One of the few times I've been unable to refrain from commenting on the Times/Sunday Times website was when the Japanese lunar lander ended up making a hard landing on the surface of the moon, upside-down.  Underneath the photograph of the event (made by an adjacent probe), I left a simple caption.  "Made it."

It's good to be back at the ancient caravanserai capital in the mountains of Bosnia.  Setup on the Humble Quarters is now complete, and I'm setting up the tasks for the coming weeks.

Made it.

Increasingly aware that all the corruption I've encountered has been in the context of general industrial prosperity in the West.  So the malicious and false things go on, in the easy tenor of breezy conversation, and eveyone thinks that doing things in that manner must be right, because there's so much prosperity about.  

If the world had more faith in ideas, this could be corrected, but part of the Faustian pact was choosing to believe that ideas are inherently illusory or meaningless, and the only things that mattered were what worked.  (Though I've never seen an explanation as to how that last part could be tested without bringing ideas back into the picture by the back door.)

Tempore, mores, we have no bananas, &c., &c.

Costly unforced error of a momentary wrong button-push (after deliberately pausing to think it through)  during afternoon setup.  <$20, but on this budget, a Jackson is a non-insignificant matter.  I have rued for hours, days and weeks missing a classical concert or theatre show that I really wanted to witness,  because the tariff was in the neighborhood of $20.  

In fairness, after a very grueling three day journey.  At one point in the afternoon, I simply sort of slumped over.  I'd like to think that I made a conscious and deliberate choice to do so, but I'm not entirely sure about that.  

It's really the sort of world in which if you don't have private money, your life is made so difficult that having private money is thought to be a necessity.  Of course, if everyone had private money, the economy couldn't function, as most people with sufficient means simply wouldn't work.  With each passing day, Hoover's "square deal" seems a better desideratum.

The adventures in Balkan groceries continue.  Not nearly as bad as the country to the south, in which I had to forcibly extricate myself from what seemed to be a criminal conspiracy after trying to purchase milk and eggs at the most reputable store in the town -- here, just many missing prices, shriveled vegetables,  and one or two rude folks, though most are very nice and helpful.  It's not Germany, and that's perhaps the problem -- being non-German becomes an act of cultural self-definition.  But the Japanese, the Jedi, and the folks on the planet Vulcan all run very efficient supermarkets.  There's something to be said for having models of virtue that are more distant.

cc'd from the wordpress site:

Safe arrived in the ancient Caravan-Serai/National Capital in the mountains of Bosnia, and waiting to set up the Humble Quarters.

Was excellent to return to Belgrade, if only for an afternoon’s glimpse. After the traditional tall Americano in my Starbucks office across from the national parliament, walked down to Studentski Park and spent some quality time with Henry James, and then back up King Alexander street after dark, with the scent of the popcorn vendors on a warm summer evening, annd hopped on the tram to the bus staiton at Zuk’s Spomonik…

…at which point the tram went out of service at St. Mark’s, due to the evening’s protests. So I double-timed it to the bus stop sideways from the Parliament to catch the bus to the train station (also the same one as to the House of Flowers/Pebbles, I think), with the thought of then hopping onto a commuter train across the river, but that arrival board kept spinning in the wrong direction, as perhaps it was going out of service as well. At this point, I discarded all modern mass-transit conveniences, and set out for Brankov Most, as the walk would be at least theoretically possible, if I ran for part of it. (The luggage storage at the bus station has changed their hours, and so I was carrying the knap filled with clothing, computers, cooking pans, etc.) At the bridge, logic dictated that I catch the first bus across, as all buses were going across the river, and the first one that I hopped on happened to be going right to the bus station. Deo gratias.

And so, then a mysteriously long bus ride into the mountains of Bosnia, and then a morning arrival at the capital city. (Where the theatre season starts up a month before other cities in the region.)

The Catechism says that to come to Christianity, one has to first feel the presence of God, or at least something there, in nature and existence as a whole. Then, the God of Abraham emerges in history, and this is the second step. Finally, the events that unfold within that history describe the Christian mystery. I went to the mountains, and I am now in a city where the calls to prayer echo out every evening.

There’s a divinity that shapes our itineraries, rough hew them as we may.

 Overnight in Sofia, wandered through the Palace of Culture late in the evening, a fairly large crowd.  Sofia is a city surprisingly easy to navigate by the names of subway stops, at least in my limited experience of a few breief visits.  The eponymous subways top took me right there, just as "Teatralna" had landed me in a good neighborhood last time.

There seems to be a bit more borderlands intransigence than there was last time.  Perhaps the heat of summer, perhaps the ongoing war with a million individual tragedies in the north.  Small things, all possibly down to miscommunication.  Subway clerk sold and charged me for a 24-hour pass, but apparently rang it up as a one-day, which is a Euro cheaper, but leaves you without a subway pass when racing to the bus terminal in the morning.  (Easily solved by fishing a Euro coin out of my pocket -- always retain a bit of bakshish in the local currency until you're past the border.)  Finding the right gate at the bus terminal involved two quick, wrong answers in confident terms before the bus driver set me right.  Had EES biometrics re-done for some reason when leaving Bulgaria, and they asked me my destination, which I've never encountered when leaving a country before.  On the Serbian side, about a third of the stamp, including the year, was off the page, and when I went back to request the correct stamping, the refusal was rather peremptory.  The southlands have always been a bit less friendly to the USA types, with the exception of a hard 30% who are very nice, many of whom are involved in the tourism industry.

The smells of Sofia in summertime are nothing to sneeze your nose at.  Even just walking through the tunnels after two showers and clean clothes at the hotel leaves a patina on you.  Belgrade is a noticeably cleaner city.  It's like going from Jersey City to the Upper East Side.  Even mow, many hours later, I think there's still a bit of a patina on the travelling clothes.

After a few years of pushing hard on these journeys, with overnight on the mode of travel or in the station between travels, even a $40 hole in the wall (cheapest international chain) feels like the Waldorf Astoria.  A shower in the evening, clean clothes for the night, a shower in the morning, clean clothes for the day.  Rather like that system.

Perhaps much of this has to do with Christianity, a transactional and commerce-oriented faith -- and a something other than the determined simplicity of the faith to the south.  It raises the tone of the interpersonal contact, like the rising reed at the beginning of Gershwin's Symphony in Blue.  This is not a criticism -- for the most part, for all the clean, wealthy cities, we lack that insistent simplicity in the presence of God, and when things eventually come together, we will very much need that from them, and perhaps they will need some things from us.  For the nonce, Belgrade and Budapest are the two lighthouses on this side of the peninsula, and Christianity has much to do with this.  That said, one doesn't just jump into the fight to defend the flag closest to one's own.  These are ethnic wars between cultures based in religion, so in this post-Westphalian world, we should be absolutely neutral in foreign wars and entanglements.  (But try telling that to the cadre currently running things from NYC on behalf of Foggy Bottom.)

Preserving the doctrine of neutrality against the ratings-seeking cable news version of the world hasn't gone well recently.  Be the peace.

Belgrade is chaotic, as I had caught rumors of, much disorienting construction on the one or two routes I've traversed in the last few hours.  But very good to be here for a bit, before transisting to the east.  Folks seem much friedlier than in the last country.

Happenstance put me off the bus to the center on the side St. Mark's, which has figured in a few of my visits.  I decided that this was the entry point, then, and stood in front for a bit.  And just above the architrave in the front, a mosaic of the fellow himself, writing determinedly on a scroll of enormous length.

Point taken.

 "Hamlet is Bosnia."

Kenneth "Thin-Lips" Branaugh, A Midwinter's Tale

 Decollation of the Baptist -- the depths of late summer.  Bulgarian techno/dance music blaring from the buildings and adjacent apartments, stepping out in the balcony risks a lungful of atomized vegetable oil, etc.  Salome and the eternal return.

Perhaps only my sense of things, but the immensity of the mountains and the nature of the social culture here are a very, very odd mix.   Still trying to get a handle on how the basic social nature here fits into the scheme of things.  Very distinct from the Romanian/Transylvanian vibe.  Southlands.

Think of it this way. You are in Paris, and in a good frame of mind.  You feel the historicity of the place, you understand the motives for these palaces of stone, there is a good tone to the afternoon, and the weather is excellent.  You happen upon a street painter painting the river, and given your awareness of the moment, you can read the totality of your experience in the painting on the easel, so you purchase it and take it home.  

The mistake is to think that the afternoon existed for the acquisition of a painting.  It is a breadcrumb, and one doesn't savor breadcrumbs.  It is a marker for your experience, and an incentive to experience.

Much of modern logic would say that the painter, and you, and the city existed for the material purpose of the painter's creation, but that is Gollum's gold, not the good stuff from the river.

Experience necessarily involves the totality of experience -- we don't remember just a specific sensory intuition -- the specific sensory intution is a breadcrumb, from which we assemble the totality of experience as ourselves, as memory.

If reducing the high purposes of life to the mundane experience had by billions all over the world right now seems a bit of a let-down, then you might have gone through a wrong gate upstream, and carried from it the assumption that the everyday is already known and therefore unspectacular.  Everything we will ever have or know or perceive comes through that door.  Beware of reductionism in that regard.

Here ends the lesson, as there's coffee to be had.

If you have young and fit folks, but due to the structure of the society, they're largely forced to do manual labor or other such things, becoming obese and unattractive can become a power move.  The genesis of the pasha, perhaps. These things can be recognized and re-balanced in a society, -- necessarily using television, though that's usually the blunderbuss tactic.

Perhaps its about the notion of perfection being stronger than the notion of power.

 Feast of Augustine.  Tolle, lege.  Apparently heard in Milan.  Sweet ambrosia.

Take up and read.  Very important to remember that these are two distinct, and distinctly necessary, things.

 Again the peculiar morning exhaustion.  Not complaining, just noting the fact.  It's good to make explicit note of where such things happen.  Excellent run yesterday.  Made the goal of running straight to a certain lookout point with a wooden platform.  On principle, continued on a bit past it.

Lawrence (T.E., not he of the plumed serpent) said that the Arab cultures first noticed him and took him into their confidence when they noticed that he was recording everything, including his inner states, in his notebook.  Of course, he was likely working a second job that required a bit of annotation, but the point stands.  It's fascinating the way he's appropriated by folks (pace Said) seeking mystic widom, when the whole gist of the fellow was that this was an incredibly literate Fellow of an Oxon. college, who kept thinking.  Distant Christminster can save.  (Or perhaps there should be a comma after that first word.)  

Current humble quarters basically the equivalent of a states-side $40 motel room with kitchenette within walking range of mountains that go above the treeline.  Which was basically the purpose.  And perhaps foreseeably, the reading and writing dropped off without a proper table in the room.  Still trying to fashion a way of working that relies on none of these appurtenances, but after being raised in a certain culture and in a certain way, I still, chameleon-like, fashion the existence to the room, rather than the room to the existence.  

Perhaps I should start transforming the space.  Make it as close as possible to the lounges in an old college.  Henry James seemed most taken by the private interiors of Paris, the bric-a-brac, the draperies, rather than the monuments and the art galleries.   The space is what draws us into existence.  We have our being by living within this inner cube of the not-I.

At any rate, the text, however electronic, is at hand... So, to it.

 To market, to market, for dry goods, milk and soy milk.  Home again,home again, as that wwas logically the next place to head to.

Walking everywherein the heat here can leave one a bit ripe at times.  All the locals have cars, of course, but there's no local bus service to speak of, and even walking alongside the roads is a bit dicey at times.  I suspect I'll be remembered in this town, if at all, as the slightly ripe large American fellow of slavic ancestry who was always porting rucksacks of food and such.  But the views are quite spectacular, even going up the four mile hill with the ruck filled with soy milk and such.

Much of the last decade has been about accomplishing the necessary work with as much grace as possible, and without the usual bare minimum.  And that's roughly the hierarchy of those needs/ambitions, as well.  If material prosperity ever does come, and I say this as someone with a first-tier US law degree, it will likely be the result of something I've managed to do, not the general industrial prosperity of the race or my social situation.

 Excellent run yesterday, if a bit later in the AM than I'd have liked -- a bit of pedestrian-dodging en route.  (Bringing to mind the notion that Tolkein had based the hobbits on the undergradutes wandering the campus.) But then utterly unrewarding and maddening things until well past 1AM.  

The first moment after noon is frustrating.

 For reasons that make a bit of sense if you think about them a while, the east of the Balkans (colloquially, not geographically) is the Western Balkans, and the west is (for the most part, saving influences of seafaring and the South) the East.  Ovid was exiled to Varna, as once the roads had been built and the sea routes made familiar, the east was the Western bound, and I suppose vice versa.  

An ancient trend -- it's deeply woven into the languages.  Hardly an expert, but it seems that in the east, the diacriticals are there to make a phonic transposition from Cyrillic noises, while in the east, they're more organic to the language.  Interestingly, more than once, though no examples come to mind, I've expected to find a shared word from Latin, and encountered it from modern Romance, presumably Italian.  

And every other year, the orchestras of Europe troop down to the country to the east for a major international festival.  Not this year, as it's a competition year, but there is at least an opening concert.  Having attended concert in the room, I remember the acoustics, and listening to the first symphony of the national composer (whose statue I had a brief hello with most mornings during the run, as it was next to a very large intersection, and I had to wait for the light), the horns seemed perfectly calibrated to the warm acoustic of the former equestrian hall.  

When you're genuinely making art, as opposed to puting together entertainments for the machine, place matters. In a literary context, this is where Auerbach ends his long story of mimesis (written in peripatetic exile)  -- Mann, and a specific region of Germany.  The stories we tell are not a figment of the place, but you can't make worthwhile art as if you aren't in the place where you are.  It doesn't bound experience, or even condition experience, but it does provide a ground for it.

 

 

 Up past midnight... trireme... tempore, mores...  we have no bananas, &c, &c....

 Rested yesterday after the long walks in the heat on Friday.  The tension in this visit is that I'm in a place that I'd like to explore, and that seems to be giving me every indication that I should explore it, but the number of days that I can spend wandering the mountains is constrained by both the desire to keep my mind focused and productive, and the body slowly healing from the adventures of the past year.

 Arguably, one of the more significant effects of Enlightenment rationalism is in consigning everything outside of itself -- literally, every other notion in existence -- to romanticism and historicism.  More specifically, that just these notions and ways of thinking are what are to stand for rationality.  Even just looking at it in terms of legal doctrines, many that found a place on the historicist agenda were thought to be very rational at the time they were made.

And now the present order of things similarly consigns all thoughts outside itself to history, which is to say, the story that it intends to tell.

.....

Reading Foldenyi's history of melancholy.  I recall reading his Dostoyevski/Hegel at a coffeehouse on the rebuilt large stone bridge in Mostar, arguably one of the centers of effective world-history in recent times.  (The bridge was bathed in blue light at the time in celebration of the EU accession.)  Surprised to learn that he's a theatre scholar, sort of in the Robertson Davies Anglo-Canadian correlative, perhaps.  Learning that, the first thing that I did was to start reading his primary sources.  Theatres make plays, and theatre scholars are sometimes similarly very useful in pointing out useful things that they themselves attempt to serve, rather than surpass.  (I'm certain that the Great Scott had a big hand in this text.)

(And I say this as a scholar and  theatre person who was given a Robertson Davies novel as a vade mecum by the head of the masters conservatory.)

 From far afield, I'm wondering if the Cantab sociology crise has something to do with the time-and-motion-based schools of British sociology coming into conflict with the awakened and aggrieved factions now running the American humanities faculties for the most part.  If the appointment was a sop to a certain faction, perhaps it was more directly to the political faction than to individual scholars who happened to be classed as being within traditionally disfavored racial minorities.  The people, the advocates themselves, prevailed -- rather than the point that they were making.

I honestly think that the problem is that the pragmatic way of being an academic is to do and say the things that gain you political popularity, rather than using political popularity as a tool in effecting some changes in the structures of thought that have come down to us, and translating these structures of thought so they can be approached by the minds now living.  The point of doing this, of having these institutions, is what used to be called the deposit of faith -- the intellectual tradition.  As Heid said, ~the work of a philosopher is stating the same thing as has been said for thousands of years, and the ability to do so in the present is the substance of intellectual progress.

Random corrigenda, cont'd.:   The passport-sized booklets being waved around at the curtain calls in the country to the W/nw during the recent student-led protests were not in fact passports.  Some leveret-chasing down rabbit holes with artificially intelligent Gurgling last night revealed that they were academic indexes.  (As it is multiple physical objects, indexes, not indices.  Indices would be indecent.)  Apparently, in this country (and in nearby others, perhaps), the students carry around a small album within which each professor, at the end of a course, manually inscribes the course name, the grade, and their own signature.  And the students carry this booklet around for the rest of their lives as academic citizens, using it to establish identity.  (Obviously, the professoriate is much more respected there, and the entrance into same is more carefully guarded by the society at large.  I can imagine my own version, in which a few pages would need to be ripped out -- not for the grades, but for the traces of the individuals.)

Some interesting minutiae as to their use in curtain calls:  apparently, the visuals were more important than the status of the book as a personally meaningful device, as I noticed that they seemed to be haphazardly handed out in the wings, and occasionally, presumably when the count was wrong, two people would hold up a single book.  Also, the leading actor at one of the theatres made it clear that he didn't take one, but enthusiastically applauded the others -- perhaps not a university type.  

Apparently a long-time icon of the protest movements in this country -- in fairness, to a wandering reine tor, they looked very much like passports.

--------------------

Interesting -- on the stone mountains, where there is an indentation running down the peak that becomes a stream or rain drainage, where the land levels out a bit, the alluvial soil deposit at the base takes on a circular shape.  (It naturally extends downhill in the center, and is bounded by the angled indentation on the uphill side.)  This forms a natural circle beneath a stone rise on one side that would allow sufficient seating for a large crowd.  Perhaps the most primitive form of theatre, with the ritual altar placed at the center of the circle?  

 Long though scenic walk down the highway to a nearby town, and then the narrow-gauge rail to the grocery town, and the now-legendary four mile uphill grocery ruck at sunset.  Long day.  Quite warm.

 

 Despite all of the political changes and wars of the last few centuries, there still still a sense here, underneath everything, that the lowland pashas still claim to govern the mountains.  I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, although that's a thread in the culture ("corn (wheat) eaters" is the traditional insult for the lowlanders in the plain in the country to the north, who are bounded to the north by mountains that I'm also quite taken by.)  I have seen very skillful locals with good souls on the mountains here, but this isn't a mountain culture.  It's very sedentary, the wealthier people tend to the corpulent, and the popular music sounds Turkish to my untrained ear.

One interesting thing about the old 19th c. Austrian (and then, post-compromise A-H) architecture in the largely Muslim country to the west/nw is that it has a Moorish inflection rather than a Turkish inflection -- you see the latter more clearly in the indigenous mosques.  There is a story that the locals in Sarajevo (famously resistant to central authority--regional governors of the Sublime Porte were only allowed to spend a certain number of hours within its bounds, and that's in a country where the rural folks would often rip up roads in the night to prevent the easy commerce with the center), when the Archduke arrived for his infamous visit, were very proud of their new town hall, but as they stood there on its steps, he simply went up and down the line lambasting them for the lack of security, given the first attempt to kill him in the morning.  And then, later that afternoon...  Which is to say -- always make a point of admiring the local architecture.  You'll notice things.

The Balkans are subject to four winds.  The wind from the south reaches to the primitive puritanism of the old Turkish empire, brought into the conversation by the reformers early in the last century (there is a peculiar memorial to Ataturk outside one of theatres in Bucharest -- the "8" in one of years is sideways, for some reason), and through that glass, past the weary warriors of central Asia, one glimpses the classicism of distant Arabia.

 Piecework again until well past midnight.  Rowed the trireme to shore, and then collapsed and slept in the dank shadows of the quay.  (Which, in the empirical event, might have appeared to be listening to a tape of the 6PM news from radio 4 while preparing some pasta, and then collapsing on the couch, but the inner essence governs.)

Resurgam.

Again the immense fatigue upon waking. It has happened several times in this apartment, though possibly a function of the long recovery from the winter. (The innards are still not back to full functioning.  In addition to the short wanders, I've gone on a few long (~ 12h) hikes into the mountains on this visit, but I've been absolutely useless for a day or two afterwards.)  

Rested a few more hours, despite the romantic notion of a run at dawn up the mountain on (local) Transfiguration. 

Staying in each place for only a month or so on these travels is also a means of limiting risk -- many unknowns, and these places can be a bit odd at times.  I'm here for the mountains, and even though I've tried to strictly limit my other interactions with the local commerce and culture, several difficulties still managed to come up with the local sensibilities.  A single travelling American of Polish/German ancestry stands out a bit hereabouts, even if avowedly and obviously a peacenik civilian.

Onward.

 Eve of the Orthodox Transfiguration.  Apparently serves in folk culture as the first shift to autumn.  The sky changes three times, traditionally people stop swimming in lakes and rivers.  Divination at midnight, of course. Holidays are always a good time to try to see things another way.  More empirically: Lammastide -- first loaf, and the harvest to run through the next month.  (Lammastide, astronomically speaking, was apparently precisely eleven days ago, so things seem to be right on course.)

To market, to market, to buy soy milk and musleii; Home again home again, because that was logically the next place to walk to.

Rucking 7L of liquid and a week's worth of dry goods four miles up a hill is no small feat. A largely unnoticed feat, true, but not small.  I remember when I thought it oppressive in that first conservatory apartment in Cleveland to carry the groceries and water much less than a mile on flat ground from the co-op.  Even stopped to rest.  Similarly, the Wal-mart about a mile and a half from the last apartment at the university in Illinois.  We should grow more capable with time.  I know that it's true of my academic work -- when I look back at what I was reading and working on in Illinois, and consider my present agenda, not only has several years of reading given me much more of a background, I'm also quicker to pick up a broader view in a certain area.  I've grown more capable of doing things.

Even in cases of immene adversity, like this past winter, I was able to handle much more capably than when it had happened a few years before.  I was afraid beforehand, remembering it, and it almost killed me (not an exaggeration), but the same thing that was my fear was also my strength in the event, because it was the force with which I met the event.  'Geranimo,' and all that.

Apparent increase in capacity has generally generally the case since  I left the childhood home -- as an undergraduate, I was largely incapable of cooking, housekeeping, etc.  But one picks up how to do things, and if you spend enough evenings cooking with people who know what they're doing, it becomes second nature.  I couldn't imagine using a book, or the promptings of a television.  It would be like not singing while on a long walk.  

 A brief anecdote, to establish that I'm not imagining the difficulties with the local business sensibilities.  I was looking for a certain business in town, and I asked a similar shop if they knew where it was.  They shrugged and said no.  I walked out the door, turned to my left and there it was, three doors down, and marked with a big sign.  And then I went to that shop, and they turned out not to have the one thing that I was looking for, and hadn't a clue when it might be in again, though it's not an obscure product.  Borderlands.  An inherent intransigence.

But I have fixins for meals, mountains to walk on and look at, and books, albeit via electronic copies.  Enough for the nonce.  Onward.

 The real danger in the suppressed meritocracy isn't necessarily the event itself, but the notion that it is a good thing.  Beyond virtue.  Pragmatic.  Those roots will take some untangling.

 The high moment of all of these recent peregrinations was undoubtedly the Comedie Francaise performance that night in Budapest last year.  A close second was the Noh performance in Transylvania.  I am travelling through the Southlands, but I am a creature of the North.

Perhps not the relation I have in my own country, but certainly true in this context.

Interesting -- a small rock formation in a river in Budapest, apparently extending no further out into the river than the height of a person, has apparently been known for centures as "starvation rock,"visible when the Danube was perilously low  A city of millions, for centuries, knew this one small place as holding a meaningful sign.  Not every sign need be massive, or massively reproduced.

---.

Interesting article in the media from a nearby countyr -- a basketabll coach moving to America, as he was tired of the local corruption, of having to have powerful friends in the city and to keep in touch with them if he expected to keep his job.  Yes, well.  The glimmer of truth to that, in the present generally non-meritocratic context, is that when you cross borders, there is a brief time of objectivity, when your degrees and levels of experience themselves are meaningful.  But that only lasts a short while, especially in an interconnected world.

The model for Shakespeare's Polonius was Cecil, Lord Burghley.  Old-fashioned fellow, always did arithmetic in Roman numerals.  He once remarked that to be without a friend at court was to be like a hop without a pole.  Now, I'm not saying that dukedoms should be awarded by competitive examination, but we should be more aware of the fact that the general industrial prosperity has slackened the inherent checks on those sort of things.  Any given fellow will do, for the most part.  

Read the old books.  Focus your mind.  Cultivate your own garden.

 Borderlands.  An essential intransigence.

Balkan wordplay: "Ne kaže se, jadan, o nietzscheu, nego o niočemu."

Feast of the Assumption.  Which in my private experience is inextricably linked with finding my first apartment at the masters conservatory in Cleveland.  On principle, exactly as I was to do later in NYC, I didn't rent an apartment before I arrived.  (Such things were possible then -- I doubt that they would be possible now.) The neighborhood next to the university was the old Little Italy -- one of the largest in the country, very old school. (Minnestrone soup was invented a few blocks away.)  There was a carnival on the church grounds.  I asked the folks selling raffle tickets if they knew of any apartments for rent in the area.  They pointed me towards the rectory.  I knocked, and a staffer answered, vanished for a moment, and came back with a typewritten list.  Within hours, I had found the place.

It's my belief that in spiritually important things we shouldn't expect that everything will happen of its own accord.  Everything will fall into place, yes, but we will have to venture there, and ask.  This might be part of the reason that we do spiritual exercises in the everyday world.  This venturing and asking might prove more difficult than it seems.

 A pattern of pattern-seeking.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-ireland-booksellers-suspect-ai-companies-bulk-orders-data-acquisition

 

 Aha.  Memorial of Max.  Always said a brief hello via the icon near the side altar of Czestochowa.  Good memory of a good soul to ground the morning with, given the circumstances.  Quite the prolific author and publisher, before events took over.

Piecework to well past midnight.  The general unconscious conspiracy against the dawn continues.

Have lost the cross-breeze for the nonce, as the apartment next door appears to either be spontaneously emitting Bulgarian music (which continues to strike me as very Turkish in style), vape fumes, and the scent of frying meat -- or someone's there.  As the vape fumes seemed a bit odd, sealed off that vector.  The music and the meat scents seem to have stoppped today, so perhaps the cross-breeze can return soon.  In Humble Quarters, it's best to be as far from people as possible.  I could make a nut-shell a sufficient monastic kingdom unless there's someone else nearby. 

Always best to have a bit of the suoave in the vento.  Much better than mind-altering substances suspended in a cloud of vegetable oil.

Far from the totality path here, not even really in the official penumbra range.  Nonetheless, took a walk around at the hour.  Interestingly, around the time of the theoretical event, a stream of fireworks went up from the town in the valley below.  Quiet evening. 

Eclipse to come in the evening.  Apparently after sunset locally, but totality elsewhere on the continent.

A few days after I arrived here, there was an absolutely spectacular thunderstorm over the mountains -- it lasted for over an hour, and there were almost constant lightning strikes up and down the range.  On certain occasions, nature seems to make itself known to us, which is to say that despite our lack of perception, we eventually realize what's there.

 Piecework past midnight.  Rowed the trireme safely to port, then slept in.

The universe appears to be conspiring to keep me from the dawns.

The West is corrupt, the East is in darkness.  And any given fellow in the New World is expendable. Find the artifacts of wisdom and knowledge from a century ago.  Focus your mind upon them.  Travel as one who understands, not one who hurtles through the world with rumbling luggage.  Else, you're simply a part of something you're keepng yourself from understanding.  Don't trust the universities -- visit Christminster, admire the statures in the evenings, use the libraries, but the ways of the people of those places are not what will help you to understand things.  They exist such as they are to perpetuate the place.  And their present form is quite strange indeed.  Use the places.  Sufficient written knowledge exists to help you understand things, and one aspect of the present social order is that texts are ubiquitous.  Find those texts among the manifold, and use them.  Tolle and lege.  Quoniam advesperacit.

And return to the dawns.

 Loud carousing late into the night and early morning by a few souls in the nahne.  Resulted in a good deal of lost sleep, so I turned off the alarm.  Sir Toby and Maria, in every culture.  And their Malvolio lurks over the mountains, an ancient adversary who wants to put an end to all good cheer.  This area of the mountains was the redoubt of the second, post-Vienna, rebellion against the south -- mountain strongholds of the Orthodox.

The saying attributed to the local 19th c. folk hero is that the world is a forum for the clash between cultures.  Careful historiography would likely reveal that this was cherry-picked from his writings by the socialist government that showed up a half-century later.  (The notions of the firstborn of the Enlightenment sometimes sit oddly with the subsequent social forms.)  

All well and good, and every culture should preserve its revels as best it can.  (The dominant note of the week, and likely of the visit to these quarters, is the long mountain hike that didn't get me to the cultural festival that exists to just that -- perhaps a lucky outcome, perhaps a necesssary outcome.  Still mulling the event.  Listened to the Bulgarian Womens Choir albums quite often in NYC.  But it's a conscious engagement, and I'm always looking a bit over their shoulder at my own art and thought -- a bit like the Russian film Forgotten Melody for a Flute.)

At any rate though, if the culture becomes too garrolous, the conservative folks within it sometimes take on the aspect of the folks being rebelled against -- the Malvolio, the pasha.  And the whole cycle begins again.  Some degree of abstraction is necessary for cultural progress, even though it is these forms that give us life.  They live within us, and transit time by our actions, but we ourselves, our intellects, our moral centers, are the greater good.  To both have life and to stand sufficiently above the things that enliven us to have a deeper understanding.  That is what a good wind brings.

 In the great triumph of the middlebrow that seems to have been the outcome of Enlightenment, employment is a tricky proposition.  (Not that I have much experience with the thing itself of late, but in laying siege to it, I've familiarized myself with the ramparts and portcullises.)  Since the middle sensibility has triumphed, the rigors of the elite and the dutifulness of the low have completely fallen away, and within the general industrial prosperity, it's simply a big party.  If they want you at their party, they'll hire you.  If not, then not.  It's not just non-meritocratic, it distrusts the notion of meritocracy, and prefers to pick a team based entirely on non-cognitive instinct.  One difficulty with this is that many dark forces are quite happy to have the great mass of folks operating on non-cognitive instinct, and figuring things out as they go.  And by the time they've understood, they've gone.

I've always intensely disliked parties.  Time was, there were places for people who preferred books to parties, but now those are just a different kind of party, ones with slightly subtler codes.

But, in independence, it is possible to read and work.  So I read and work.  And the dark mechanisms of the world grow closer.  Run while you have the light, the Book says.  

To work, then.

 Coffee made at the Humble Quarters with water from the fountain in the mountains, the cool shade of the apartment very different than the heat and strain of the journey.  Difficulty recollected in tranquility.

 Some regret at missing the cultural festival, which after further research, seems to be a very important event in this part of the world.  But if I had made a beeline for it, walking next to Bulgarian highway traffic for hours, I might have been there, but I wouldn't have found it.  The arc through the mountains was the better choice, even if it came up short in the end.  Not to make a thing out of the reach perpetually exceeding the grasp, but it is important not only to do the right things, but to do them in the right manner. However important the thing might be.  The way we have of doing things is what we are.

There are no regional busses in this area -- I could have booked a ticket for a more distant place and asked the bus to stop, and then walked back, though.  Ultimately, you need a car, or access to a car, as with many things in the present world.  Which is a bit troubling.  It's one thing for a car to be required, but it's quite another for automotive traffic to be the main obstacle on the path.

 Utterly exhausted after a day wandering the hills to the west.  Oddly, the idyllic mountaintop meadows were the most grueling part, given the August vegetation and mid-day heat.  Spectacular views, though.

After the trail up to altitude, there were two options heading away from the hut at the trailhead in the right direction.  I took the one less travelled by, which, as it turns out, is not always the best way of finding the right trail in the mountains.  After up and down a large hill, beast tracks and beast noises helped me to convince myself that what I had thought was a trail was in fact a trace.  So I backtracked and found the right, properly blazed trail.  Long walk over the hills.  My destination was a small town at the intersection of the mountain ranges that was apparently hosting a well-regarded (and free) traditional music festival.   After many hours in the mountains, having set out at dawn, I finally reached the rural road leading to the town.  Something shifted in the shadows ahead, and an inner sense told me that finding out what it was would be a matter of the higest priority.  The identification then became clear as an enormous bull lumbered onto the road, presumably wandering from a local dairy operation.  Having been (I thought) on my way to the traditional music festival, the notion from the Golden Bough of a bull being the sign of danger for the traveller flashed into my mind -- Tauric Diana.  (But when there's a large bull in front of you in the road, the cultic resonsance is sort of a second-order consideration.)  We looked at each other a long while, as I was sizing up the adjacent woods for safe running paths and climbable trees.  He seemed a nice fellow, just a bit lost, and angry about that.  A car came up behind me -- I signalled for it to slow and pointed out the obstacle.  The car then inched forward, forcing the fellow off the road, and he trundled away.

I headed into what I thought was the town square, and asked a vendor about the concert, but he had heard nothing.  (As it turns out, the venue was an additional hour's walk or more down the highway from the trail intersection.  Apparently it's more a county than a town.)  I would walk the two or three hours on the highway to hear the concert, tbh, like Henry VIII waking before dawn to walk hours to go see a rural theatre performance that he had heard good things about, but there's thunderstorms in the forecast, and I'm an intrepid fellow, not a complete idiot.  (Despite appearances.)

[Full disclosure, the beast was polled, but I made a point of looking to see which it was, given the effects on disposition.  And I often ran past dairy fields at dawn in the undergrad town in Virginia a few yeas ago -- I know what an angry cow sounds like, and this didn't seem to be one, though, again, I might have misread the identification.]

 Piecework well past midnight.  The trireme courses onward.   Slept in.   The intention gives the rule to the event, but the event gives the nature to the intention.

That bit of (running, fresh) water from the fountain yesterday was the dominant note of the afternoon, as Henry James might say.  Checked color and scent and had the exploratory sip beforehand, but then drank the bottle quickly, given the thirst.  Only in the aftertaste some minutes later did I begin to perceive the soil notes.  Makes the coffee all the more desireable, in a way.  The wiser course appears to be to sip the first bit and then check the aftertaste.  Intuition and knowledge need to be commixed more evenly.

Long walk into the town for dry goods and grocery.  Decided to add milk to the list -- 7L of the white stuff can rather dramatically increase the weight of the ruck.  There was an old Soviet story about a very highly placed official in Moscow who was on edge every autumn until he had 100 kilos of potatoes safely in his basement.  The human spirit still lives by these cycles -- witness the LDS prescription to always have a year of food on hand.  Invisible depndencies -- you are otherwise reliant on certain things for life itself.  Along the same lines, I have a personal rule to always have at least one pair of shoes/boots that could see me safely across a continent, should the need arise.  No need to take on the cult of the "prepper" for doomsday, just try to preserve a basic capacity to survive the unexpected.  Some life comes from that.  I always try to have at least a fortnight of supplies on hand before vanishing into the books.

Sampled one of the famous roadside/trailside running fountains for the first time on the way back.  The lore says to observe the locals, and go to the ones that they go to, and I've frequently seen cars stop for this one, so I tried it.  Bit too much of the agriculture of the field for my taste, but perhaps that's a function of streams running low.  Will have to try some others.

With the third supply run accomplished (rucking this stuff from town is no small matter) and the environmental hazards of the place seemingly sufficiently evaporated/blocked off ( I heard a roto-rooter going in a nearby unit yesterday, perhaps I was smelling the accumulated chemical attempts at clearing something).  At any rate, went from unbreathable air at the beginning to unnoticeable  now, so there's less concern for the coming days.  In retrospect, I should have been more cautious -- stayed out on the small balcony as much as possible, but sitting next to the window in a room with a sort of background chemical scent for a few days hopefully won't have done too much damage.

The fatigue this morning was odd -- but I do need to reverse the tendency to take the indicated rest, something I (wisely) indulged in rather freely for the first week or two here in the mountains.  Only wakefulness will wake us up and keep us awake.  I wake by awakening.

 When you come to realize that the world is mostly composed of unthinking repetition, imitation and competition, the forms eternally returning because everyone's just playing the game, the prospect of ever resting back into the simplicity of the social forms fades, and you see that the task is to have conscious existence within these forms -- that is life, and we will only have so much of it.

 Woke strangely fatigued, so I took an extra couple hours of rest.  Many environmental toxins hereabouts, very far from California.  Have taken steps to minimize exposure -- windows always open, etc. And there's the constant sound of motors and flamethrowers from the off-season repairs and roofing work in the complex.  As always, trying to find the 'sweet spot' of humble quarters that allow me to do what I've come here to do -- and here, that's visit the mountains of Pirin Macedonia.  It usually works, as I'm not looking for the things of comfort that other folks seek out.  The paradigm was perhaps my first apartment at the conservatory in Cleveland -- humble digs on the second floor of an out-building in Little Italy.  Perfect for my use, bought some spice plants and made pasta every night, sometimes then heading out to the orchestra concerts.  The point was that I could do what I needed to do, rather than just inhabit the place.

Might have done better to have, like Phillip and Alexander, just pitched a tent on the mountain.