Computer models said rain until 8, so I stopped in at a sbux for a rare coffee around 6, as I also needed to see whether I could get this winbook to process a download on the better wifi there. Of course, the rain stopped soon after I handed over my $4. Now I'm thinking of finding myself $4 short for an airline ticket or a rental booking at the critical moment. For the lack of a nail...
Dover Beach.
Which, looking on the bright side, is a beach.
Undoubtedly connected with the chill and clouds and such locally. Slogging through tough times is seriously inflected one way or the other by the weather. I'm certain a pleasant day in the prison camps was still a pleasant day. God's world of nature supervenes, and God in the world of human intelligence makes us cognizant of the fact.
I do regret the distance from what was the immediate family, but the estrangement seems to be mutual, as to every relationship. The atomic family, exploded. They were very good people, but the confidential government work had a very deracinating and destabilizing effect on their minds, and things just fell apart from there. Quite spectacularly. There are a few things touching both family confidences and government confidences that can't be discussed, but I do need to slip into this evolving record of the time that we're completely estranged, and there's no implicit agency, or basis of knowledge to be had vis-a-vis the others in the tribe.
And now, I will allow such things to scroll off the bottom of the page.
It's odd -- as the difficulty increases locally, my thoughts about the Balkans and southern Europe tend towards places in which my faith has prevailed against adversity. When things even out for a bit locally, I'm very much drawn to places of different traditions, especially as I've had some powerful dreams about higher things in those places, and I'd very much like to follow up on those. But with difficulty, my mind ineluctably reaches to the places and traditions of hard-won Christian worship.
This morning: Zemun, Brankov most.
Against the erasure. With all the force of my being. In the city of the power of evil.
--
I have received many graces during these difficult last six months. And I'm very grateful to have had the chance to go to the mountain (Pirin ) before the fight began, and to come down to the fight from the mountains.
But, to conceptualize this visually, imagine a fellow walking on the earth. As the graces arrive, they reveal more and more of the heavens above him. Eventually, what began as a difficult journey under a heavy cloud is lit by unimaginable heavens in a series of larger arcs above him. But there is still the same difficulty of the earthly progression, at the smallest arc of the journey, across the round planet. This is perhaps how to distinguish graces from temporal assistance. The road is difficult, but the stars are more clear.
Just to confirm the present state: off-the-charts bad. Travelling southern Europe, possibly finding an academic or artistic berth there, seems to be the only possible way to accomplish the work, given the adversity from the corrupt folks stateside. Dozens of times every day, I remember a specific place from my most recent travels, and those times are the hope and happiness of the present.
It's a peculiar country, sometimes, and also dangerous. You wouldn't be able to understand my situation from the general notion of life in these United States, but the folks actually involved with the culture here would certainly recognize the fact of de facto internal exile in a market economy.
I survive, I keep an attitude of dispassion, and I do as much work as I can. Tomorrow comes.
Research libraries opened two hours late today for some reason. Conceptually, a bit of extra time with Henry James after breakfast and before the tasks sounded like a good idea, but in practice, it was an exercise in avoiding the tourists and trying to find as warm a place as possible. Temperatures in the fifties, but an oddly persistent chill.
Bright side, excellent price on the new bag, which I was able to secure in the late morning, as opposed to the evening, after the tasks -- the reliable army surplus shop across from port authority saves the day again. Deo gratias.
I can't say that it makes any sense to continue on after all these years, but I continue on, and will continue to continue on. Sufficient is the day. Straight on till morning.
In one of the Star Wars films (not the real three, one of the subsequent ones), Obi-Wan is fighting with his light saber, and suddenly a door descends, blocking him off from the action. He drops to one knee, perhaps praying, perhaps crystalizing his purposes. When the door rises again, he leaps back into the fray.
My years of training and teaching swordwork were peculiarly formative. Not fencing. Although we trained to miss, we were the real thing in the context of negation, rather than an easygoing sport based on the ancient discipline.
It has stood me well in these times -- I salute my teachers.
As predicted, un-patchable fault appeared in the Rothco bag inside of two months. Their India/cotton products aren't bad, but the synthetics are weak material, stitched weakly with cotton thread. I reinforced points regularly with nylon, but the hard use tko'd the hold of the zipper teeth.
Back to BW Alpine, one of the last ones in the shop, as apparently they've been discontinued. If I had the storage space, I'd buy a dozen -- looks like BW switched to a zippered model.
When the catastrophe of things first descended, when I found all doors closed after the law degree, my focus was on absolute discipline, and a plan to get back to the mountain path from which I apparently had fallen. And that was a real challenge -- the mind faces some very powerful difficulties once even the most basic normal life falls away. And then I made it back to the path, and found that the path itself was a falling from the path, for some reason.
Now, the task is far more complex. While there is an attempt to find whatever older, living, honest paths might have survived, I am also faced with the reality that I might have to do most of my work extra mures. And it would be foolish to make getting back onto a true path the work of a life. So now, in addition to the attempt to find whatever true paths might remain, there is the attempt to accomplish the work within present circumstances.
Then, the question that presents itself is whether the work should be a response to the circumstances, or taken up despite the circumstances. I unequivocally elect the latter. That said, the task requires constantly pointing out that you are speaking through a screen of circumstance, that you are not speaking from the same place as the others. But that which you speak is despite the circumstance, not out of spite at the circumstance.
One of my usual analogies is that of a fellow in a very small canoe speaking to people sitting on their lounge chairs on a massive cruise ship. But it has slowly dawned on me that they don't know that they're on the ship. David Foster Wallace told the story about the old fish who met two young fish and greeted them, saying the water was fine that morning. Afterwards, one young fish turned to the other and asked "What's water?"
In antiquity, every god was greater than every human being. This is the notion of the absolute nature of the distinct spheres of existence. In the same way, today, every individual human is greater than the shared social forms of the culture. There is something particularly American about the notion that a single fellow's notion of the truth might be true or useful, as against the massed and amassed wisdom of an enormous, industrialized society. And this is because we inhabit a higher sphere, although day-to-day life in industrialized societies serves largely to erase such notions.
The only possible direction is towards the center -- not the center of the largest city, that was the mistake I made in my youth. The path is towards your own center, and by your own lights of truth. And even if life proves nasty, brutish, and a bit shorter than it otherwise might have been, to have stood when it was generally thought that you had no place to stand is to stand in the presence of something higher than the thoughts of the world.
The present political moment here seems to establish that a Kantian/Habermasian procedural basis for preserving a republican form of government is insufficient. The external mechanisms (television, etc.) can become the effective mechanisms.
Perhaps the Founders had it right vis a vis the direct election of the Senate. Ironically, the sort of discourse coming from the UK these days about which life peers should sit in the Lords might be informative and useful.
But for the nonce, just try to survive this momentary lapse in republican governance, I suppose.
Peculiar day, yesterday. Two events that had the semblance of being meaningful; they were close enough to events that would have been profoundly meaningful that some sense of that event actually occurred, although within the negation.
Experience is that which we should be grateful for, which is to say, our encounter with the world is always looking over the world's shoulder a bit, and being grateful to that other, larger thing that we can just barely make out within the totality of things. An animal, or a human living a rote life, when encountering the world, does so within a frame of reference without residue--the encounter with things is a zero sum game. But as you begin to sense, as a human, the limits of human intuition, the encounter with the world starts to look past the world, and with wisdom, this looking-past begins to be characterized by gratitude.
Christ, in the desert, was perhaps shown the events of the subsequent three years, and invited to take the fruits of this experience without actually encountering the time. Traditionally, we call this the work of the devil. (Presumably, he characterized it this way when recounting the story to his students.)
But, reason why such a thing would be ascribed to the evil forces. It is not necessarily authenticity, since everything has its own authenticity. It is not merely avoiding anything characterized by the evil ones, because that just poses the question again of why it should be so, and we are trying to make the connections between things more clear. Perhaps the answer as to why the fruits of experience, these things that the temporal mind thinks to be the aim of it all, don't accomplish the work of teaching us that we are within a larger picture than we can fathom, and the gratitude that quite possibly follows from living with that belief awhile. It would have separated him from the Father.
It is the ingeniousness of the form that gives the compact content its brilliance, and produces at the same time not an exposition, but merely an expansion consisting of subjective particularities, self-important vagaries, and abtruse bantering, together with much blustery ranting and grotesque, even farcical components, with which he probably intended to amuse himself, but which could neither please nor interest his friends, much less the general public.
(Hegel on Hamann)
As a quondam (et possibly futurum) Shakespearean text actor fellow, the local lectors have always been a source of interest, wonder and disbelief. This morning, one kept pronouncing "presbyter" with an emphasis on the last syllable, rhyming with "fear". It took me a moment to realize her logic: a shortening of "Presbyterian".
Stormy seas.
If you pay attention to the nature of the animation of those around you, you begin to get some sense of the nature of the city. For an example, consider the pigeons, relative to most other species of birds: a frantic, perpetually amorous catastrophe of a bird.
Firm hand on the tiller, redoubling the discipline. Traversing the time.
The great frustration is that the path of safety and discovery would require something that, in any basically honest civilization, would be well within the reach of someone with my degrees and experience.
So, for the nonce, there is danger, difficulty, and the city of the power of evil.
"I just read books."
(Three Days of the Condor)
The cynical view:
This country is not what it seems to be. (Few are.) To live among its appearances and semblances, to live in the country that it seems to be, certain quiet compromises with those in power have to be made. This applies equally at the Supreme Court and at the Waffle House. But once those compromises have been made, and the price of admission has been paid, you are free to enjoy the county fair.
All in all, it's better than most, but it's certainly not what it's cracked up to be.
If the argument is that the evolution of the industrial mechanism that has provided prosperity for a healthy preponderance of the people (though not as many as the continent's prosperity might have suggested) has to be preserved, and so, as opposed to traditional notions of right and wrong, "what works is good" -- if that is the argument, then, even in this case, every given individual within such a society is morally obliged to exhaustively defend the presumptive validity of traditional notions of right and wrong.
"It does not help at all to point out the steps in emancipation that have been taken and to argue prophetically that the rest is to come. We have no concern with the future. It has not come yet."
Union Trust Co. v. Grosman, 245 U.S. 412 (1918) (Holmes)
---
Holmes was the outlier among the Boston pragmatists and pragmaticists. He seemed to view the traditions of the law as a counterweight to the more free-form thoughts of James et al. (Though they certainly informed his course in Jurisprudence and subsequent writings.) The final break, if memory serves, was when James said that religious belief was true if it helped the believer. Holmes, as a veteran of some bloody campaigns with his Massachusetts-based unit, had his own notions, and they were firm ones.
Was perched on a rock reading some Krasnahorkai, when I noticed a fight rehearsal going on in the field below for a farce of Hamlet. Resisted the impulse to go down and give notes based on former work as an outdoor drama fight captain, but good to know I still have the eye.
Videlicet:
- Laertes is flipping the wrist on the head cut in the last phase -- keep it supinated, or it will drift downwards during the run.
- The (cert-compulsory) punto phrase is good, but as they follow through with a volte afterwards, Hamlet is avoiding into the diagonal cut. Punto, then break circularity.
- In the first fight, the counter-sigundes are getting a bit pointy towards the opponent -- keep them vertical, or at most, 45 degrees.
The pining for southern Europe requires some circumspection and care. These are nations with world-historical waves still coursing through them, and my own country, for its sins, is very much involved in the local minds, for good and for ill in all cases, I think. I don't want to exploit their hospitality, but after the last visit, I feel a very deep interest, on the level of dream-life, and I'd like to pursue that.
Ideally, I'd like to get back to Transylvania in time for the big theatre festival in Sibiu, though I'd likely only be able to afford a few of the ticketed shows -- the outdoor ones are less worthwhile than in the past, but still worthwhile, and the university ones are revealing. And the film festival in Sarajevo has actually provided a very unfiltered look at current world politics.
But this will (n.b., not the subjunctive) require an uptick in editing work, and that transom is conspicuously free of anything flying through it recently.
I do need to get away from their craven minds, if I am to realize my outlandish hopes of continued existence and such. The corruption that has brought me to this point is just an accident of the craven nature of the people running the show (cast a glance at where the buck stops for the quintessence of the species). And I've made careful record of their actions as I've encountered them. It's only been that way since the last generation (Woodstock>Wall Street), but these folks have marked my card and effectively ended my hopes here. It has been a difficult winter, and a difficult decade.
But while one's hopes are a creature of one's own place, they are not necessarily all located within one's own place. There is a world elsewhere, my tradition teaches.
Useless day -- attempted to rebuild the winbook, but this old dog apparently has learned one trick (reinstalled one OS) too many. Will have to figure out alternate means. Listened to a couple of lectures, one Oxon on tape, one Edinb. live, wrote an essay, and then headed upstairs to the research reading room. Had to compromise on the Hegel reading, given NYPL's oddly limited holdings (perhaps reflecting the prevailing misreading of Adorno's Categorical Imperative), so wasted a few hours reading about H's juvenilia, utterly unilluminative. Found McTaggart on the Logic, but it's keyed so closely to the main Logic that reading it while I'm working through Jena would be useless.
In sum, a day not well disposed. On the bright side, had an hour or two of sunlight in the park after Mass and before breakfast. So, there's that.
Brief game reset:
Have just survived a tremendous challenge (impecunious winter in a northern city). Considerable fatigue and oddities in the innards as the present empirical effects of it.
Still keeping absolute mental (the Project) spiritual (Mass, online homilies, daily essays on the readings) and physical (new heights in bench-press -- "when the water is muddy, I wash my cloak")
Apparently still blackballed from every job stateside, and not enough freelance editing work coming in to decamp to southern Europe for a sustainable room/board while exploring the culture. Present living conditions a bit dire.
The Project might bear fruit, but by design, that's a bit further down the line. Right now, I'm reading as much as I can in these areas. The only improved thing I have to show after these five months of superhuman survival is the mind (and the notes), and that's precisely the point that's being presently stressed a bit. Like using the blackboard on which the entire set of equations has been written to hold the wall together in a storm.
Top tier law degree; top conservatory masters and a decade in the art, and Midwestern monolithic (and corrupt) university ABD, and decent scholarship from all of the above in the portfolio, and in progress.
The difficulty is that the international positions seem to be looking primarily precisely to the corrupt folks who explicitly told me that they were going to blackball me, and the latter appear to be following through on their promise.
So despite the extraordinary physical difficulties, the extraordinary professional difficulties, and the present living situation, I still have hope. Arguably, this is the least rational choice that my mind has made, but it is the one in which I have the strongest confidence.
Onward.
It is a fine balance -- sufficient rest and recollection to exist, and the force of existence. To the transcendental mind, this is identical with the balance between Romanticism and Enlightenment knowledge.
(At which point, the non-transcendental mind points out that it might just be that the inner dichotomy is what we use to understand the mind-independent phenomena of time. To which the transcendental mind replies that the world is more than our eyes, and yet we actually know the world through our eyes. And by this point, the non-transcendental mind has lost interest in the question and surfs the web a bit.)
One thing that follows from growing up under a family that was (in retrospect, quite conspicuously) doing work of a confidential nature is that when the extraordinary occurs, one has to look quite closely at it to see if a meddlesome game's afoot. I'm certain that I've puzzled more than one angel during my journey. The journey itself, you see, was an extraordinary thing, and a bit sui generis.
"God bless the child that's got his own."
Upgraded the coat -- Amazon cheap, thin cotton wasn't holding up with nights in the 40s locally. After a (rare, first of the season) chest cold didn't lift for several days and some other oddities developed in the innards, stopped by the military surplus store across from Port Authority. I'm known there, very occasional customer for many years, given the cheap, strong togs. Bought my first pair of Corcorans there, I think. When I was at the Ansonia and doing a melodrama in the East Village. Used, but only for film work.
BW wool coat with liner. Under $50. The things that a country makes to go to war with are generally the strongest and best things to use. These are mechanisms -- take the best products from the mechanisms, without taking the purposes from the mechanisms.
The reading rooms of the public research libraries here have their peculiar challenges. (Beyond the occasional lounge singer belting out pop tunes.)
The vast majority of folks there are invariably there just to cadge the free internet and table space, which creates a distinctly different vibe than if the room had been filled with people reading books. Attention is looser, unconscious interactions towards the others increase.
The ideal, I suppose, would be separate desks (it's unnerving that any given person is the city is free to show up and sit down facing you, a few feet away, while you're trying to read), like in the old British Museum reading room (perhaps at the LOC reading room as well -- I've never been there, only seen photos). Given the character of the city, it's no exaggeration, and I think an uncontroversial statement, that an objective person, or even one grounded in the national culture generally, feels him or herself constantly surrounded by both genuine evil, and the indolent comfortable folks who are always open to the thought of it.
It's revealing, though -- the assumption that, so long as everyone is empirically doing much the same thing (encountering text, not talking) that the character of the room is sufficiently preserved. The difficulty is in the obstacles to concentration -- when a society actively creates a space for this use, it should be trying to move towards a more congenial environment for that sort of thing, rather than simply re-create the empirics of past tokens of the type.
As hard as I'm working to get back to the ex ante status of digital nomad in the Balkans (and it would merely require getting one of the lowly paid remote gigs that I'm obscenely overqualified for -- which is to say, it's not looking good), while this is rightfully the sole focus of my work, and I'm beginning to think that success in this rather soon may be necessary on an existential level, I recognize that it's downstream from the work -- when I was over there I was able to read, think, and write, in addition to maintaining the encounter with the arts, both the ones I'm qualified in, and those for which I'm simply the idiot savant (hold the savant).
And the books are here before me, for several hours in the daytime. (I actually briefly pined for access to these collections and cheap peanut butter during a dark day or two in Macedonia, even given the unimaginable associated difficulties.) So....
Hic Rhodus [It isn't, I tells ya!!!] Hic Salta [Salta est, salta est...]
----
Handke's essay on tiredness in his most recent collection: Precisely this.
It's an interesting approach -- instead of using fiction to illuminate the human condition, he considers individual physical phenomena within the shared empirical existence and addresses them directly (while renouncing any claim to the thing as such).
There is the story from antiquity about the dangerous rocks near the edge of the world that moved back and forth, and would break any ship attempting passage. When the explorers saw them for the first time, they stopped moving.
There is much in that, if you can avoid the melodramatic or pop-psychiatry reading. Thoughts can change the way things are.
I recall, at Indiana, in the first year of law studies (before a Torts professor decided to give me the lowest score in the section on an ambiguous rubric, taking me from near the top to Midwestern median), the temperature control in the rooms at the beginning of the semester was a bit off, so the rooms were sauna-like for weeks. Finally, I ordered a digital thermometer on Amazon, and the day that I brought it in in my bag, the room temperature was normal, and it stayed that way. Coincidence, undoubtedly, but it does highlight the fact that as much as we might think ourselves sufficiently well-informed, and sort of sitting back and watching the orrery or the diorama of things, life is basically an ascending rocket (screaming across the sky) of untrammeled intuition, and its best to be looking out the window of your rocket (or monad), with the furious influx of knowledge of how things are
--
If a society, seeking to make all things new, builds an industrial mechanism to assure the prosperity of a healthy preponderance of the population, and a sufficient number from among that preponderance (and for whom it is an active and present question) take the view that the poor people should be done away with, this is arguably some indication of a persistent issue within the species, and one that perhaps should be remembered the next time folks set about to make all things new..
I do have a bit of a distinctive look, these days, with the leather hat and brown jacket. Based on a random overhearing, there's a small chance that the narrator for the ill-sited site-specific show that ran here for a few weeks worked me into the show occasionally as "Thoreau," despite my glowering at them as I left. (There were reasons. "People who love people" belted out by a lounge singer twice per day in the reading room of one of the world's most essential publicly accessible research libraries.)
Or I might have misheard. Dewey would have liked that, I think.
Those two years or so of wandering nomadry qua exile were a bit difficult, yes, especially in terms of keeping up the work. If I had just cut loose from my projects and wandered, I would have been free for a bit, then lost. But now, of course, I'd do almost anything to get back to those difficult days. Almost. (To quote Meatloaf:) I won't do that. Not that I've been offered any, but any job that requires secrecy is most firmly, perpetually and unequivocally off the table.
Just thought I'd put that out there, to save some time in the future. And save the future.
--
The Jena Logic again today. Some progress. I'm alternating Dewey work and Hegel work, for no reason in particular. And slowly getting the concepts that I initially merely stared at pugnaciously (in one) or glossed mindlessly over (in t'other).
Ironically, since the research libraries are filled with people not using the collections but cadging free internet and deskspace, the internet connections are very slow and dicey.
Missing out on a lot of great classical livestreams from Europe and points east (their evening, my afternoon) as workmuzik. First-world problems.
(Though rarely encountered in the second world. Romania is virtually identical with insanely high internet speeds, partially (according to rumor) because much of the network is just fiber, coax, or shielded Cat-5 nailed, tied, or taped to the telephone poles.)
Unquestionably the most maudlin performance of Arlen and Harburg's masterpiece I've ever heard.
https://www.youtube.com/live/-nxD-x52KB0?si=7RcDXpgr6pK7GEI0
May morning again. I remember last year, in Cluj, the trees in leaf, the sun and the breeze, running through the centuries-old university at dawn, the city largely deserted, as everyone was at their second homes in the country. (For all the talk of being economically retrograde, a surprisingly large number of people have second homes in the country, and eat very well and clothe themselves rather nicely. GDP doesn't touch all aspects of life.)
Here, trapped for the nonce in the gulag panopticon of the city of the power of evil. Mass homily brought to mind the line from Beyond the Fringe about America having such a strong sense of faith and national religion -- anticommunism. Not exactly climbing up to the roof to sing out an exaultant Te Deum.
I'm certainly on the right side of things locally, conceptually speaking -- but it's a bit like being on the side of friend who, having won a long and bitter argument, now believes himself to have always been right about absolutely everything.
Many mansions.
One of the things that has distinguished the dreams that I tend to privilege over other dreams is my own behavior and self-perception when in the dream. Three examples.
Many years ago, I was in a bitter court fight with a NYC landlord. One night I dreamed of an adjudication in a higher court. Everyone seemed to be speaking a language that sounded like Welsh to my (non-Welsh-knowing) mind. But at the end, when the verdict was favorable for me, my reaction was an immature, childish glee, almost embarrassingly so in that place. Like a small child or an animal.
Next, when leaving Bosnia most recently, and knowing it to be my last visit on that journey, I had a dream in which I saw the fellow who had rented me my rooms on my first visit there -- he was ex-military, now consulting for banks in the Netherlands. Apparently well-connected, decent fellow. He was standing on a mountain, and there were many men standing beside and behind him on the mountain. There was possibly an angel there as well. I was taking leave of them, and was filled with fury at the prospect of having to leave, and ended by berating the fellow who I knew, saying that he would have to leave as well some day. Ludicrous, and embarrassing, but only in the elevated place of the dream. As with the prior one, the sense of being human seemed animal-like.
Finally, one dream that I've recounted in this space before -- in an apartment across from St. Mark's church in the center of Belgrade, one night I dreamed that a large angel tossed salt in my face. I turned litigious, and demanded to know who was in charge there. With a visible sentiment that I think I will never forget, he shrugged and pointed to folks far below, in liturgical garments, very small in comparison, presumably members of the national church. Then I realized how enormous the face of the angel was.
In all of these (and a few others rooted in these three places), unusually for my dreams (and perhaps for others as well, I have no idea), my own being wasn't the grounding of the reality. My own being was the ludicrously insufficient animal in a place that made humanity seem like a primitive condition. People make mistakes in dreams, yes, but in the same manner that the protagonist of a play might make a mistake. My own mind didn't set the feeling or tone of the encounter, but proved to be primitive, untrained, not up to the task.
This is actually the principal reason for my relatively high levels of personal discipline. Even though times have been a bit difficult, and discipline has proved necessary to survive the event, it would have been possible to relax a bit more, if the earthly question was the end of the problem. But our spirits are less trained, and perhaps less noble than we might think. If the fight in the world is the be-all and end-all, then the notion that our fleshy actions change and refine the spirit can get lost.
"Behold, I tell you a great mystery. We shall all be changed in a moment."
Odd day, yesterday. Listening to evensong from Temple church (about an hour after the fact), while a British royal wandered around downstairs.
Constitutionally an interesting day for them as well. Day of royal vulting with doffs in the Parliament (theoretically, I suppose, the day in which the King has his greatest authority), and, after centuries and centuries, the last day in which an hereditary peer (as such) sat in Parliament.
Apparently, the gift to the folks downstairs was a stuffed animal -- a "Roo". Fitting, I suppose, as they've already sent over a roux.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Odd, an almost preternatural silence in the reading room for most of the morning, and then it broke, almost like a change in the weather, about a half hour after noon, and normal stirring and fidgeting returned. British Royal in the building at some point today -- perhaps Merlin is calming the waters. #kingspeace
Saxe-Coburgs apparently wandering around the city. Noticed at the gym that the chyron just said "King and Queen," without any further indication of geographical origin. Yes. well. I suppose there are people who need a king, and they'll just lay hold of the first one that shows up who speaks their language, no questions asked. If I were a monarch of one of the northern countries, I might enjoy bicycling through the UK madness incognito.
That entire model falls apart once there's no general belief in the soul and the reality of final judgment. (Which is perhaps one of the reasons that American public intellectuals have been so forthright in rejecting notions of the soul and final judgment.)
And yet, the entire progression recapitulates itself within each human life, like an embryo appearing to evolve from baser creatures -- I've had the dreams of the long approach to Windsor castle, had the Walter-Scott inflected fascination with heraldry, etc.
Hopefully, I'll make some headway on Dewey today, after a very enjoyable detour through Hegel. (Which continues -- still working my way through the Jena Logic.
The mechanics of running a world-class research library in the inner city are a bit frightening. Some genuine catastrophes of the species slumped over the tables. And at the slightest hint of irregularity, a stream of three to five heavily built and thoroughly tattooed goons stride forcefully up and down the aisles nearby, not looking to either side. Merely the show of force.
Not to mention the ill-conceived site-specific performance that had a lounge singer belting out "people who need people..." twice a day. Avoiding that cost me an hour of work every day.
Harumph.
Arc
The one disadvantage of the placement of my desk was the lack of direct sunlight, which the owners likely considered an advantage. I'd often noted the partiality of folks in this part of the world for the shaded bower; not for them the glass houses and walls open to the horizon in the American Southwest. The shadows of the forest offer safety from the sun. My favorite park in Bucharest, which I think is everyone's favorite park in Bucharest, has a long mall (from pell-mell, the old game -- the origin of many straight main streets in many cities), and about halfway through, there is a small bower with a circle of stone statues of prominent folks from the past. The mall itself is an amiable place to read on a Sunday afternoon, though the ghosts might think it a bit presumptuous to sit in the circle and read -- even if Cioran or Caragiale is on the ebook reader.
But this desk in the small apartment was persistently in shade, partly because of the trees in full summer leaf. There was the morning chorus of birds, of course, the mixture of pigeons and ravens, and the occasional cry of a gull who had found the cliffs and dank ponds of the city a suitable substitute for the ocean.
The was one bird with a peculiar call. Occasionally, I would whistle back with a distinct call of my own. And after long hours of reading in the shade, sometimes I would follow the sound of the bird outside into the summer sunshine. Once, following it at night, I met a large sociably unsocial crowd heading to an anniversary nighttime edition of the the city's football derby. On another occasion, I found a large outdoor block party. Another time, there was the picturesque walk over the long bridge over the legendary rail line, between the mountains and the sea. Another time, a massive political rally in the city, with thousands and thousands coursing through the street, on the eve of the big rally to come the next day. In short, this bird led me to many strange and wonderful things.
Then, from circumstances too tiresome to mention, I headed to the great dark city for a very difficult winter. There was the dawn chorus, of course, before the snows began, and afterwards, in the spring. But somehow indistinct, as I was focused on the tasks of the day, and simple survival in newly difficult circumstances.
One day, walking through the traffic circle, the first place to which I had returned after my flight to the city, as I had walked up out of the subway there, I thought I heard the call of that same bird again. My mind puzzled it a bit, but I didn't stop, as one doesn't stop in the city for that sort of thing. I continued on past, though the memory of it haunted me for the next day or so.
Then, some days later, as I was trying to get past the tourist swarms who come to gawk at the walls and windows of the research library, I thought I heard it again. But again I continued on, and I didn't turn around to inquire into the event. It was from this, some days later, as I sat thinking about it, that I understood that the city of the power of darkness had me in its power.
"How did you know that understanding was true?'
Because it didn't make any sense.
"Wait, how much of this was real?"
Never ask a writer or an artist that question. As another fellow once said, there were a few things that I stretched, but mainly I told the truth.
"What did you do then?"
Tried to explain it. To myself, mostly. Thought about it. Conditioned my mind to that truth.
"And what happened next?"
There is a strong Inspector Calls vibe to the present situ. It's taking all of my rationality not to smash the piggy bank and just have one of those flying aluminum contraptions take me beyond the horizon, and figure things out on on arrival.
Earlier, I (correctly) observed that a preponderance of the population of this city is composed of sub-human creatures who are trying to kill you. I'm standing by that, though I hope not to be vindicated in that belief.
Onward, carefully.
"Art saves lives" is not a slogan; it is the name of a Festival in a nation falling to pieces amid fratricidal wars.
Eugenio Barba
"Festival" sense from Holderlin/Heid, perhaps. I'm not sure what's become of Barba -- presumably he's still out there making things. I never met him (so far as I know), but I've always read his writing very carefully when working with his epigones. I'm no longer in touch with the friends of mine who are friends of his. I think he's left his theatre in the north, and gone off with his Xanthippe/dark lady. Long life and prosperity.
This is from the introduction to a text on a theatre in Belgrade that celebrated its 25th anniversary a decade ago, and with which I crossed paths briefly for a day or two as a visitor, spectator, and conversant some years before that. On the drive out of town, the member of the theatre pointed out the Baljoni market, which has been one of the places I've always returned to when visiting the city. (Excellent fresh fruit and durable long socks.)
That market is also a center of a book called Waves of the Belgrade Sea, which I found for $1 on the top-floor clearance racks of the large bookstore by Bansko bridge on a subsequent visit. Every bookish Belgrader whom I've talked to about it professed not to have heard of it, but it seems ubiquitous in foreign library holdings. Peculiar. There are some other similar offbeat neighborhood-histories in the English-language section of the larger stores.
I still remember, on my first visit, being gobsmacked that there was a large bookstore in every small neighborhood. The clerk of the one near my apartment was highly amused at that. Statistically, Americans read less than one book every year. Though, scrutinizing the B&N windows, I can't say that I blame them. But sometimes there are brief flashes of light in the windows of the independent stores.
At one of the other research libraries -- I try to do this once or twice per week to keep off the tunnel vision, do some reading in slightly different directions, spend more time cranking out CVs, etc.
The puritan sensibility is offended, though. Somewhere, on a bookshelf, there is a small pile of books on (mostly) Hegelian philosophy, silently glowering at me.
With the mounting fatigue, though, and the abundant sunlight, I'm wondering if I should wander even further afield. But if the mechanism comes to a shuddering halt, I'll be becalmed in bad climes.
Eastward ho. Second star to the right, and all that. The dutchman sails on.
Another post lost from the Blogger interface juggling things when the connection dropped. Recreation by various means follows.
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To be clear, these socio-political notions aren't a case of kicking against the pricks, though there's plenty of the latter to be had. Especially with springtime, and their ennervation, it's clear that I'm surrounded by people who have grown to be what the vast majority of recent civilizations would consider very bad people. And these folks, in their manner of being, populate an industrial mechanism that provides prosperity to a healthy preponderance of the population -- a much larger fraction than past civilizations.
If this were merely a case of folks being bad people, I could abide it. But the difficulty is that collectively, people have apparently decided that (given sufficient niceness) good and bad are illusions of the past. That things are good if they serve the prosperity.
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