seems a bit like a fellow who sees Krakatoa erupt, and writes a bad poem about it, which is reprinted in all the newspapers. Dismissing the poem is easy enough, but then the ashes, and the season of darkness.
Gently down the stream, within the mechanisms of industrial prosperity.
In my mind today, reading Henry James in Studentski park, or maybe at the coffeehouse at the corner, waiting for the philharmonic concert, after which I might try the microbrewery beer hall just above Dorcol and Baljoni market for the first time. Given the parsimony of past visits, I've limited myself to staring at the chalk-board lists and imagining the tastes as I walked past after the theatre or the concert, but it might be time to finally stop in for a pint or a half pint, and read on the porch in the evening.
Studentski is nothing in itself, much like WSQ before the renovations that turned the latter into a quad for NYU, but it's a comfortable place to read, surrounded by the academic buildings. I actually stumbled upon it on my first visit when looking for a place to drink the thermos of coffee and eat the $1 bread from the convenience store before the theatre, after walking over from the other side of the Sava. A few days later, I was looking at a map (which I try to avoid at first, in cities, the opposite in the countryside), as I needed to buy a ticket for the orchestra, and noticed that the venue was next to a large park, surrounded by academic buildings, so I envisioned a broad, majestic green space, like the quads at universities in the American South. And then I got there, and found instead my friend, the run-down spot that had proved so hospitable. On my most recent visits the dogs seem to have taken over the place in the evenings (city yuppie power dogs, not strays, though I have a Beograd stray story or two), but I still have a sentimental fondness for the place.
Double workout this AM -- lifting, as opposed to morning Mass, as I've been a bit confounded as to the latter. Physical strength was a big part of the survival plan for this recent stretch, so I've been lifting fairly hard and skewing the meals towards the more expensive protein-rich options (100% peanut butter, $2.69). (I started this turn at Pirin before being cast back down into the city via a flight from Bucharest, at the ski resort in the mountains in the off-season -- a weight machine or two and some barbells, but it was enough.) Emphasizing the physical strength seems to have been a wise call, but I'm not sure all of the innards are in the right place and functioning after those months of biblical adversity.
And I must remember that I am not my strength; my strength serves me, and a different sort of strength (like running 5-6 mi. before dawn, as usual on the most recent Balkan peregrinations) would serve me equally well. Easy enough to say, but as one walks down the street after lifting weights hard for an hour to ninety minutes, the temptation exists to walk through the world as an animal might. So I force myself to sit and read Henry James for 45 minutes. Enough for the nonce.
Against the erasure.
As foreseen in blog postings when the winter was trying to land its last blows, the struggle has certainly shifted to the geist, and the social forms, ennervated with the warmth of the season. The Jewish Passover was a springtime holiday -- perhaps those conversations with Peter and others on the long road to Jerusalem had something to do with the weather.
Interesting to read the context of early Hegelianism in America -- in its undiluted form, a creature of the west, associated with the German emigrants (and American civil war heroes), and their associated sodalities and restaurants. Amusing anecdotes about Alcott and Emerson coming for a visit and being put outside their texts by the finely honed minds of the laborers.
The past, as Dewey said, is to be found in the present. Acting nobly, and with self-possession, and studying philosophies and personalities closely, will likely cause people to call you old-fashioned. But whatever that word might mean to them, they are characterizing something in and of the present.
Ascension. Solemn observation of the departure of God. It's just us now, men of Galilee. But that which we are, we are.
As my mind keeps drifting back to southern Europe, I have to check myself from pining for the fleshpots (or, to be specific, pans filled with vegetables, pasta, and cheese and a bit of panem et vino on the side). The point of being there was the discovery and the work, and I subordinated the creature comforts to those things, rather ruthlessly on occasion, so I can take my own testimony from then as a sort of justification as to my motives. The understanding, and the work. These are the things that I am attempting to preserve against the adversity. And, over the years, I have come to strongly suspect that this adversity is directed precisely against those with the capacity to understand, and work, and discover.
That said, some work of noble note may yet be done.
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!
Part of the reason that I dwell so much on the nature of the work of some members of my family is that I have had the increasing sense with passing time that the forces that surrounded me had a diffractive effect between myself and the world, as to who I was and what I was trying to do. (And at times exerted a diffractive effect on my own understanding.) Part of it is that it's just odd to have struck out to do three eminently achievable things and to have struck out in peculiar circumstances as to all three. People tend to have fixed ideas about things and people, and excessive artifice in gift-giving usually betrays the recipient of the gift.
Classical location for the thought, perhaps, as odd as it might sound: Heidegger on the ontological distinction. We have being, and tend to see other beings as objects, not really fathoming what it is to be.
Onward.
Was surprised to find that my being cast down here for a bit coincided with a change of Archbishops -- having now seen a fourth one in with some prayers to St. Patrick, perhaps I helped an iota or two in the furlong-length larger struggle.
In the one of the first sermons, I was surprised to hear him talk about the theatre -- but then it turned out to be a revival of "Hello Dolly." Silent gnashing of teeth. But then I recalled Egan doing something similar in his first sermon, praising American art for a bit, saying how glad he was to be back to see some, and the specific he offered then was Gilbert Stuart's paintings of Washington. And Egan, having just rewritten the code of canon law, was nobody's fool.
Listen for the said, and the saying.
Cynical view: The American mind as indolent emptiness, with nothing limiting its potential malice, a negative capability ready to take on whatever form given. The sort of thing you would expect if you were to give a comfortable preponderance of a certain, newly constituted population the means to live comfortably, and the notion that they should use this safety for moral improvement got lost somewhere along the way.
A bit confounded as to morning liturgies. After a few months, I got to the point at which the mechanics of the cathedral, which involve a small army of external contract security and ushers, and sense of the event more akin to a Knicks game than a divine liturgy, made the frustrations obscure the work of the liturgy. And the 7:30 at the parish has proved problematic sometimes for very different reasons. Additionally, I've always been a bit uneasy with the crowd that's around there in the hour afterwards, making meditation problematic.
So, lengthening the gym workout a bit, and retaining the online/time-shifted daily liturgy of the word from the UK academic chapel, and the morning written meditation.
Hopefully, I'll figure out a way to leave this place before too long, but if not, I suppose that there are a few other local options for the morning.
Another day, trapped by mysterious forces in the gutter of the thugs' paradise.
Like a character in Balzac, sitting in the sunlight, holding down a cafe table of the park on the strength of two or three coffees through the morning, gazing into the middle distance vacantly when looking up from the small stack of books next to his cup and saucer. His winter-weight wool hat, worn and shiny, but from the best milliner, and his suit of the fashion of three or four years ago, the creases in the thick wool rounded from repeated hand laundering. A small bird stares at him querulously from the shadows under nearby tables, where the summer tourists have more freely scattered the crumbs of breakfast.
Non habet equum, non habet aequum.
I go on.
Approaching the six month mark dedans l'abyme.
This isn't just a question of contextualizing the encounter in a useful way. After so many years in this place, and having seen it from so many angles, I can see the ways that people are conditioned to react, the manner of having life that is suggested to them, and I can see that this way of living is completely transparent to the folks doing bad things.
Further, I think it's an uncontroversial position to say that the people who are doing bad things are the ones in the positions of power in this city. Effectiveness is prized, and the most effective ways of being effective have increasingly little to do with right and wrong. Note the way that language has changed in the time of this city's ascendancy -- what does "impactful" mean, anyway? And, in a phenomenological context, what is it to be "immersive"? When language stretches, a condition underneath is attempting to find a marker to hold its place at the table.
Six months -- and the adversities have been biblical, or, for a fresher frame of reference, on the level of the gulags. But I have at least mostly survived it, and I still have a clear eye on the world.
Of course, this is because mentally, I am living as if in another place. This morning, reading Henry James in Dorcol or Studentski, or reading the Kantians in the shadow of the Hungarian Church in Cluj, or the Greek Gospels in the old (now Lutheran) church in Sibiu. I live not where I love, as the song has it. Largely because, if I were to fit my notions of having life to the place I'm actually in, I would lose even what I have.
Next year in a holy land.
I try to look at everything from several different gradations of hope and despair. Look at the darksome view, and then look at the sweetness and light view. That said, looking at the last however-many years, one thing that would falsify the darksome view is that I managed to find an academic editing opportunity, which although paying a small fraction of market rates for work that was very difficult at times, enabled me to get on a plane and nomad through southern Europe for a couple of years or so (it wouldn't have been sufficient for a stateside existence). At first, this seems to conclusively establish that there is at least a sliver of light of good fortune in the general mix. But then -- a counter argument arises -- this was work for a foreign corporation, and it would have been very tempting for some people simply to omit it from the taxes completely, which would of course have been a massive crime, however desperate the circumstances. Of course, for many reasons, not the least of which is the massive investment in legal education, I told Uncle Sam about the funds regularly.
So there's still at least a theoretical chance that the darksome view controls, Dover Beach, end of the innocence, work for us or die, etc., etc.
But that minimum sufficiency, however insufficient in the home country, allowed me to make a jump and do real work for a bit. That's the bit that counts.
Still trying with all my soul to get back there -- the theatre festival in Transylvania is a little over a month away. But until the Return from Egypt:
Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta.
Given Paul's Macedonian itinerary in the readings, thinking about Skopje and Pirin. Really wondering if I should have risked everything and ventured beyond the turn-around time, spent the return fare on another rental. Fortune sometimes favors the idiotic in that respect, and I walked into a difficult and dangerous time here on my return. (And ongoing.)
But there's also a moral obligation to the places that you visit. You arrive with bread for the journey, pay fairly, and leave the place clean. You don't just cast yourself upon the shore like some small-boat migrant or Norman duke.
I was actually on the Via Egnatia when I was in Epidamnus (Durres). Rather dreary stretch of modern road, at least for the first few miles from the shore. Unlike my experiences in several other cities, I didn't actually walk on the stones -- merely the vector from the ocean.
It would be possible to account for my current difficulties according to the world of appearances, and the commonly held view of things -- in ways not at all to my credit, and more to the point, in ways that everyone actually involved would know to be false.
But this is why I mention The Matrix so often -- the false folks, the ones who are just playing a game to hold their economic or professional position, with not much being accomplished by it, and generally disavowing any notion of truth, are playing the game according to appearances, and perhaps intend precisely this outcome.
I've never turned to fight them, though for some reason I've been surrounded by them since I left my family's home. I've done real work, and engaged with the reality of the ideas that I've encountered.
There is much corruption going on inside the world of postwar industrial prosperity here. The architects of that system, perhaps knowing their children well, idiot-proofed the mechanism thoroughly. It would take a lot of civic disorder to stop the trucks of frozen hamburgers that roll in every week.
Omnis homo mendax. I go on.
Interesting, the UN High Rep for Bosnian Sittlichkeit is to stand down sometime after a demarche to the home office on Tuesday. I know nothing about this, and have heard nothing about this, but apparently there were some procedural issues with his appointment, given the stasis between the Great Powers on the East Side. And there's much banter of a third entity in recent weeks. Apparently the US is behind much of this (though I doubt that it's coming from Foggy Bottom).
Contra Ockham, of course -- entia non sunt ponenda sine necessitas, or something along those lines.
Complexly ignorant of the local politics, of course, but on the afternoon that I spent looking into it one day in a coffeehouse (the Western chain in Sarajevo -- one thing about the Balkans I didn't get used to was table service coffee), it struck me that an electoral college approach might help to preserve democratic legitimacy while allowing the actual powers to hold power (always important). Everyone votes for the electors, and then the electors negotiate among themselves to find which of their potential candidates is most acceptable to the others, and balance things that way.
Again, I have no clue what I'm talking about.
The Jewish Pesach is a springtime holiday. Social forms awaken, and people have their being within them, and know them as what it is to have life. With, on occasion, predictable results.
Notably, I think all of the Abrahamic faiths have a sacramental renunciation or ascetic memorial with the end of winter and the return of life -- long fasts, prayer, almsgiving.
Not to renounce life, but perhaps, by focusing your mind on God during the beginning of the annual floreat, to ensure that when you have life, you yourself have it to the fullest.
There is a moment in one of John Crowley's novels where one character says to another "I've lived in New York for (so-and-so many) years," and the other replies "Are you sure about that?"
Not, of course, questioning the duration.
Thoughts of Cluj, and the old medieval church, and the odd Hungarian theatre. Not to mention the national theatre, which is precisely as it was over a hundred years ago, which is remarkable. And Sibiu as well, the SJ church, and the old town walls. Transylvania on my mind.
Computer models said rain until 8, so I stopped in at a sbux for a rare coffee around 6, as I also needed to see whether I could get this winbook to process a download on the better wifi there. Of course, the rain stopped soon after I handed over my $4. Now I'm thinking of finding myself $4 short for an airline ticket or a rental booking at the critical moment. For the lack of a nail...
Dover Beach.
Which, looking on the bright side, is a beach.
Undoubtedly connected with the chill and clouds and such locally. Slogging through tough times is seriously inflected one way or the other by the weather. I'm certain a pleasant day in the prison camps was still a pleasant day. God's world of nature supervenes, and God in the world of human intelligence makes us cognizant of the fact.
I do regret the distance from what was the immediate family, but the estrangement seems to be mutual, as to every relationship. The atomic family, exploded. They were very good people, but the confidential government work had a very deracinating and destabilizing effect on their minds, and things just fell apart from there. Quite spectacularly. There are a few things touching both family confidences and government confidences that can't be discussed, but I do need to slip into this evolving record of the time that we're completely estranged, and there's no implicit agency, or basis of knowledge to be had vis-a-vis the others in the tribe.
And now, I will allow such things to scroll off the bottom of the page.
It's odd -- as the difficulty increases locally, my thoughts about the Balkans and southern Europe tend towards places in which my faith has prevailed against adversity. When things even out for a bit locally, I'm very much drawn to places of different traditions, especially as I've had some powerful dreams about higher things in those places, and I'd very much like to follow up on those. But with difficulty, my mind ineluctably reaches to the places and traditions of hard-won Christian worship.
This morning: Zemun, Brankov most.
Against the erasure. With all the force of my being. In the city of the power of evil.
--
I have received many graces during these difficult last six months. And I'm very grateful to have had the chance to go to the mountain (Pirin ) before the fight began, and to come down to the fight from the mountains.
But, to conceptualize this visually, imagine a fellow walking on the earth. As the graces arrive, they reveal more and more of the heavens above him. Eventually, what began as a difficult journey under a heavy cloud is lit by unimaginable heavens in a series of larger arcs above him. But there is still the same difficulty of the earthly progression, at the smallest arc of the journey, across the round planet. This is perhaps how to distinguish graces from temporal assistance. The road is difficult, but the stars are more clear.
Just to confirm the present state: off-the-charts bad. Travelling southern Europe, possibly finding an academic or artistic berth there, seems to be the only possible way to accomplish the work, given the adversity from the corrupt folks stateside. Dozens of times every day, I remember a specific place from my most recent travels, and those times are the hope and happiness of the present.
It's a peculiar country, sometimes, and also dangerous. You wouldn't be able to understand my situation from the general notion of life in these United States, but the folks actually involved with the culture here would certainly recognize the fact of de facto internal exile in a market economy.
I survive, I keep an attitude of dispassion, and I do as much work as I can. Tomorrow comes.
Research libraries opened two hours late today for some reason. Conceptually, a bit of extra time with Henry James after breakfast and before the tasks sounded like a good idea, but in practice, it was an exercise in avoiding the tourists and trying to find as warm a place as possible. Temperatures in the fifties, but an oddly persistent chill.
Bright side, excellent price on the new bag, which I was able to secure in the late morning, as opposed to the evening, after the tasks -- the reliable army surplus shop across from port authority saves the day again. Deo gratias.
I can't say that it makes any sense to continue on after all these years, but I continue on, and will continue to continue on. Sufficient is the day. Straight on till morning.
In one of the Star Wars films (not the real three, one of the subsequent ones), Obi-Wan is fighting with his light saber, and suddenly a door descends, blocking him off from the action. He drops to one knee, perhaps praying, perhaps crystalizing his purposes. When the door rises again, he leaps back into the fray.
My years of training and teaching swordwork were peculiarly formative. Not fencing. Although we trained to miss, we were the real thing in the context of negation, rather than an easygoing sport based on the ancient discipline.
It has stood me well in these times -- I salute my teachers.
As predicted, un-patchable fault appeared in the Rothco bag inside of two months. Their India/cotton products aren't bad, but the synthetics are weak material, stitched weakly with cotton thread. I reinforced points regularly with nylon, but the hard use tko'd the hold of the zipper teeth.
Back to BW Alpine, one of the last ones in the shop, as apparently they've been discontinued. If I had the storage space, I'd buy a dozen -- looks like BW switched to a zippered model.
When the catastrophe of things first descended, when I found all doors closed after the law degree, my focus was on absolute discipline, and a plan to get back to the mountain path from which I apparently had fallen. And that was a real challenge -- the mind faces some very powerful difficulties once even the most basic normal life falls away. And then I made it back to the path, and found that the path itself was a falling from the path, for some reason.
Now, the task is far more complex. While there is an attempt to find whatever older, living, honest paths might have survived, I am also faced with the reality that I might have to do most of my work extra mures. And it would be foolish to make getting back onto a true path the work of a life. So now, in addition to the attempt to find whatever true paths might remain, there is the attempt to accomplish the work within present circumstances.
Then, the question that presents itself is whether the work should be a response to the circumstances, or taken up despite the circumstances. I unequivocally elect the latter. That said, the task requires constantly pointing out that you are speaking through a screen of circumstance, that you are not speaking from the same place as the others. But that which you speak is despite the circumstance, not out of spite at the circumstance.
One of my usual analogies is that of a fellow in a very small canoe speaking to people sitting on their lounge chairs on a massive cruise ship. But it has slowly dawned on me that they don't know that they're on the ship. David Foster Wallace told the story about the old fish who met two young fish and greeted them, saying the water was fine that morning. Afterwards, one young fish turned to the other and asked "What's water?"
In antiquity, every god was greater than every human being. This is the notion of the absolute nature of the distinct spheres of existence. In the same way, today, every individual human is greater than the shared social forms of the culture. There is something particularly American about the notion that a single fellow's notion of the truth might be true or useful, as against the massed and amassed wisdom of an enormous, industrialized society. And this is because we inhabit a higher sphere, although day-to-day life in industrialized societies serves largely to erase such notions.
The only possible direction is towards the center -- not the center of the largest city, that was the mistake I made in my youth. The path is towards your own center, and by your own lights of truth. And even if life proves nasty, brutish, and a bit shorter than it otherwise might have been, to have stood when it was generally thought that you had no place to stand is to stand in the presence of something higher than the thoughts of the world.
The present political moment here seems to establish that a Kantian/Habermasian procedural basis for preserving a republican form of government is insufficient. The external mechanisms (television, etc.) can become the effective mechanisms.
Perhaps the Founders had it right vis a vis the direct election of the Senate. Ironically, the sort of discourse coming from the UK these days about which life peers should sit in the Lords might be informative and useful.
But for the nonce, just try to survive this momentary lapse in republican governance, I suppose.
Peculiar day, yesterday. Two events that had the semblance of being meaningful; they were close enough to events that would have been profoundly meaningful that some sense of that event actually occurred, although within the negation.
Experience is that which we should be grateful for, which is to say, our encounter with the world is always looking over the world's shoulder a bit, and being grateful to that other, larger thing that we can just barely make out within the totality of things. An animal, or a human living a rote life, when encountering the world, does so within a frame of reference without residue--the encounter with things is a zero sum game. But as you begin to sense, as a human, the limits of human intuition, the encounter with the world starts to look past the world, and with wisdom, this looking-past begins to be characterized by gratitude.
Christ, in the desert, was perhaps shown the events of the subsequent three years, and invited to take the fruits of this experience without actually encountering the time. Traditionally, we call this the work of the devil. (Presumably, he characterized it this way when recounting the story to his students.)
But, reason why such a thing would be ascribed to the evil forces. It is not necessarily authenticity, since everything has its own authenticity. It is not merely avoiding anything characterized by the evil ones, because that just poses the question again of why it should be so, and we are trying to make the connections between things more clear. Perhaps the answer as to why the fruits of experience, these things that the temporal mind thinks to be the aim of it all, don't accomplish the work of teaching us that we are within a larger picture than we can fathom, and the gratitude that quite possibly follows from living with that belief awhile. It would have separated him from the Father.
It is the ingeniousness of the form that gives the compact content its brilliance, and produces at the same time not an exposition, but merely an expansion consisting of subjective particularities, self-important vagaries, and abtruse bantering, together with much blustery ranting and grotesque, even farcical components, with which he probably intended to amuse himself, but which could neither please nor interest his friends, much less the general public.
(Hegel on Hamann)
As a quondam (et possibly futurum) Shakespearean text actor fellow, the local lectors have always been a source of interest, wonder and disbelief. This morning, one kept pronouncing "presbyter" with an emphasis on the last syllable, rhyming with "fear". It took me a moment to realize her logic: a shortening of "Presbyterian".
Stormy seas.
If you pay attention to the nature of the animation of those around you, you begin to get some sense of the nature of the city. For an example, consider the pigeons, relative to most other species of birds: a frantic, perpetually amorous catastrophe of a bird.
Firm hand on the tiller, redoubling the discipline. Traversing the time.
The great frustration is that the path of safety and discovery would require something that, in any basically honest civilization, would be well within the reach of someone with my degrees and experience.
So, for the nonce, there is danger, difficulty, and the city of the power of evil.
"I just read books."
(Three Days of the Condor)
The cynical view:
This country is not what it seems to be. (Few are.) To live among its appearances and semblances, to live in the country that it seems to be, certain quiet compromises with those in power have to be made. This applies equally at the Supreme Court and at the Waffle House. But once those compromises have been made, and the price of admission has been paid, you are free to enjoy the county fair.
All in all, it's better than most, but it's certainly not what it's cracked up to be.
If the argument is that the evolution of the industrial mechanism that has provided prosperity for a healthy preponderance of the people (though not as many as the continent's prosperity might have suggested) has to be preserved, and so, as opposed to traditional notions of right and wrong, "what works is good" -- if that is the argument, then, even in this case, every given individual within such a society is morally obliged to exhaustively defend the presumptive validity of traditional notions of right and wrong.
"It does not help at all to point out the steps in emancipation that have been taken and to argue prophetically that the rest is to come. We have no concern with the future. It has not come yet."
Union Trust Co. v. Grosman, 245 U.S. 412 (1918) (Holmes)
---
Holmes was the outlier among the Boston pragmatists and pragmaticists. He seemed to view the traditions of the law as a counterweight to the more free-form thoughts of James et al. (Though they certainly informed his course in Jurisprudence and subsequent writings.) The final break, if memory serves, was when James said that religious belief was true if it helped the believer. Holmes, as a veteran of some bloody campaigns with his Massachusetts-based unit, had his own notions, and they were firm ones.
Was perched on a rock reading some Krasnahorkai, when I noticed a fight rehearsal going on in the field below for a farce of Hamlet. Resisted the impulse to go down and give notes based on former work as an outdoor drama fight captain, but good to know I still have the eye.
Videlicet:
- Laertes is flipping the wrist on the head cut in the last phase -- keep it supinated, or it will drift downwards during the run.
- The (cert-compulsory) punto phrase is good, but as they follow through with a volte afterwards, Hamlet is avoiding into the diagonal cut. Punto, then break circularity.
- In the first fight, the counter-sigundes are getting a bit pointy towards the opponent -- keep them vertical, or at most, 45 degrees.
The pining for southern Europe requires some circumspection and care. These are nations with world-historical waves still coursing through them, and my own country, for its sins, is very much involved in the local minds, for good and for ill in all cases, I think. I don't want to exploit their hospitality, but after the last visit, I feel a very deep interest, on the level of dream-life, and I'd like to pursue that.
Ideally, I'd like to get back to Transylvania in time for the big theatre festival in Sibiu, though I'd likely only be able to afford a few of the ticketed shows -- the outdoor ones are less worthwhile than in the past, but still worthwhile, and the university ones are revealing. And the film festival in Sarajevo has actually provided a very unfiltered look at current world politics.
But this will (n.b., not the subjunctive) require an uptick in editing work, and that transom is conspicuously free of anything flying through it recently.
I do need to get away from their craven minds, if I am to realize my outlandish hopes of continued existence and such. The corruption that has brought me to this point is just an accident of the craven nature of the people running the show (cast a glance at where the buck stops for the quintessence of the species). And I've made careful record of their actions as I've encountered them. It's only been that way since the last generation (Woodstock>Wall Street), but these folks have marked my card and effectively ended my hopes here. It has been a difficult winter, and a difficult decade.
But while one's hopes are a creature of one's own place, they are not necessarily all located within one's own place. There is a world elsewhere, my tradition teaches.
Useless day -- attempted to rebuild the winbook, but this old dog apparently has learned one trick (reinstalled one OS) too many. Will have to figure out alternate means. Listened to a couple of lectures, one Oxon on tape, one Edinb. live, wrote an essay, and then headed upstairs to the research reading room. Had to compromise on the Hegel reading, given NYPL's oddly limited holdings (perhaps reflecting the prevailing misreading of Adorno's Categorical Imperative), so wasted a few hours reading about H's juvenilia, utterly unilluminative. Found McTaggart on the Logic, but it's keyed so closely to the main Logic that reading it while I'm working through Jena would be useless.
In sum, a day not well disposed. On the bright side, had an hour or two of sunlight in the park after Mass and before breakfast. So, there's that.
Brief game reset:
Have just survived a tremendous challenge (impecunious winter in a northern city). Considerable fatigue and oddities in the innards as the present empirical effects of it.
Still keeping absolute mental (the Project) spiritual (Mass, online homilies, daily essays on the readings) and physical (new heights in bench-press -- "when the water is muddy, I wash my cloak")
Apparently still blackballed from every job stateside, and not enough freelance editing work coming in to decamp to southern Europe for a sustainable room/board while exploring the culture. Present living conditions a bit dire.
The Project might bear fruit, but by design, that's a bit further down the line. Right now, I'm reading as much as I can in these areas. The only improved thing I have to show after these five months of superhuman survival is the mind (and the notes), and that's precisely the point that's being presently stressed a bit. Like using the blackboard on which the entire set of equations has been written to hold the wall together in a storm.
Top tier law degree; top conservatory masters and a decade in the art, and Midwestern monolithic (and corrupt) university ABD, and decent scholarship from all of the above in the portfolio, and in progress.
The difficulty is that the international positions seem to be looking primarily precisely to the corrupt folks who explicitly told me that they were going to blackball me, and the latter appear to be following through on their promise.
So despite the extraordinary physical difficulties, the extraordinary professional difficulties, and the present living situation, I still have hope. Arguably, this is the least rational choice that my mind has made, but it is the one in which I have the strongest confidence.
Onward.
It is a fine balance -- sufficient rest and recollection to exist, and the force of existence. To the transcendental mind, this is identical with the balance between Romanticism and Enlightenment knowledge.
(At which point, the non-transcendental mind points out that it might just be that the inner dichotomy is what we use to understand the mind-independent phenomena of time. To which the transcendental mind replies that the world is more than our eyes, and yet we actually know the world through our eyes. And by this point, the non-transcendental mind has lost interest in the question and surfs the web a bit.)
One thing that follows from growing up under a family that was (in retrospect, quite conspicuously) doing work of a confidential nature is that when the extraordinary occurs, one has to look quite closely at it to see if a meddlesome game's afoot. I'm certain that I've puzzled more than one angel during my journey. The journey itself, you see, was an extraordinary thing, and a bit sui generis.
"God bless the child that's got his own."
Upgraded the coat -- Amazon cheap, thin cotton wasn't holding up with nights in the 40s locally. After a (rare, first of the season) chest cold didn't lift for several days and some other oddities developed in the innards, stopped by the military surplus store across from Port Authority. I'm known there, very occasional customer for many years, given the cheap, strong togs. Bought my first pair of Corcorans there, I think. When I was at the Ansonia and doing a melodrama in the East Village. Used, but only for film work.
BW wool coat with liner. Under $50. The things that a country makes to go to war with are generally the strongest and best things to use. These are mechanisms -- take the best products from the mechanisms, without taking the purposes from the mechanisms.
The reading rooms of the public research libraries here have their peculiar challenges. (Beyond the occasional lounge singer belting out pop tunes.)
The vast majority of folks there are invariably there just to cadge the free internet and table space, which creates a distinctly different vibe than if the room had been filled with people reading books. Attention is looser, unconscious interactions towards the others increase.
The ideal, I suppose, would be separate desks (it's unnerving that any given person is the city is free to show up and sit down facing you, a few feet away, while you're trying to read), like in the old British Museum reading room (perhaps at the LOC reading room as well -- I've never been there, only seen photos). Given the character of the city, it's no exaggeration, and I think an uncontroversial statement, that an objective person, or even one grounded in the national culture generally, feels him or herself constantly surrounded by both genuine evil, and the indolent comfortable folks who are always open to the thought of it.
It's revealing, though -- the assumption that, so long as everyone is empirically doing much the same thing (encountering text, not talking) that the character of the room is sufficiently preserved. The difficulty is in the obstacles to concentration -- when a society actively creates a space for this use, it should be trying to move towards a more congenial environment for that sort of thing, rather than simply re-create the empirics of past tokens of the type.
As hard as I'm working to get back to the ex ante status of digital nomad in the Balkans (and it would merely require getting one of the lowly paid remote gigs that I'm obscenely overqualified for -- which is to say, it's not looking good), while this is rightfully the sole focus of my work, and I'm beginning to think that success in this rather soon may be necessary on an existential level, I recognize that it's downstream from the work -- when I was over there I was able to read, think, and write, in addition to maintaining the encounter with the arts, both the ones I'm qualified in, and those for which I'm simply the idiot savant (hold the savant).
And the books are here before me, for several hours in the daytime. (I actually briefly pined for access to these collections and cheap peanut butter during a dark day or two in Macedonia, even given the unimaginable associated difficulties.) So....
Hic Rhodus [It isn't, I tells ya!!!] Hic Salta [Salta est, salta est...]
----
Handke's essay on tiredness in his most recent collection: Precisely this.
It's an interesting approach -- instead of using fiction to illuminate the human condition, he considers individual physical phenomena within the shared empirical existence and addresses them directly (while renouncing any claim to the thing as such).
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