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 Polonious 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.

 With very few exceptions, including the odd AI rabbit-hole runs, I use computers to write/edit, read books, read the Times, and listen to broadcasts from churches and concert halls and the BBC.

Possibly excpting the churches and concert halls, all of these activities were possible beforehand, though not necessarily in peripatetic and difficult times.  

Perhaps the chief virtue of the machine is in the reproduction and dissemination.  If you can identify the good things in the digital manifold, they're much easier to access.  But absent the icons of things that were known to be worthwhile beforehand, the encounter with the usual content (social media scrolling, etc.) doesn't get you much.  One doesn't scroll FB in search of worthwhile bits of knowledge.  

With each shift in place comes the task of reacclimating the mind, focussing the eyes again on that which was always still there.  With each shift, there's the possbility of losing it all, no longer sensing the edge of things, vanishing into the great gameplaying.  Even if it's just a move across town.

When I was acting, I could do this because I had a physical technique of re-centering myself in each new place, and that gave me access to the world again.  I suppose if I were a priest, the rituals would serve much the same grounding.

Now that thinking is all I have, thinking itself must find the thought.  Takes a few days, on occasion.

That said, I'm in a much better position to think than I was in a few months ago.  Deo gratias.

On the last peregrination in these parts, I developed a sort of counter-clockwise rotation through the peninsula (as extended -- geographically the Balkans ends with the Danube across Romania, but I extended this up to Transylvania), and so came to pine for the next stop on the journey.  When, as now, I was in the lower mountains, the thoughts of Bucharest and old German and Hungarian Transylvania motivated my travels, and then, usually with a quick day in at Szecheny (rather than a hotel room on the multi-day bus/train trip), I would head across to the northwestern side, (which politically is the Eastern side), and from thence, down to the Adriatic, and then across the lower peninsula again.

As the rentals in Romania have gone up a bit in the interval, though, I'm not going to follow that track this time, but I still have the thoughts of the Bucharest opera house ($6 back-balcony tickets), the old churches in Transylvania, the coffeehouses.  

Desire as an anticipation and preparation for necessary action.  Interest as turning the attention to the necessary object. I'm beginning to get a handle on these pragmatist/pragmaticist ideas.  Which perhaps, extending the logic to the cognition itself, means that I'm turning to engage with them.

 I might be wrong about this, but it certainly has seemed at times that the aversion to the Latin church among the Orthodox is more of  popular and populist movement, with the structures of power taking a much more ecumenical view than the everyday person, while precisely the opposite obtains in the West, with a genuine interest in the Orthodox worhip by the average person, but a strong political mistrust fomented towards these nations by those wandering the corridors of power.  

 New humble quarters surprisingly noisy: construction, maintenance, vacationers.  The cult of quiet civilization isn't strong here -- the relaxation seems more garrulous, perhaps associating quiet civilization with other, enemy cultures.  Vacationers with engines revving, and the workers of the ski resort working hard, industrious in off-season upkeep.  Both of which are rational things for humans to be doing.  In fairness, windows have been kept wide open given the chemical smell that seemed to be coming from the drains and surfaces.  Mostly dissipated now, though it reappears from time to time, which would favor the drain hypothesis.  And be sufficient reason for keeping the windows open.

I came here for the proximate mountains, and they're undeniably proximate.  The rest can be muddled through, especially on this budget. The present task is mental focus.  Which has has different footpaths to it, compared to reading and thinking while attempting to survive the unsurvivable in the city.  One has to bring the urgency to the task, rather than there being sufficient surplus urgency from the struggle to survive the day.

Onward. 

 And yet.  In the country to the southwest of here, that's in rather dire straits, seemingly perpetually, though in fairness I didn't experience the capital -- I stayed in the old Roman city on the coast -- the most powerful grocery-type memories are of the small grocers, ubiquitous, scattered among the buildings, shops lit by a few incandescent bulbs, and a few shelves of provisions.  I never shopped there, as I had made a rule for myself to keep to the big chains, which are garishly lit and reasonably well-stocked (and I made the rule a bit more strict and went to airtight packages only, after the bits of Italian muselei started swimming around in the bowl one morning).

Similarly, even in the largest cities in the region, I don't eat street food.  Actually, anywhere -- including NYC.  I've come to mistrust both the hot sauce and the white sauce.

I recognize that the general way of travelling is a bit freer than the ways that I keep to.  But the mountains are still there, and I can enjoy them just as well after a meal of vegetables and grains bought whole, inspected and cleaned, rather than some fried dough from a corner stand (the American phenomenon of the donut turns out to be just one species of the larger genus), or packaged and prepared local foods.  

I'm a bit of a Califonian manquee, though I've only visited there a few times, mostly for theatre.  There's safety in nature.  Unlike Kant's (highly offensive) Sachem who loved Paris for its sauces, I'll take the architecture and the opera instead, after a self-prepared meal from scratch.

 The cultural cliche from this part of the world is that people tend to flaunt signs of weath, and loudly claim privilege.  And this is important for the social bond, and there is some history to it -- in the 19th c. the claim to be part of the enlightenment was the most important thing.  Positing this kind of status involved a moral choice, and people recognized that.  And centuries later, this turned into expensive cars (even if only rented for the weekend to visit the village) and flashy clothing.  Culturally, it's cognate with the early modern commercial theatre in England in the 16th c., when it moved outside of the sponsorship and mansions of the aristocracy and to the town hall -- dressing up for the theatre made a certain kind of cultural claim.

So the glitzy cars on the street of Chicago and Milwaukee, etc. have some logic to them.  But the thing is that they also tend to expect this from visitors.  As a rather low-key fellow who tends to keep his cards well inside his vest, I'm enjoying the mountains and the natural scenery, but I limit my cultural contacts to a very occasional cup of coffee, and making the weekly grocery run.  And the latter is to the German chains -- it's no exaggeration to say that just buying milk, eggs and bread in this part of the world can drag you into a criminal conspiracy, if you're not careful.

 Much of modern (yes) life involves putting ourselves into the stream of things and letting the way things are be our instructor.  But, said the doubtful one, we have it within us to judge and know the nature of the time and the way things are. Perhaps this is now a historical question, i.e., our choice will bring a change in the way things are.

One element of the situation that should be kept in mind: the character of the present political leadership of my country isn't accidental, or unrealted to the basic social reality.  When you think in this way, these are the sorts of things that you get, even if they are contrary to your stated political views. 

'We are their parents and original.'

 Rather remarkable dream last week, a couple days after walking up the mountain.  Hope to remember it.  #breadcrumb

Elected the main road for the walk over, as the back trail was terra incognita, and when carrying the full knapsack, I prefer the better-trod paths.  (Though I did walk across a very narrow top of a dam once on Holy Thurday in a park in Budapest, similarly laden, in-between the Szecheny baths and the Basilica for Mass.)  

Specatacular scenery hereabouts, but I suspect that vehicle emission standards aren't tooo stringent in these parts.  

 Shifting Humble Quarters -- the new one is a bit humbler than the last, but has a rather spectacular view of the mountain that I was on the other day.  Further out from the town, so hopefully a more productive space.  Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth tonight.  Last year, I listened to the broadcasts in Belgrade -- magical Rheingold at the Sbux across from the national parliament, as the building lit up as darkness fell.  Here's it's been about the mountains -- Walkure after the seven hour return from high on the mountain, absolutely exhausted, just sat in darkness next to open window for a long while.  Seek, strive, find, don't yield, &c, &c.

 One of my favorite Ring moments was the slight lacuna that I clearly remembered in the rest at the entrance of Fafner.  It offers a foothold for notions like the caesura, as I mentioned when attempting to curry favor with the Wagerian on my PhD prelims panel.  Just to check it, I ran it by Google AI, and it turns out that there is no rest there -- it was just Levine giving the moment a little extra hold.  

So my favorite part of it wasn't in the score, but it came about because of the interpreter's notion of the essence of the piece -- is it part of the work of art, or just a nuance of the interpretation?

Sviatislav Richter once had a retraction printed and distributed when he realized that he had been playing a single wrong note in his recordings -- a Bach piece, I think.  

Music, particularly printed music, is a little like a play -- it consists of the instructions for an event.  And the nature of the event governs.

Local jazz festival underway.  Wandered down to the mainstage, knowing very little about Bulgarian jazz.  Interesting band, interesting singers.  Perhaps just the act that I caught, but it seemed to be more about standards than the sort of experimental vibe that seems to be part of the tradition in Poland/Serbia (I happened to look through a recent history of Balkan jazz at the Lincoln Center library before I left, and I've found a few Balkan state jazz groups/esembles on Youtube, but that's about it.  Basically clueless.)  Very few solos, and the solos kept close to the melody.  Capapble sidemen.

The old-school standards/songbook vibe was interesting.  Balkan jazz works for the same reason that the Macbeth in Belgrade was so effective -- when the actual shadows in the culture are this intense, the art form expresses something almost primal.  The gentlemen of the syndicate.  And the music.

There's a Turkish-inflected jam going on at a restaurant within earshot as I write this -- that proximity has a lot to do with the culture here, I think.  Green over red.  Alongside the loyalty to the Orthodox to the east who helped them get free of the Sublime Porte and governance by distant purchased firman, there's also a certain sympathy of cultures, a certain cunning.  (cf. "What do you suppose he meant by that?")  

Southern Europe.  Borderlands.

Lengthy maintenance on the the ragtag-fleet computing machines this afternoon, to keep everything up to spec, and surviving long past service life.  Peculiar slew of scam financial emails this afternoon, likely unrelated.  Last time that happened, I had just booked an Airbnb in Budapest -- no recent transactions along those lines, though.  To take a line from Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of techology.

The difficulty with the mixture of corruption and exogenous forms of industrial prosperity is that there are so many more prizes to award.  And prize-winners are historically loath to sue in piedpowder.

Like John Rambo and the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, I take things day by day.  Rigor towards the simplicity, and rigorous simplicity.

Perhaps it's to do with the imbalance in relations vis a vis the UK and countries like France and Germany.  A way of running society on an island nation with two or three universities and a tenacious squirearchy is difficult to map up to the continental scale.  The forms of meritocracy must be more distinct.  Despite the fact that a tendentious earnestness is bound to result. (qed)

 Took some pride in my thick-weave cotton oxford shirt, jeans, found stick and leather hat amid all of the folks with fancy, or at least synthetic, mountaineering kit and togs.  Upholding the nobility of the amateur (amo, amas, amat...)  The fellow who simply sets out from his apartment with the simple intention of getting to the top of the hill louring over the city.  Apparently, the big hill is a rather big draw.  Counted three languages in passing hellos on the way up.

Of course, they were much better than me at most of it, but that's simply because I'm an inexperienced amateur.  Simply a question of getting to the hills more often.

 Absolutely brilliant and exhausting day wandering the nearby hills.  Above the treeline especially, very difficult.  In fairness, I've been at sea level for some time now.

Absolutely exhausted.  Long maundering through a circular bike trail trying to find the elusive trail head, which took me a good ways orthogonal to the range, and ended up just walking up the access road to the larger hills.  Blazes here are a bit spotty.  The assumption appears to be that everyone has GPS.  Much like the blank stares I get when asking at the cheap stores for compasses -- a few had some toy compasses which were quite an improvement on the traditional compass, as the latter has only one direction for north.  Really, any of the usual Chinese bulk-buying websites would be able to get them decent compasses for $4, which they could sell for $20.  (They're trying to diversify the tourist approach, but it's still fundamentally a ski town.)  But the hills are extraordinary.  Macedonian Pirin.  Mythic in the Balkan imagination from the time of Phillip and Alexander.  Gateway to the region.  

After a 4PM turn around rather high up -- well above the nearby ranges, and an excellent view of the glacial lakes and ranges in the distance, made it back to the road before dark, and then walked down, sometimes only turning on the flashlight when a car approached.

Luckily, there was a 24 hour grocery open (at 24 hour grocery prices), so I bought much milk, turned on the tape from last night's first night at the Wagner festival, and some potato paprikash is on the industrial-strength hotplate.  I found an enormous bag of it at the discount grocer for less than $2, and it has done me goodly service.  Budapest in a bag.  Then some Iris Murdoch until I drift off, and the mortal frame can begin its repair job.   

  

 Perhaps the idea itself, as a thing, is the reflection of God.

Another dawn lost to piecework well past midnight.  Slogging onward.

C. Miloscz, in one of his poems, talks about the fate of the poet, always taken for something other than he is, even after his death ~"no  sign arriving from the other world to correct the mistake."

Peculiar events yesterday.  I think I have the cultural context, and I'm aware that the locals who saw me disputing a receipt would have had little clue as to what I was disputing.  But 'here I stand, I can do no other.'  Be just in small things.  Otherwise, when the small things turn against you, you''ll have no way of stopping the momentum.  I'm not offended at all, by the way.  My only concern is that the local folks not come to harm.

In my own country, it seems to me at least that many of my struggles of the last decade or so come from being surrounded by unsophisticated people who thought I was an unsophisticated clod for not realizing how much was to be gained from playing another sort of game.  And if I was another sort of person, I might have believed them, and believed in them.  Many do.  There's a lot of bad stuff going on inside the prosperity.

My virtue, my discipline, my ways aren't as against the others.  They're some of the only things I have with which to defend my mind and spirit against the others. 

Onward. 

 

 But, all else aside, if a customer tells you three times that you gave them too much money in change, and appears to take the situation very seriously, it would be best to try to either understand the mistake or unwind the transaction.  To folks of a certain cast of mind (I don't claim it's a good one or fortunate to have), a troubling transaction is much more costly than a few days of groceries.  

I can understand the contrary view, and why it might be held, but in shopkeeping, if one side invokes the "make this transaction right" rule, particularly when it's not to their advantage, that does need to become the prime objective of the encounter. 

 Well, that was a peculiar and frustrating experience in balancing diplomacy and paying the right price for groceries to the multinational corporation.  Realized as I stepped away from the till that I had the wrong change in hand, but there was a logic to the error, so it took me a sec.  Scribbled some numbers in the pad that I thought would make it clear to the cashier, and attempted to subtly fix it, as I didn't want her to come to harm, but she affected (possibly quite genuinely) not to understand the error. Took it to the assistant manager at the back of the store twice, who might have been confused, or might have been trying to resolve the situation without undue trauma to local staffing, but both times shut down, and the Google translate screen at the end said "...It is okay for you to leave."

So, reader, I did.

Will have to figure out how to subtly return it to the local folks, despite my own wing-and-a-prayer budgets on this leg of the trip.  I once enriched the poor box at St. Pat's with a twenty when I was in a similar predicament stateside.  I don't want anyone local to come to harm, but even though it's less than $25, this runs too close to American Privilege for my comfort.

At any rate, have decided that it won't drive me mad, and now I'm going to focus my mind on the work for the rest of the evening.  Insh'allah, and pace the bakshish.

 Saturday night adventures in laptop cinema, cont'd: July Rain

I'm not sure what was forcing my mind so insistently in this direction, but the whole film seemed to be about the certainty of death -- the July rain being this brief, chaotic floreat of the flesh.  But comes the hour when the springtime rises and washes over the earth, and....  

So.  We 'keep the door open.'

Along those lines, the constant phone conversations with the fellow who lent her his allegedly waterproof jacket in the storm seemed a bit like contact with the divine, with he who provided us with this garment of flesh.  His own, no less. 

The new-wave/verismo still works, even after the lapse of the fashion -- one test of a true movement, perhaps.  It grounds the film in actual experience.   

The rain, then, is our flesh, our life, which is to say the things that we do.  But things in the city are constantly carrying the others out of reach and rushing us along -- which makes the night picnic among the white birch such a relief.  But the ski-jumper girlfriend who blended so easily into the background in the city parties is revealed in the light of the campfire as an unpleasant sort of person.   

Odd double meaning -- the pantograph, both a means of mechanical reproduction of art, and the point of connection between the tram and the wire.  Like the typewriter at the beginning, these machines seem to have life, but the real point is that they bear relation to life, and change our lives.

And then, at the end, she is empty-handed.  After the rain, walking among the veterans, which apparently was a bit of happenstance during the shoot, but it captured the sense of human relations after our midsummers, after the love and the war, we still have our humanity, though the storm has quieted, and might yet grow more quiet.

 If, on a mountain trail, you encounter a family of trees  that seems gnarled or misshapen, leaning in a certain direction, the easy logical conclusion is that some force of wind, weather or land has made them that way.  Similarly, and this is a bit less commonly thought to be the case, people, communities and even nations can take on a certain misshapen form, relative to some general mean of health and open disposition.  And yet, in these situations, we tend to take their disposition as not merely primitive, but itself an irreducible constituent primitive term of humanity.  

In truth, and this is where the idea reaches its furthest point from the usual path, people are shaped by the spiritual nature of a place. (Spirit isn't necessarily a glowing, magical thing, it's simply the changes that happen within time.  The material thing without a substance of its own, but describable.)  In the course of the long logic unfolding within their lives, across the many years, certain types of thoughts persistently occurred to them.  And just as the spirit is material but without substance, these thoughts were about everyday things, but the manner of their occurrence was of a certain character.  This is how to find the spiritual nature of a place -- examine the character of your own thoughts in that place.  And after many years of a certain characteristic pattern of thinking,emotional response and physical action came to shape the organism.  The trees along the path took on a certain shape. 

These are the sorts of conclusions one should come to after having encountered people of many different ethnicities and nations, not least because if you've only explored a few, each would take these sorts of thoughts as a personal criticism.  This is a universal phenomenon, and I'm sure that my own spiritual/arboreal shape, to a dispassionate observer from far away, would reveal some of the storms that I've weathered.  Ah well. Like Shelley (I think), I always made an awkward bough.

I don't have wants.  I set objectives that will help me to accomplish things.  The happiness is from the totality, not the particular circumstance, but it is good to make as many particular circumstances as transparent to that happiness from the totality as possible.

The different view is largely a creature of people trying to sell things.

But in working to achieve the objectives, it can seem that these objectives are desires.  A misleading appearance.  If you were to sop me on the street and somehow hypnotize me and demand of the most remote reaches of my subconscious what I really wanted at the present time, it would likely be on the order of a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee, or a decent used paperback book.  But that's because of the nature of desire.  I tend not to associate happiness with the object, or even the objective.  That can be dangerous in a prosperous society.

We have a rational mind, but it is up to us as to whether it will govern the beast, or a more Humean sensibility will govern the relationship.

TLS on the cult of Oxbridge donnishness:  "The only professors without private incomes who have ever lived a genteel life are those who were once resident fellows of rich colleges." 

Much truth to that, even at the far end of the scale.  I still remember the summer in summerstock at one of the Seven Sisters.  Long afternoons reading in the parlor.  And jobbing in as a technician (just after receiving a top conservatory masters in performance) at a theatre based in Edith Wharton's old estate, where I lingered in the library when not figuring out the electric wiring in the horse stables (where Raquel Welch was shortly to do some Bernard Shaw). 

The piece closes with a quote from a Wittgenstein disciple.  Cantab ascendnt, now that they hold no. 10.  Rumor has it that some of the mannerisms in the Philosophers sketch in Beyond the Fringe have their roots in common-room impressions of W.

The notion of a distant Christminster (or two) is useful.  In addition to Hardy, I've plowed through C.P. Snow and Iris Murdoch, and still return to them as a sort of ongoing mental frame.  But as useful as the distant fiction might be, one hopes that the thing itself doesn't do too much damage.

Brilliant.  Pellucid,  forceful.  And at times just as fast as the Proms version a few nights ago.

Some of Beethoven's contemporaries called him the musical Kant, because compared to Hayden, his works were so complex.  Many subtle ocean currents, perhaps.

 The small scherzos inside of the choral movement are very clear, each one a different run of thought.  As opposed to building to a central monotonic theme, the thousand several souls of the democracy, perhaps.  Each one a universe, and making a universe.