Basically, I'm trying to find a way to set up a sufficient revenue stream, or perhaps shake a sufficient windfall of coconuts from the trees, to get to a neutral country, or travel between a series of neutral countries, with a very basic existence, such as I almost had for the last two years or so -- sufficient to read, think and do real writing.

I've set forth elsewhere the headwinds that I have been facing, and continue to face.  I've also outlined the corruption that I've encountered that has effectively blocked my efforts to have a career in my own country.

Frankly, someone with my degrees and experience wouldn't be in this position in a rational market or a well-ordered society.  But I'm still not sure how to characterize a situation that isn't commonly thought to exist.  An American Navalny, perhaps.  It's my understanding he was a Russian patriot. Solzhenitsyn has often come to mind.

So I can only fight for this by fighting for this -- a neutral country, or a place of safe internal exile.  I can't tell the story of what it is for me to have to do this.  That will have to come later.  The analogies, the contexts, the inference.  A political reality always arrives in advance of its stories and aesthetics.

For now, I have to fight for the thing itself, not as someone inside a cultural narrative. 

 

 My mind constantly on those other places.  Not so much wanderlust as wanderdeleriumtremens.  

Not exaggerating -- despite the degrees and credentials, the difference between the present mode of things in my own country and being in a neutral country with a survival-level job and the chance to explore, read, work and think is approaching the difference between life and... t'other thing.  

Working as hard as I can to put something in place to either return to southern Europe or carve out some sort of internal exile in the upper Midwest. 

The only thing strong enough to break the commonly held notions about life in this society is the circumstances of your own life.  But once that happens, 'the first moment after noon is night'.

Peculiar sort of spiritual second wind.  Perhaps the extra hour or two of sleep last night.  Treat unexplained strength and bonheur like hard cheese -- put it in your pocket for later.  

(One reason for this is that it often seems to prefigure some difficulty.)

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

The bread as material substance the wine as geist.  The truth of the material substance is its composition and matter; the truth of geist is in its history and its future, as it is only the event.

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

 In a moment of extreme parsimony yesterday, elected to read in the park for a bit rather than do a second spell at sbux, given that the libraries were closed.  Not too cold, a bit above 30.   But reading became impossible.  The great advantage of keeping to my tasks and my work is that when I've begun to lose the plot on occasion, it's obvious to me, because my eye is either just numbly glancing over the page (or taking a glancing blow from the page as my head goes down to the table for a bit of involuntary rest).  Attune yourself to the work (as long as it is real work, and not servile tasks), and you preserve that which works.

In my mind, hearing the Ramadan cannon and the calls to prayer in Sarajevo and imagining the iconostases of Belgrade.  Things were much clearer when the world was divided between East and West.  You could hop a wall or find a dissident niche.  Now, we are ostensibly merely creatures of economics, and there's nowhere to set one's face toward.  And yet....

Perhaps there are invisible divisions in the world.  Cultural ha-has, invisibly keeping worlds apart while not serving as pretexts for wars.

Whether or not there was ever a way through the woods, I do need to find a way through the woods.  Perhaps better if sooner rather than later.

Libraries closed for the federal holiday, so just surviving the day.  As per usual practice, secured a vade mecum before the doors closed, Carnap's first book.  Slogged a hundred pages in before realizing that the entire work was defining the vocabulary of the proposed system, so there was at least a hundred pages of mental focus.  Dropped it off on the way to a sbux impossible to justify vis a vis the budget except as a last-ditch gambit to avoid the onset of indelible madness.  (Seems to have worked.)  

Equivocated between Carnap and Dame Francis Yates when I was in the shelves.  Clearly should have gone with the non-Vienna-circle option.  

Part of the frustration is the abysmal battery life on the Kindle; forces one to budget the e-reading time.

 Quinquagesima. 

Pass a few days, and, like Abraham, we shall have been called to quit things visible and temporal for the contemplation and the hope of God's future presence. Come the fourth day from this, and, like Moses, we shall have gone up into the Mount, to remain there forty days and forty nights in abstinence and prayer. We shall be called, as it were, out of sight; for though our worldly duties will remain and must be done, and our bodily presence is in the world as it was, yet for a season we must be, more or less, cut off from the intercourse, the fellowship, the enjoyment of each other, and be thrown upon the thought of ourselves and of our God. Earth must fade away from our eyes, and we must anticipate that great and solemn truth, which we shall not fully understand until we stand before God in judgment, that to us there are but two beings in the whole world, God and ourselves. 

https://www.newmanreader.org/works/subjects/sermon3.html 

Nolite confidere in principius. 

Which, being translated is: don't admire, emulate, or seek to please the people in charge of things.  As a class, the only good thing about them is that they're in charge.  And they'd likely not only agree with that, but think it a virtue.

Ambition -- Sarajevo or Mostar for Ramadan, or Belgrade for Great Lent.

Reality -- Among the marijuana-smoking greed machines and tourists, wearing the (by now tiresome) Garment of impecunious Humility.  And winter is proving persistent.  

O temporatura, o borea...

(I think NY is actually cognate with 'boreal' through the Latin for York--the northern city.)

Sabbath reading at the research library.  The non-servile parts of the lists.  Philosophy.  

Also helps in, later on, reading the weekday lists with Sabbath eyes.  Freedom from the domination of the world, in the capital of the world and its herrschaft.

JP2 warned the local church on his visit that they were in the capital of the world.  The archdiocese put the quote on its letterhead.

Wondering at the wisdom of escaping the difficulties a few years ago by scratching out a living in acadrmic publishing in southern Europe.  Now, forced to return when the revenues weren't up to scratch, I have the same difficulties, but compounded by longing.  My mind constantly in the Pirin mountains, Bucharest, Sophia, Skopje this morning.

"Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere.'  (Henry Miller)

"Hic Rhodus, hic salta!"

Yes, that's definitely it. Strong effect -- invariably feeling it, even at the end of the day.  Will investigate how to search out the O2 in the AM.  Adjacent rooms seem properly ventilated.

 Hm.  Might have solved the question of the odd physiology in the morning when working here.  Felt the ventilation come on (a few hours into the occupied hours), and shortly afterwards, the dull muscle aches associated with the difficulties came on.  Presumably, after the morning workout, the body is more prone to shutting down when deprived of oxygen, and that's why I had the difficulties with spontaneous sleep and discomfort.  

Bit like the church in Cleveland that I used to run to in the AM from the gym.  They seemed partial to the dim airlessness usually found in churches, and I almost passed out a few times from it.

Without oxygen, the people perish. 

Building engineers in some quarters have apparently discovered that turning off the ventilation in well-insulated rooms accomplishes the work of heating these rooms at far less cost than actual heating.  A humanity-quieting trick known to long-distance bus drivers for decades.

 A season of adversity.  Winter, more's the pity.  But the recent extreme cold and blizzard seems to have passed, and there's a possibility that it will have been the worst of it, or that something will fall into place before the next storm.

I do keep to a rather rigorous discipline, both in these situations, and in the general scheme.  All through the travels, I was up very early, in darkness most of the year, for a run through the empty city, wherever that might have been.   

The last role I had in the theatre in this city, before I was frozen out for a few years and headed off to law school, was the title role in Spartacus with a small theatre I'd worked with several times.  The director was a good fellow, quintessential New Yorker, had worked with Joe Papp in the early days.  For some reason, the fight captain of the show (we had a top fight staff, comparatively -- I had worked with the FD often) didn't dull the blade on the trident he used, and was a bit overenthusiastic on a certain thrust when I was upside-down in a shoulder roll, and put the barbed end several inches into the side of my foot.  I was lucky; I do shoulder rolls with a trailing foot, a bit of a quirk, otherwise it likely would have gone to my head.  So I called out "wound", lay there for a bit and bled under a statue of the BVM (we were rehearsing in the basement of a Catholic school), and then the ambulance came and the wound was dressed.  Visited the hospital, and then the UWS pharmacy for the antibiotics. (At which there was a bit of a delay, so that a local plainclothes could check out the apparent stabbing.)  Then to the apartment in the historic building.  I didn't fill the painkiller prescription, so it was a difficult night.

Listening to Offenbach, two thoughts came to me.  The first was of a monastery by a river, with certain specific icons lit by candlelight.  The second was a cornfield, in which an oak tree was complicating the harvest.  I was the oak, of course, having had a it of a run-in with the agricultural tool.

That sense of being something other than what I was taken for, and being something other than the generally provided things of life were provided for, is essential in a large city such as this.  People are shaped into the forms useful for the city, in ways that are both obvious and difficult to notice.  You become the expected creature, unless you are, in your heart of hearts, more than a bit alien to the entire experience.  Apart from the world.

This is one of the reasons I have such an aversion to the cultural Catholicism I see associated with the older institutions here, and that is so ubiquitous in the Midwest.  Christianity has made its peace with the world, but it did so in order to teach people in the world -- no need to be scampering up pillars or running off to caves.  But any form of religion also exerts a re-ligare, a binding force that the world makes use of in ways that Christian doctrine specifically counsels against in the context of social life.

I keep to the morning prayers.  It's like dredging a navigation channel before the rising sun and ambient energy of the others turns the stream to indistinct muddy flats.  You must awake your faith.

Greek thought divides the φρονεσσι, the savvy and practical know-how, from the νουσ, the intelligence of mental thought.  Our society generally relies on the former, heirs of the empiricist Scottish Enlightenment.  We tend to learn tasks through apprenticeship ("mentoring", which arguably should be capitalized) and not education and understanding.  The implicit reasoning is that doing something changes your ability to understand it, and absent the practice or experience, understanding would have no value; this is a very English sensibility.  It's not the only way of thinking about the world, though.

To be the oak in the cornfield is to refuse to bear fruit in the customary way.  The reality of the extreme adversity that I've been facing for the last few months is that the social forces of the city are exerting immense pressure, both in the material realities of life and in the incidental contacts with others, and being alien to the experience, not sharing the general understanding, is really the only way of preserving one's humanity.  You must be a traitor to your architects, as Leonard Cohen wrote.  

I'm confirmed in this belief by seeing the ways in which people try to make their lives meaningful by doing precisely the opposite, and playing the social role with enthusiasm.  The question, then, is what is to be meaningful -- to be among the others in the way that is socially approved, or to come to an understanding of the nature of the place, and to attempt to use the useful things.

Adam, alone, needed no Christ.  Sometimes, when the morning psalms and prayers return to the thought of Christ, I realize that  I had slipped away, in the course of the previous day or evening from such thoughts, and it is as if a pair of glasses had slipped away from my eyes.  To see things naturally, as figments of an already-understood world, however useful that might be against nihilistic despair, isn't what Christian doctrine is about.  (In the same manner, doctrine is moderated on the other extreme by reason.  ~ "Naturalism against the Pyrhonnist, reason against the dogmatist.")  But between the two, between being something a bit more than our forms in the state of nature, and not taking doctrine past the reach of reason's assent, the spectacles of the faith do tend to reveal the world past its own self-revelation.  I'm concerned by people who worship Christ as any other given thing in the world might be worshiped, by the simple assertion of the identity with divinity.  The point of asserting such an identity in the context of Christian thought is that it reveals the nature of doing so, and the truth is in the nature of doing so, not having the abstract truth of the proposition.  The abstract truth of the proposition is (rightly) preserved in dogma as a potential means of ascent.

So this is perhaps the opposite of the error in our society that privileges experience over understanding in order to more effectively subordinate the souls to the work of the machine.  In that context, it would be better to attempt the self-possession of understanding.  In the Christian mystery, though, we enter into the wounds of Christ, so things prove true by experiencing the nature of things, rather than ratifying abstract propositions. 

Intra tua vulnera, absconde me... 

In sum, perhaps, the oak, unlike the corn, knows the scythe as a wound, not an end. 

 

 

 

 

Long story short, I feel that I've been surrounded by very questionable people doing very questionable things for a very long time, and things appear to be coming to a bit of a head.  The present difficulties are substantial.  Hence, I'm trying to shift the narrative.  Not a blank slate, really, but just a bit of space so that the current plot lines of the narrative become a bit less ineluctable.  And I'm beginning to think this might be sort of important.

Slogging on. 

 I have to get back to southern Europe, I think.  The times are out of joint.

I'm increasingly aware that, at first glance, the sequences of events in law school and during the Ph.D. are indistinguishable from academic insufficiency. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  I have the strong portfolio of work, and the documented proof of the mind-boggling and eye-watering levels of corruption and irregularities. I'm still puzzled at these events, given the fact that American universities are not generally thought to be corrupt places.  The question is how to make these events plain, so that the intuitive misunderstanding doesn't take hold.  

Peirce: the Ockhamite razor can be perilous--a plurality of explanations occasionally gets you closer to the truth.

Perhaps a website redesign is in order.  That should solve everything.  Font switches do wonders for the self-image. 

 "Against the erasure."  

I'm not sure why that phrase came to mind, but I've used it a few times when talking about Tarkovsky's  Stalker (the source Strugatsky novel took the word verbatim from Fenimore Cooper).

I thought of that phrase this morning, standing at the altar of Czestochowa.  Egan raised the altar, perhaps in thanks to old JP2 ties, shortly after I moved to the city.  It's the only side altar that I regularly see decorated by wreaths and flowers brought in by the people.  

I've lost a lot over the last ten years.  When I left conservatory, even long before that, I was a very finely tuned mechanical watch.  The nature of my society is that capital raises immense educational institutions, but when you leave them, the difficulties of the individual in the unchecked market are considerable.  Bede's sparrow, perhaps.

Perhaps we can hold onto things by remembering the fact of the erasure.  Meditating on that.  And then, more colors come into view, lines of lower light make themselves apparent.  

Perhaps the most beautiful colors I've ever seen I saw once in a dream, after walking through the old marketplace in Sarajevo one night.  A woman, holding a book, and teaching about God.  I remember those colors very clearly, and I've noticed them in some Islamic art as well.  Wavelengths.

One reason I think Rene Girard is very important is that he makes the case that much of our life is unthinking, competitive imitation.  We go through the forms, and ring the changes.  But then, one day, you notice that the changes don't ring anymore.   

There's a fellow in midtown of late, walking around with some holy icons and ringing what sounds like an orthodox-tuned bell.  (Do they have a different campanological scale?  Wavelengths and Pythagorean divisions of sound?)

Always be ringing.  When necessary, use bells.  

 Much of this chuntering about circumstances is simply an attempt to keep my own thinking on it coherent, as the times possibly grow more difficult.  To be clear, there is a certain life associated with working in the theatre, practicing law, or teaching in an American university, and although there were very costly and difficult times in the years I spent working for those credentials and that experience, I'm not talking about those lives when I muse about what it is that's to be done now.  I'm attempting to sketch a basic existence somewhere -- the sort of life and work in the context of rustication or internal exile that most civilizations would think that the state should set up when blocking someone from the learned professions on political grounds.

(Though this would occur to very few people in the present cultural context.  You would have to synthesize and compare several different, and perhaps contradictory, cultural sensibilities before understanding it to be a logical reaction.) 

Famously, a prominent academic who crossed one of these institutions recently ended up driving a school bus in the Midwest afterwards.  It's better than an Albanian chrome mine of a few decades ago, to be sure, but I'd be willing to wager that he got the gig through personal connections.

Today, frequently thinking of Cluj, for some reason.  University town, two very interesting cultures, fascinating traces of medieval murals on the walls of the Hungarian church.  

My present existence here is simply a form of Purgatory, and not necessarily the most pleasant circle or storey of it.  To get a baseline existence, I need to return to exile.  (Though the means even for this are proving very elusive.)

The existence here isn't existence but endurance.  And there are limits to one's endurance. 

 In all candor, here are the factors:

An institutionally and personally divided family, some of whom apparently work in confidential service for the government.  I have no connection with such institutions, nor would I ever collaborate with them after seeing what, in all probability, they did to my family members.

Three careers shut down by corruption (as described in the two-page addendum to the online CV).

Even after the top-tier law degree with strong grades, many years in which the physical circumstances were as difficult as they can be for someone in the first world -- unsurvivable for some, the equivalent of the physical difficulties described in literature from the gulags of a century ago.  Almost all of it in the fishbowl of midtown NYC.  Present difficulties are substantial.

I realize that discussing these things publicly likely makes me a less salable prospect, but frankly, I'm a bit concerned about what they might do next.  I intend to try to find a life in a more neutral place, and will fight to the utmost to retain the ability to leave the country.

I work out daily, spend my days looking for work and studying philosophy, and have maintained the mens sana in corpore sano. I attend daily Mass on weekdays, and spend some time each day composing a written meditation on the readings. Teetotal, of course, when there's nowhere to stay, and I don't use illegal (or recently legalized) drugs.  I've put together some research projects on the early history of the American corporate form and some aspects of American philosophy, and I am working on them every day the libraries are open, when I'm not doing piecework for academic presses in order to get sufficient money for things like food and laundry and the discount gym.  

It's possible that this isn't a corrupt country, but if that's the case, I'm at a loss to explain the things that have happened to me.  It's certainly a very prosperous country.  But there are serious problems.

As for me, I'm trying to work, read and think -- and I'll fight as hard as any caged lion to keep doing this, and to get to a place in which I can have a minimally sufficient life while doing so -- even if it means I can't practice the professions in which I've trained and studied, or enjoy the prosperity that is usually associated with such work.

I remember, many years ago, sitting in this room, on an impulse, I filled out a card (in the days before computer requests, when there was a lit board on the screen in the middle of the room to let people know when their books had arrived) for the Shaker Roll, and quietly read it, a propos of nothing, from cover to cover.  

We exist to testify to the truth.  This is why we came into the world.  

One goes on.  Specifically, I go on.

 

 

Increasingly certain that I should head back to southern Europe.  And soon.  Thinking about the production-premiere of Twelfth Night that I wandered into at the municipal theatre in Bucharest.  The Dvorak 7 in Belgrade -- I could hear the war.  The morning courtyard performance of the Noh troupe at the Sibiu festival, when the opening blast of the flute coincided with a peal from the 18th c. SJ church across the way.  The April snow that started to fall in Zemun, as I finished writing about that performance.

In short, if there's a place where its possible to live and work and think, as opposed to spending my life trapped in other people's games in a matrix of corruption, I do need to be a bit ruthless about getting there. 

Some hardware problems this AM, likely solid-state issues with adapters and plugs.  Amazed the reconditioned Battlestar Galactica (ragtag, yet fleet) winbooks have survived the peregrination and this much of the afterwards.  

Much of the last five years has involved working on a wing and a prayer, with the wing often being hypothetical.  

One survives.  And as many of the machines that form Lockean appendages to the self as possible survive as well. 

They have survived much.  Several recent nights of ice-in-the-thermos cold. 

 Be very careful around craven and jocular folks -- though they make up the preponderance of the governing class in this generation, this isn't a universal phenomenon.  In other times and places, being an authentic and substantial person is generally thought to be a good thing, and accomplished with something more than simply affecting seriousness when necessary.

Your righteousness must exceed that of the wealthy and well connected. 

 

 One danger in looking for a bridge from here to there is the odd folks who are sometimes looking for people who are looking for bridges.  Best to just get there.

"I begin by beginning." 

Radio Three continues to be one of the great life-lines, like a signal coming over the shortwave transistor in the deepest foreign forest -- and one that I choose to believe is being broadcast from a planet without any of these empirical troubles to it.  Or at lest a moderately more civilized place.  Or at least a place in which one can occasionally get a cup of coffee and quietly read a book.

My mind constantly thinking back to the conditions during the last peregrinations -- the places, the nature of the experience.  If one pines for exile, perhaps there is a condition beneath exile in inopportune return.  

Oedipus wandering empty Thebes, homeless -- dreaming of the strange streets and the bare camp-beds and tables of unfamiliar Colonus. 

---- 

And yes, camp-beds and tables is a reference to Wittgenstein.  Working a few of those into the plaints of the present helps to elevate the tone.  Rise above. 

 Sat down to work, went unconscious for three hours.   Life is a process of getting as much out of these fleshy machines as possible.  On occasion, less William James' white or black horse in deepest night than the Blues Brothers' car.

 The week or so of extreme cold seems to have broken, with warmer temperatures to come starting tonight.  For graces received.

Based entirely on the recent weather, there seems to be a certain lack of freshly-shorn lambs hereabouts.

Not that I shirked the wind.  Made a point of spending a good amount of time most nights on the quay and piers of the west side, where the winds and temperatures are considerably more adverse.  Always interesting to walk out onto the wind-swept pier at midnight, across the frozen parts of the river -- to look out towards the center of the channel to determine which way the tidal estuary was flowing on that night.  The whisper of the passing ice.

 

 

 Still casting frantically about for more remote academic editing work, sufficient to get back over the ocean and to the Balkans -- as an American, I am a creature of Europe, and it's arguably the most revealing part of the continent, with the confluence of the three, perhaps four, big civilizations.  Decent arts, priced as a cultural necessity, not a luxury good.  And I can afford to live, eat, read, write, and think there, even when I'm firmly in the cold stateside.  American Navalny.

The task is essential -- I shifted to this mode as a means of surviving the crisis (which, as fate would have it, came in coldest, darkest winter), but if I run the engine in this gear for much longer, the frame might crack.

 Peculiar moment at the new Abp's first pontifical yesterday.  Customarily, almost everyone in the nave sits after the end of the Gospel, though the concelebrants in choir almost always remain standing (as is proper)  until the celebrant at his chair venerates the book of the Gospels. Yesterday, for the first time in my memory (attending there since the last millennium), everyone stood until the new abp. headed to the pulpit.

So, one of two things (and with the proviso that the crowd is mostly tourists).  Either everyone suddenly   came to the realization that they had been doing it wrong, or something about the fact that the now-retired fellow wasn't there anymore.  A hesitation to act in his absence, or perhaps the lack of his prompting.  Peculiar.

 From all appearances, the city is populated entirely by marihuana-smoking greed machines and tourists.  Apparently, I'm two centuries too late for the kind of place I was looking for.  Already checking the timetables for departures on the Celestial Railroad (Hawthorne).

Despising for you this city, I turn my back.

There is a world elsewhere.  

 

Bosnia or Serbia is the watchword, I think.  Both populated by very civilized folks who are highly attuned to the traditions of hospitality, but I don't think I awaken any particular affinities -- merely interesting places in Europe in which I know that I can work and think.  

I am, of necessity, coming to a dualistic understanding of church and religion.  Dualism is  distinguished by there being two serviceable explanations for things; there must be no overlap between the descriptions, since they explain things based on completely different understandings of experience, and each must purport to offer a complete explanation.

Considering religion, we first have that objective, perhaps anthropological, phenomenon of the sacred element in any culture -- the medicine man, Gibbon's barefoot friars of Jupiter, etc.   Any great city, from Egypt to North Dakota, has its priests and its rites.  And one beginning of sufficient humility is recognizing that this explanation can be used to describe the Mass of the Latin church in the West.  When you travel in contested lands, you can see that these rituals, familiar to the native as anodyne weekly rituals from childhood, are specific to a certain world-political force, and operate to strengthen that force.  Note, though, that this is not a materialist or exclusively political reading -- only a dogmatic thinker would refuse to concede some spiritual power to the shaman and the Egyptian priest.  Every place has its eidelon and holy rites, and the people in each place are able to think transcendentally about life and their own experience in the context of these rites, even if the rites are merely expressive in nature.

Looking at the Masses in areas thought to be most attuned to the culture, it is possible to see them in this manner, as the holy rites proper to the place, and which it is good and fitting to do, and they fulfill the righteousness of the time.  

But this definition does not exhaust the event.  The righteousness of the time is fulfilled not by setting out to fulfill the righteousness of the time, to do holy rites, but by entering into a certain event in a first-person understanding. Which is to say, those who go to Mass to participate in the sacred rites of a certain place are fulfilling their obligation,but some aspect of the experience is veiled to them precisely because they rely upon this line of thought as a sufficient explanation of their actions.  

A religious event also has its first-person characterization, in that the people are not merely dutifully fulfilling the city's rituals, but doing things that are meaningful to them because the actions of the ritual have something more than expressive meaning to them.  A Christian who recalls Christ thinks of someone who actually existed.  One who meditates on Isis and Osiris mediates on s sequence of events that is meaningful in itself.   In other words, in these rituals, we are doing certain things in the world, and encountering certain things in the world, just as we might do so outside of the context of the ritual.  

So if the prevailing explanation of the event comes from the first understanding, the dutiful observance of the holy rites proper to the place, there is a possible remonstration from someone who, ontrastingly, has an understanding of the event based on the first-person experience of meaningful, rather than expressive, actions in the world.  The thinker of the second way might say, "But what about Christ" or "But what about Osiris?"  This thinker understands that what he is doing in the ritual was instituted within history at a certain discrete time in reaction to certain specific events, and that the ends of the ritual are a closer communion with these truths that have to do with independently meaningful things in the world -- things in the world that have a historical or cultural reality outside the context of the ritual, so their invocation within the ritual is not simply expressive speech.  The ritual refers.  This view exists alongside the way of thinking based on the present importance of of the act, despite the fact that the understanding which sees the ritual as the rites proper to the place purports to offer a complete explanation without entering into the first-person nature of the experience.  (And the first-person explanation also makes a claim to completeness, even though it would miss much of the the event going on around itself in the present moment if it were to rely entirely on the actions of the event.  At a certain point, we should realize that we are not merely meditating on the actual reality of Christ, but that we are standing in an immense cathedral; the latter is clearly a meaningful aspect of the event.

So, as I attend the Masses in the capital of the world, this is why I am pining a bit for the ikonostases of the Balkans.  These rituals are proper to the place, and they make the culture strong.  But the rituals refer to things actually in the world, and so we need to turn our minds to the first-person meanings of the event.  Turning my mind to the reality of, for example, a Serbian ikonstasis isn't a fleeing from my own culture, or in the manner of Heidegger on Holderlin, an outward journey to the distant place to unearth the truths of the homeland.  I turn my mind to the distant event because I am surrounded by the piety of expressive speech, though I know that this speech refers to actual entities.  His blood dripped onto the same earth on which I stand.  And the distant spirituality that is calling me through the doors of memory serves to ground me in the event apart from the present culture -- which is not a fleeing from the ritual, but in fact the central truth of my first-person experience of it.

 

 Sexagesima.

In Jacob is prefigured the Christian. He said, "All these things are against me;" and what he said in a sort of dejection of mind that must the Christian say, not in dejection, not sorrowfully, or passionately, or in complaint, or in impatience, but calmly, as if confessing a doctrine. "All these things are against me;" but it is my portion; they are against me, that I may fight against them and overcome them. 

https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume5/sermon20.html 

Waited in the cold in front of the research library before it opened, went inside, got the books, and then apparently almost immediately fell asleep, losing the whole (half) day.  Almost certainly due to inadequate caffeination.

When performance is at issue, performance-enhancing substances should not be abandoned precipitously. 

 ----

"The poorer quarters, where the ragged people go."  Places characterized by certain scents, which one picks up from the chairs and such during the day.  A lesson in both humility and mental focus.  These days are characterized by an almost militant approach to hygiene -- I identify with Platonov's travelling soviet teachers and leaders, trying to preserve the spirit against the filth of daily habits in the Central Asian steppes.  A workmen, perhaps angry at the world, shaking out his workclothes right in front of me as I stepped out of the shower at the gym.  Nothing from the outside can make one unclean.  Though that's not necessarily the first reaction one has to such things.

                    

One of my secret weapons: a bit of instant coffee in the water bottle.  Cold brew of champions.

Am mulling, though, in the manner of Luke switching off his targeting systems in the event, following the LDS prohibition on "hot drinks." i.e. caffeine.  Unclouding the mind.  The warning o hot drinks should be contextualized -- 19th c. canteens, there's no telling what was in those beans, as Gurdjieff pointed out.

One reason for this is something I noticed during the blizzard last week.  Given the weather, I relaxed the firm parsimony, and went to sbux a few times, where the coffee is more potent, caffeine-wise.  The lift was rewarding and familiar, but I also had a sense that the ladders of the evening (it was morning) were the cost of the present energy.  Antaeus lifted from the earth.

Of course, the second test will be whether I can stay awake all day.  In prior spells of adversity, the record was five days without real sleep (I think).  Almost, Gilgamesh.

Update -- this will have to be a gradual reduction, else I will likely go mad an instant before my head falls unconscious onto the keyboard in front of me.  A solid ambition, though.

Bit of a nip in the air last night.  Seems winter's coming on.

I must remember that the stable living and working situations that I'm constantly thinking about and working towards are attractive because of the possibility of work.  The reason a room in a brutalist tower appeals is that I could fill it with paperback books (as I habitually do at rentals that last longer than a month and a half).  And there is a very specific abundance at hand in form of one of the world's largest research libraries that allows for many hours of work and reading before the extraordinary difficulties of the day have to be dealt with again.  Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

According to the post count, I've written over a thousand ephemeral things.  And yet, only when considered as a whole are they rightly called ephemera.  

Even the smallest parts of a life look to (and require) the fullness of a life in order to understand their role in the scheme of things.  βιοσ.

--

Separately, one regret from the last Balkan trip was that I didn't get up into Moldova -- the old communist-era flats looked fascinating.  But based on the response rate compared to those in the more prosperous countries surrounding it, it appears that the Polish name did me no favors.  A bit like the American Midwest, perhaps.

And I was also tempted to break one of my cardinal rules and enter a country at war --  Odessa, etc.  But I kept on piste.  More's the pity.   

 Assume, for the nonce, that in any rational system of social life, someone with my education and accomplishments would be able -- again, in every single world/instance -- to secure baseline sufficiency employment.  Whether the system was state control (report to local work board) or a healthy market with transparency and efficiency (file a reasonable number of applications, some in which the training and experience would be per se sufficient against the competition), a basic life -- again, not the life that the credentials might suggest, but the baseline -- would be possible.

The temptation then arises to fix precisely this flaw in things.  To make things less corrupt,  to allow for less caprice in matters affecting basic livelihoods.  This is understandable, but an error.

Attain the position of minimal sufficiency and then attempt to do the transcendent (involving all aspects of being) work that you were born to do, and for which you came into the world.  

The errors of the world should not determine the choice of the good. 

Ante faciam frigorem quis sustenibit?

My thoughts are tending to Romania today, a country I came to know rather well (in the library knowledge sense), and which I like very much -- Cluj, Bucharest.  But I think the focus on Bosnia and Serbia is correct.  The Powers that Be in my country and the Powers that Be in the eastern (which is to say Western) Balkans are a bit simpatico.  And I seem to be having a mite of difficulty with the former.  The watchword is: basic sufficiency, and the freedom to read, think and write.

Let me try to explain (or perhaps just sum up) how it is that I think things are going wrong in my country.  It is a prosperous country, so a materialistic critique would say nothing is wrong.  And yet.  

First, consider that there is a commonly held notion of fairness, democratic process, and the law of the land, and that this becomes the default understanding when one of the hundreds of millions on these shores thinks about what might be going on in areas of the country that they know nothing about.  Second, I would claim, based on several experiences with institutions of national scale, that this is not in fact the sensibility that governs in the event.  Third, there is a prevailing sense that this is not the exception, but the higher pragmatic truth.  That to be governed by ideas is a mistake, and it is better to reach pragmatic agreement with the habits and processes of those currently controlling the institutions.  The claim of right, I think, is the essence of the growing threat to the Republic (in evidence of which I would point to the current Executive). Which is part of the reason that I think my secular work (literally, of the age -- when I break my own rules and read and think about the thoughts currently percolating, as opposed to the old texts) is worth doing, even at the cost of extraordinary difficulty every day.

Next.  Consider the balance of realism and idealism within the current political matrix.  In more pragmatic terms, consider which things are mind-independent and should be judged by us as to their real nature, and which things are more idealistic, in that we take them on faith to be a certain thing, and our intuition of them allows us to calibrate our general understanding of things -- they teach us how to think about the things that are.  In the context of the general imitation that constitutes the present politics, only certain things are thought to be grounds for private opinions.  The leaders, whomever they might be, are thought to be guides, not probationers subject to constant scrutiny.  Herein is the mistake.  Everything on earth is on earth to be judged.  That is the Adamic task.  And in this general reversal, the things of heaven are claimed to have mind-independent existence as existence is generally understood, and this proposition is promptly collectively negatived, leading the people away from both God and higher thoughts.  We look at the stars to expand the reach of our sight, not to judge whether they exist.  Perhaps in the context of expanding our sight, we might wonder, with Huck, whether they were made or just happened, but this is the beginning of knowledge, not a threshold criterion of legitimacy.

This is what I think is going on far, far upstream.  As for my personal experiences downstream in the muddy flatlands, I know that I've attempted three careers and encountered fatal (and occasionally almost deadly) corruption in each, resulting in the present rather spectacular difficulties.  At the same time, there is a general prosperity from the industrial structures set up after the second world war, making the proposition that things are going badly in the world a bit counterintuitive to the materialist mind. 

Which is why I think the question of intuition, after the last clarification in Koenigsberg some 250 years ago, is perhaps ripe for another explicitation and calibration. 

But first, one must survive the cold, the calumny, and the general confusion. 

 Wow, that was a difficult mediation to write.  Started off strong, but was fighting lethe with both hands within tn minutes. 

This sort of life does odd things to the habits of the mind and body.  Another reason for puritan discipline. 

 This will be the first Abp. installation that I've missed here.  Inquiries after Mass one morning S"ticketed only" policy would not have the usual exception of a standby line.  And that relations between palace and cathedral seem a bit frosty--as seems to be sometimes the case here, possibly because both appointments require vast amounts of influence.   I remember the last Abp. but one and his rector having some disagreements.  Led to some interesting liturgy.  At one point, when the rector was saying the Mass, the C. Abp. walked into the sanctuary, sat in the cathedra, and got up and left after a while.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          ., 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Plummer's Lear at Lincoln Center at a St. David's day matinee is one of my great theatregoing memories.  Afterwards, the city seemed enchanted.

 

 

 (My reason for posting this is that these blogs are sort of an online representation of the way things are, representations that impart some sense of reality, even to the one living the life in question. And I will presently need to focus my mind and activities according to these sensibilities.  We know something to be important when it penetrates our habits.)

Coming to the histrionic-sounding but in fact quite justified awareness that I need to get out of my country before it kills me.  Or, more precisely, before I am unable to survive the circumstances.  As a proffer of justifiability: most people would not have physically survived the circumstances of my life for the last two months or so.  I could have asked to sign on with folks doing confidential work for the government, and I could trudge into the shelters and mazes of charitable aid, but neither of those possibilities is open to me as a moral choice, given my history.

I'll not rehearse the larger claim of right -- the two-page PDF linked to my CV at the WordPress site explains things.

The most troubling aspect for me is that it's clear to me that I didn't just blunder into three corrupt organizations  -- this is the way my country works now.  You have to go along with the corruption within the mechanism, and -- this is the important bit -- it is thought good that things are this way.  Pragmatism.  Doing what works, or doing what you have to do, however you might choose to know it.  Consider the present character of the federal government.

So, apparently blackballed from employment, housing and the arts that I trained in,. I have only my work, but I do have that, and I can live in such a way as to preserve it against the evil.

Arendt said the evil was banal.  I'm coming to the opinion that a better description of the same phenomenon would be that the evil is unnoticeable.  It's the people who are banal.

 Two useful advantages of the present adversity:

1.  I will no longer, even slightly, pine for this place, despite the fact that I've lived here for many years.

2. Should I be able to get back to the nomad scheme abroad or find a sufficient place and means stateside, I need to be always writing.  I had that sense, and some interesting promptings towards it, but there were countervailing factors.  I see now that those factors are outweighed, and that I would be best off using as many breaths and heartbeats to shape words and texts as possible.  Even if all is writ in water, it must be written.

 At the beginning of my most recent visit to Belgrade, I had a very peculiar dream shortly after I arrived.  I was staying in a very small studio just down the block from St. Mark's church, near the Parliament.  (During this visit, there was an immense protest march one weekend, so it was a very interesting location -- on that day, I made it a point to stay in, though I walked around the city the night before.)

A day or two after I arrived, I dreamed that I was inside the upper reaches of a very tall tower, facing an angel, who was standing slightly above me on the stairs.  The angel had an immense countenance.  He threw some salt in my face.  Like any graduate of an American law school, I took umbrage at the tort. I demanded to know who was in charge.  Surprised, and apparently a bit confused at the question, the angel indicated some figures standing far below, whom I understood to be the clerics of the local national church.  That's all I remember of it -- the memory is keyed to the authentic reaction of the angel, taking the question and answering it.

A very peculiar dream.  

I have a theory of long standing that when I remember some detail of a dream, the reason is that it indicates something that I need to pay attention to, possibly to repair.  

So, acting a bit less like a graduate of an American law school, especially when abroad, is perhaps the takeaway there.

 

There is, of course always the danger, as Ben Kenobi warned Luke, that wearing one's heart on one's sleeve makes you vulnerable to others, and my professed understanding that, to quote Pynchon, "Reckon yo tengo que get el --- out of aquí," might allow others to take advantage, having some insight into my personal hierarchy of needs and desires.  

On the other hand, I think it's rather obvious.  The fellow being kept in the basement of the colisseum with the animals and aquatic machinery should probably, in every world in which he appears, be rather energetically seeking pastures new.

Mentally, on Brankov Most over the Sava, looking over at the Danube, and the silt island at the river's mouth.  For some reason, the bridge somehow connects to an apartment in Skopje -- and the chain Western coffeehouses in Cluj are on the far side, not to mention the Bulgarian mountains beyond...

 

  

I should focus my objective: Belgrade.  A simple escape, not a long-term plan -- as in the first visit some years ago, when I had enough on hand for a month or two, and found a job (in India) when I got there.  If I aim at the Balkans in general for an indeterminate time, I might miss it entirely.

But I know that if I can get to Belgrade, I can think clearly and get a few things in order.  Read Henry James and the Strugatsky bros. in Studentski park, haunt the balconies of the national theatre and JDP at $5/ticket. Write.

Or I might veer to Sarajevo at the last second.  But I do have to get there, wherever there might be.