Walked across the river to the enormous Franciscan church and the cathedral, and stopped in at the mall afterwards.  The Franciscans here are a bit peculiar.  Very different from the avuncular fellows stateside, to say the least.  Many young warrior monks--I half expect them to have a katana or something underneath the habit.  There was a bifurcation in the church here during the rule of the Subline Porte.  The ab-original church was apparently thoroughly suffused with the Bogomil heresy, and was the subject of some 13th c. crusades launched by the good offices of the Hungarians.  Then the Franciscans came in, and developed a good network among the people, who were distrustful of the more sumptuous offices of the church.  In the late 15th c. they gained an apparently very powerful firman from the Sublime Porte -- a copy is actually on the wall of the madras museum in Sarajevo, and it guaranteed them freedom from worship.  That said, life under Turkish rule was difficult -- there are a few popular histories of the province written by OFM authors -- I read them in the library in NYC, very mass-market.  Then, with the arrival of Austria-Hungary in the 19th c., a legitimate diocesan system was set up, something that the SJ's likely had a lot to do with.  Notably, though, the OFMs retained a parallel structure and didn't merge in.

One peculiarity of the Franciscan order here is that it is allowed to hold land.  This was apparently necessary under Turkish rule, and the formal Vatican permission to do so in the 17th c. (I think) legitimated a practice that had probably been going on for some time.  The main Franciscan churches in Sarajevo and Mostar are interesting.  Both characterized by the art of the 1930's, the sort of modes of expression that were popular among the more right-wing cultures in central Europe at the time.  The human form ascendant, but unlike the detailed musculature of Bernini's statues in Rome, or the quiet workmanlike dignity of the superhuman forms in the communist-era statues in Bulgaria and Romania, these figures have a distinctly unheimlich, numinous, almost radiant aspect to them.  It's dangerous ground, but apparently very deeply felt.  And the Austrian-built cathedral, in contrast, is very proper and Austrian.  

At any rate, some time with the Real Prescence at the immense Franciscan church, along with a fair number of tourists and tour groups -- it's quite an industry -- and then slipped into the back of the much more modestly sized cathedral for the Mass of the Faithful in a Saturday afternoon marriage Mass. A male voice choir in the latter was quite impressive.  There's something about a culture singing its songs at a marriage feast.  Exaltate.  

And then to the mall, which was quite bustling, apparently at least a good number of folks here are doing quite well, the stores filled with locals buying things.  

And then closed out the evening on the famous stone bridge, found a perch and read some of a Whitehall memoir about the run-up to the First Rather Large War (source of "The lamps are going out across Europe...").  Quite meaningful, to read it while sitting on a great stone bridge in Bosnia.  History is ultimately about the nature of material things.  Which is quite different from saying that it is determined by the nature of material things, or by our understanding of that nature.  Last time I was there, I read some Hegel criticism ("Dostoyevsky Reading Hegel in Siberia and Bursting into Tears"), which as it turns out, had been written by a theatre professor at the conservatory in Budapest.  Read some of his other work recently.  I well remember playing the Molnar Festival there as an undergraduate from Virginia.  (And on my return, the graduation speaker would be the undersecretary of state who had just brilliantly resolved the Bosnian wars in Dayton.)

The great powers of the north, the ancient cultures and rivalries of the south.  Europe continues.  And a random fellow from over the ocean sits on an old bridge in Bosnia and thinks about it for a bit.

Interesting, the name of the town in the last country, part of the first stop on this peregrination, comes from the word used for "reason" -- the south Slavic root common to the languages of Yugoslavia and nearby countries has a sense of things being visibly laid out, as in a vista of a valley between mountains, and uses it to describe a clarifying precept (not Reason writ generally, but a specific assertion).  In fairness, the views of the valley from the mountain during the morning run were invigorating and clarifying, but the town itself usually seemed to be wrapped in a bit of a haze.  I found the upper areas of the large mountain walkable from the nearby town to be much more mentally fortifying.  Something about looking down on a panorama of mountaintop glacial lakes while suffering from moderate oxygen deprivation and exhaustion seemed to clear the haze of the mind. (And inspire some odd dreams later on.)

I've taken a trick from Tenzig Norgay, who did a Tibetan milk sacrifice after ascending Everest for the first time.  I don't deliberately waste any of it, of course, but a half-thermos of milk at altitude does do wonders for the strength.

 Apparently, the undergraduate university is attempting to play big-league sports now, and like all arrivistes, is getting soaked for the privilege.  (At least relative to the larger downstate schools who socialized in these circles long ago.)  I have a complex relationship with my undergraduate school.  I went there because it was nationally strong in debate, and in-state, and I (mistakenly) supposed that the mountains would offer some respite from the circles of kin and friends of kin.  (Cf. Marshall's diary entry: Yesterday, I indicted Burr, and this morning rode for the mountains of Virginia.)  As it turned out, the theatre program there was also perfect for my work -- a very robust experimental theatre program, closely allied to the liberal arts campus.  Outside of the debate prep room and theatre rehearsal halls, though, I was a stranger to the traditional haunts of campus (the fellow who played at the campus bar every weekend became an international superstar), and I and my circles were very different from the sort of people who generally went there.  I made use of the specific things there that were useful, at in-state public school rates, and then headed off to work in the theatre.

I've been back there a few times, certainly not for the libraries, but it was possible to work in in the mountain air during the pandemic years  But it was pellucidly clear in those interactions that I wasn't the sort of fellow who usually went to the school, so I largely just found a room where I could, went for a run through the hills and cattle fields before dawn (trying to avoid the stale air from the poultry slaughterhouses), and just took the place on its natural merits, as opposed to its social sensibilities.  Being a large public university reasonably close to DC, the general norms did sort of have a corridors-of-power vibe at times, but far from the corner office.  

I suppose it was the first example of a pattern that has proved to be general in my experience -- I make use of specific things in a place, rather than trying to be the sort of person whom one might think was the sort of person that would be in that place.

 "...but the sky is the first thing that they divided."  

(Christa Wolff)

Orthodox Michaelmas, which isn't at all on the calendar, but rather assimilated from the Austrians and then kept up as a proper feast to warn of the impending autumn.  Apparently, the city turns on its heating plant today, though apparently that's just a coincidence, as there's a mathematical formula based on the temperatures.  I recall reading a contemporary Russian novel not too many years ago about a writer who returns to his Siberian hometown in an increasingly hallucinatory visit; I thought it was a brilliant plot device to have the entire town heated by the city's steam network, not realizing that it was actually how things were done.  In the context of collectivization, the built infrastructure is different -- Russia has electrified its long-distance train lines, largely because the state owned the whole mechanism at the time.  In contrast, there was an immense debate in the US at the end of the 19th c. about the wisdom of constructing public drinking water fountains in small towns, as it would attract the wrong sorts of people.  (While of course, the fountains and bridges in Ivo Andric are of a very different world.)

There are differences in the infrastructure, certainly.  But the spirit is the litmus.  The Sublime Porte ruled with a gentle and providential hand in the distant provinces, likely primarily because they were distant. And of course, they would show up to capture the sons of the families for their warrior castes -- a 19th c. British military history that I found at the foundation library here a few years ago talks about the legendary size of the warriors here, as seen through the eyes of the south, with women fighting while holding their children, etc.  

And bridges and mosques helped to win the hearts and minds. Interestingly, the religious foundations that are at the heart of the eleemosynary institutions that still endure here are distinctly transnational, and held to be valid until judgment day.  Apparently, that's an issue in a city to the south at present, but not enough to cloud a modern title.  Just enough to create a private sense of righteous entitlement.  The immense bureaucratic effort to unwind all of the wartime property swaps here is interesting, since virtually none of the people who reclaimed their houses crossed the lines and lived in the old place -- they simply sold it off or rented it.  But the odd thing is that both ends of the swaps were unwound, so you had immense transaction costs, with no real seisin for either party at the end of the day.  Might be an interesting law and economics inquiry.

Amusingly, Orthodox Michaelmas has a local association with mice -- if the mice haven't found their winter quarters by today, they won't survive the winter.  So tradition holds that foodstuffs must be kept sealed on this day, and no agitation in the closets and pantries that might attract their interest.  Agamben has an interesting thought about mice and prosperity -- it's one thing for a house to have wealth, but in a genuinely prosperous house, the mice thrive as well.  Apparently, local ethnographers also link the mice to spirits of the dead -- small forms flitting in the corner, scratching on the walls, just barely audible.  

(Sort of puts Mickey et al. in a different light.)

 The call to prayer at a nearby mosque in counterpoint with the "Taran-tara" from the Pirates of Penzance on the laptop.  One smiles, 'but not as sultans smile.'

 There is perhaps a vast invisible seam in the social life of the West.  On one side, there are the partisans of the thing itself, who see life as a bit of a mystery, and the language and actions of the shared life as a means of both getting along with each other and doing some worthwhile things together.  The other side thinks these things to be illusions of the mind, and considers life to be a struggle for wordless ascendency over other people, and all of the notions and words of the shared life not merely means to that end, but ultimately only having meaning in relation to these encounters of power.

This seam perhaps has its correlative in political theory: on one side, the partisans of the Republic, who think the forms of the state to be useful and noble things as we attempt to live lives worthy of the mystery in front of us.  The other side tends to take a more entrepreneurial view, who see the forms of state and the paradigms of international law as opportunities for personal ascendency, and more, as merely prelude to the ascendency of the power of the individual.  Clearly, the pendulum has shifted to the second in recent years.

So it's not entirely inconceivable that half of the people are thinking of life a certain way, in which every word and thought is ancillary to the struggle for personal domination, and the other half is attempting to use these forms to facilitate the inquiry into the things themselves.  In a timeless hour, perhaps the first way of thinking makes a certain figuration within existence, and the second a different type of soul entirely.  Perhaps the eschaton was always working among us.

With the caveat, of course, that because of the festival management issues, I couldn't really see the action, and I left rather early on.  But that did seem to be the way that things were going.  

 I will say this about the show last night.  (The Crucible, with a revealing local title.)  Miller's estate appears to have completely fallen down on the job.  An absolute travesty that appears to lump Miller's work in with precisely the things he was fighting against.  It was so crowded by my seat that I stood up and went by the side wall, where I couldn't really see, and just listened to it, with about 20% of the stage visible.  I could tell, though, that when they tried to do the play, they couldn't.  In my experience, method acting in the Balkans, with very few exceptions, consists of actors getting into fistfights and shouting at each other.  And then they rolled the big black Croatian voodoo Moloch muppet on, and some time later, the crucified figure on a large white cross.  At which point I muttered to the crowd around me "Well, that's as good of an excuse as any" and decamped back to Humble Quarters.

The difference between good regie theatre and bad is the difference between an eccentric philosopher and and a madman.  The eccentric philosopher doesn't act normal, but he has a great care for the way things are, and his actions illuminate things.  A madman doesn't act normal because he has simply gotten hold of the wrong notions of normality.

 Had a banana and a package of dates, and it was about a half hour before the theatre, so I decided to head to the Ivo Andric statue and read some Elia Kazan.  Just found out that it was the anniversary of Andric's birth today -- there's a divinity that shapes our snacking spots.  As it happened, the cheap Turkish dates were so sticky that I had to abandon the notion of pre-theatre reading completely, and head down to the fountain in front of the mosque to wash off the sugary residue.  

And then there was the theatre; or at any rate, the attempt to witness the theatre.  I could a tale unfold -- and I will, but in stereotype, as Henry Miller said.  Matters to be talked about in a considered manner.  

Measure, time and place. 

Frustrating day.  Two grocery runs, both surprisingly difficult.  One does have to really be on one's game to buy 16 ounces of cheese at a discount supermarket in Bosnia.  But the morning run was extraordinary.  The view from the mountain fortress encompasses the pre-Enlightenment old city, the concrete towers of Tito's Republic, and the post-Enlightenment world beyond.  Not to mention the mountain ranges stretching off into the distance.  This is the first visit here when I've been able to make the fortress without dropping down to a walk to catch my breath between the rises, something I'll credit to the mountain runs in Macedonian Pirin a couple of months ago.  Shifting to running from weightlifting in July and August, I worked the mountain runs up from two to four days per week, and in the last week in Bulgaria, made the scenic overlook that had been the goal.  And then a few days later, without really planning anything, ran to the mountain hut much higher up the mountain.  So the much smaller mountains here, even though the roads are fairly steep, don't loom quite as large in my mind.  At least until I take in the view.

Theatre - θεατρον, literally the looking place, cogante with theory.  Gadamer has an interesting notion of it, each person arriving at the Athenian festival from a certain place, which determines where in the theatre one stands, and by inference, what one sees.  We see according to the nature of the place from which we come.  

 #postprandial #justanotherfridaynightinbosnia

 

Oxbridge evening choral services starting up for Michaelmas term -- happened into a compline tonight after the Mozart in Hamburg.  So, if I do go completely mad in the coming weeks and months, at least it will be to the accompaniment of plainsong and fauxbourdon. 

I'm surprised that whatever chapel I happen to eavesdrop on in the evening, I'm invariably one of a dozen or so listeners. (Back in the city, usually at a table in the library in mid-afternoon.) YouTube seems to be vastly underutilized for the sorts of things that it should be used for.  I'm invariably working on other things at the time, but I almost always stop for a bit and listen.  Christminster and evensong.

Perhaps the travel, but I find myself living life naturalistically, simply making it a point to live as one lives.  Life itself vanishes after too much of that.  Our understanding of life is simply a collection of facile aphorisms and axioms to make ourselves feel in command of things.  "It's life's illusions I recall -- I really didn't know life at all."

Manet nobiscum, Domine, quoniam advesperacit. 

 Update, the pestle-ground coffee from the shop next to the 16th c. mosque is most definitely worth the extra $1.50/lb premium over mid-range industrial grocery store coffee (local pricing, so everything still well below states-side).  The opposite of the mochaccino/pumpkin spice latte tendency of some coffee chains (no name, no pack-drill), a more forceful taste that sidles up to bitterness, but never crosses over.  I suspect the quasi-caramelized tastes that the coffee chains seem to favor have something to do with getting as much of the sweetness out of the roasted/browning range as possible, but Balkan coffees, which are prepared in the Turkish manner with a few variations (sugar separate, grounds warmed first, first contact between grounds and water is at a boil) have more to do with creating the right blend of oils.  (Which are incredibly high in cholesterol -- even as a vegetarian, I've modified the practice to boil away much of the syrupy stuff that usually gathers on the foam and is traditionally considered the best part of it.)

 

 One truth that recent experiences have illuminated for me.  Adversity tends to prompt people to try to live as one lives.  The absence of a minimal existence can sometimes make the normal life a desideratum.  This is valuable to the degree that these norms are useful.  But the point is to continue the work regardless of resources or social position.  To do this, it would seem that any notion that social position or material resources are determinative of capacity or mindset would have to be guarded against.  Life conceived as a struggle against the pains of poverty is a poor life even, and perhaps especially, when it prevails.

 Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath

(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)

And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,

And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . .

https://www.chesterton.org/lepanto/

 Sent off a few fellowship/VAP applications in the early afternoon, and then did a quick supply run.  First, to the shops by the 16th c. mosque for bread and coffee (the bakery claims to date from the late 16th c., and the coffee shop from the late 19th c. -- the latter grinds the beans in a pestle in the local manner, at only about a $1.50/lb premium over a mid-range supermarket coffee -- will have to see if it's worth it).

Then walking across town to the local base of the international fast-fashion cheap clothing chain.  There are plenty of clothing shops around, but in the absence of Amazon, if you know exactly what you need, and know a chain that sells it at a reliable price point, there's then the additional Cartesian challenge of locating the unremarkable store with the unremarkable but perfectly on-spec goods.  Interesting walk through the neighborhoods of the newer parts of town.  Actually reminds me more of the last country I was in than the comparator countries of the old Republic, mostly because of the size of the city, I suppose.

The bread at the 16th c. bakery is quite good, and like all of the bakeries here, very reasonably priced.  Panem quotidianum.  They seem to make their money from the usual array of fried and sweetened things and pizzas, but on my first visit, I just pointed to the racks of real bread off in the corner.  Which are quite good.  And easily pronounced as well.  

 One of the most important precepts on these kinds of travels is that no matter where you find yourself, no matter what condition you're in, no matter how difficult the circumstance, there will be times in your life when you incline towards it in memory or anticipation.  Savoring it or dreaming about it.  So when you begin to sense your enthusiasm for present circumstances flagging, call those other times that are pining towards these circumstances to your mind; give yourself, in all frames of experience, access to your present experience.  At some point, you will intensely desire precisely this.  So allow that desire to work through you now.  Allow the time to be fulfilled, and you come into a more full existence.

This also has something to do with motion.  On the last peregrination through these climes, I began in the southeast,, went up to the mountains, then across to the west, and then down across the south, and back to the southeast -- over the course of half a year or so, I think.  Purely an accident of the places that looked or sounded interesting, and where the rentals would be towards the inexpensive off-season.  But then this circle kept repeating itself, and gained its own logic -- I would begin to pine for a place more like the next geography in the cycle.  Desire, to state the obvious, has to do with motion in time.  But again, it also does some work that is more a priori in nature, not experiential.  It knits the life together by reaching across it to different times within it.  We're not always entirely transparent to ourselves, but if we were, all times of our life that wished for a certain experience would be able to live through the experience when it occurs.

So desire both carries us onward, and strengthens the inner lines of force, when used correctly.  When used incorrectly, we don't translate the inner pressures into present experience--they simply carry us past experience--and perhaps as a result, our external journeys become less attuned to inner promptings.

 

 

 

 Difficult evening.  Staged reading at the local theatre festival (the longest-running experimental theatre festival in Yugoslavia, having outlasted even Yugoslavia) that lasted an intermissionless almost five hours, with everyone intending to wring the usual pathos out of the event (house darkened, etc.) rather than the reportage that I suspect was the genesis of the concept.  Bright side, observed the event and thought about its nature, and sampled a very wide range of the strongest local actors.  And in the old Austro-Hungarian theatre, you can always look around and imagine a past or future time when the entertainments might tend a bit more to the First or Second Vienna School.  The local arts are a bit of a confusion.  If they would clarify the lines of work, and the nature of each institution, things might become more clear -- as opposed to each institution trying to be all things in its form.  A promising new theatre has apprently launched with a Seagull in the newer part of town (that of the old Republic), which would have been right up my alley, but it sold out before I turned my attention from arrival and calibration to theatregoing.

I knew I was in for a difficult evening at the beginning -- charming old theatre, but at the entrance, they forced the audience to file between two large unkempt fellows wearing the insignia of a local private security company on their synthetic workclothes.  The audience members seemed not to notice, dutifully submitting to the scrutiny, as if they wanted to eat at a nice restaurant, and accepted the fact that the underworld figures there had placed a few goons at the door.

There's a way of doing things in the arts, and it's really only evident when the work inside the room guides the sensibility, though an institutional memory can carry it forward in time -- hence the charm of old Vienna.  Of the three or four winds guiding the Balkans, Vienna is of the north -- an alternative for the locals between the Orthodoxy of the East and the Latins of the West.  Reading an interesting dissertaion written at Berkley a few years ago about the Austrian cadastral and construction initiative that followed the 1879 withdrawal of the authority of the Sublime Porte.  The locals, always paradoxically clinging to distant authority rather than the Christian nationalists in the hills while simultaneously treating the emissaries and orders of that authority with profound suspicion, switched their allegiance from South to North, seeking protection from East and West. At least those who stayed.  And after the 1919 dictatorship, the old Austrian borders (which followed the earlier borders) were restored.  So Austria, in a Clifford Geeertz--local meaning sense is a sort of northern culture that offered a safe haven from the Serbian and Croatian imperial forces, a role that subsequent mediators perhaps unwittingly stepped into, naturally thinking the classicism at the center of things to be a product of all three cultures.  

But it's not that simple -- the cultural sensibilities of the north informed both East and West.  Serbian priests lauded the pananthropos of Shakespeare, and Romanian actors trained in Paris, while the theatres purchased their stage machinery from the emergent German industrial cities.  West and East are both creatures of the North as well, at least in the cultural arena.  

So, perhaps Mozart, and when the subscriptions allow, Schoenberg might be a good charm.  And once the rooms start to do their proper work, there might be a few less goons about, or they might find work in the stage carpentry shop instead.

After the return from five hours of scrawling things onto the pad in darkness, several hours of maddening tasks until almost the hour of dawn.  Sufficient is the day, but sometimes there's some stoppage time involved.  No run, given the late waking, which was the catastrophe -- simply washed out all the clothes, gargled with some salt water to try to offset the long hours in the underventilated room, and got to the morning yoga.  A commissar from the East would think me a national socialist; a national socialist would think me an ardent commissar.  But this is the mind of east and west, and there are many more Hegelian dualities to life, even just limiting things to cadastral dimensions of the north, the south, the east and the west.  We haven't yet even begun to talk about up and down, for example.

 On the walk in to Mass, I noticed smoke rising in the early autumn chill from a few neighborhoods across the river.  Chimney fires, presumably.   A few days ago, I noticed a fellow walking up and down the main commercial street with a brush on an amazingly tall rod, presumably advertising the others for sale in his bag.  

When a new tool appears at hand, perhaps something in the world is changing, and making it necessary.  Our lists of equipment and affordances are not exhaustive.  

 At the beginning of the day, I started in on this weekend's light novel (after finishing last weekend's over breakfast, having fallen a bit behind), figuring I would read for a bit and then get to the real work.  Within an hour of picking up the book (another of the oddest Inkling's), it became obvious that I would be better off sticking with the light reading today, maintaining focus, and keeping the mind in low gear.  So, reader, I did.

When golfing, there are some days in which you get to the course and realize that the wisest course would be just spending a bit of time on the chipping green and the putting green, rather than setting out on the long walk of the game.  

Likely a result of that odd episode a couple of days ago, which has left no evident physical traces -- almost certainly something I ate.  

Gently down the stream.  Particularly on certain days.  Slow and steady doesn't win the race, but it can help you from losing it, and then afterward, you can get about the business of winning the race. 

 The quest to find a travel alarm clock in Bosnia continues.  Shifting the focus to kitchen timers, but the Turkish hardware/housewares chain that I had pinned my hopes on came up empty, except for a doubtful-looking, bulky digital thermometer/clock with alarm function.  Which was vey cheap, but not what I was looking for.  

Odd.  I mean, even in Montenegro, they condescend to sell a few at the back of the hardware store.  I assume everyone here uses phones, or the morning calls from the mosques.

 Well, whatever it was now seems to have cleared the system, or, dark view, convinced the system to stop opposing it.  I don't often talk about the occasional feats of physical endurance or athletic achievements here, but it should be noted that if something puts me out of commission physically for a bit, it's highly unlikely to have been a function of the imagination.

The most obvious correlation would be the water service stopping at the apartment (municipal water projects have been a constant feature of visits here), but I only used the backup jug for second coffee, and the water had been refreshed less than seven days before.

Oats in the morning, garlic at night.

The story of Israel's exodus from Egypt has been thought worthwhile by people of many cultures over the last few thousand years.  A tribe leaves the swampy Egyptian floodplain where they had been living, working as forced labor.  Part of this was leaving the bowls of  leaven behind.  They then walk through the desert on a journey of purification, occasionally pining for the fermented pots of their old home.  Microbial balance is a thing.  It changes people, and as it changes people, it changes a culture.  And, to a visiting American, these things are sometimes perceptible -- in the country to the south, even in midwinter, whenever I returned from leaving the apartment, even if only to go to the market down the street, I took a shower and changed my clothes.  Sunlight and fresh air.

Dark, airless spaces seem to be sought out by many sorts of religious people.  I certainly suffered through many an airless Mass in the Midwest, occasionally after having run up a large hill in the morning to get there.  But it's my understanding that this physical reality is only incidentally, not essentially, connected with religion.  People feel comfortable in the old cities, in the old places, for reasons they don't fully understand.  And they're fond of the fermented foods and drinks of the place. And part of this is necessary -- if we don't have the right microbial balance inside, our bodies can't function.  But over years, and generations, and even centuries, the grime of the past can cause people to cultivate unhealthy habits, as they focus on creating a circle of life that preserves this sort of physical reality.  And the circle is necessary, and the physical reality serves it, but occasionally, there is a better way at hand.

There is a deliberate sequence to this progression of places, after the winter on the lonely ice floe.  First, the mountain.  Second, the old city.  And next, the city of the Republic, the Enlightenment. (Which is also in this city, but not this part of this city.)  

 Hm.  Well, clearly I ate something that should never be eaten, or touched something that should never be touched, or perhaps just was nearby something that one should never be nearby.  Quite the odd day or so.  Not an illness, just a pervasive feeling of toxicity, mild fever, an entirely conceptual mild nausea, etc. But very intense.  I'm not generally susceptible to those sorts of things, and I have had the good fortune in my adult years of very rarely being ill.  

Perhaps with the chill in the evening, the microbiota of the old city were able to make inroads.  Or something was off in the kefir at the supermarket cafe.

The closest correlative would be the second half of the first bar exam that I took (and passed with flying colors).  On the Upper West Side, a large armory gymnasium.  At the lunch break, I think I had the sweet and sour tofu from a cheap Chinese place nearby.  And I assumed that it caused the mind-bending unease that I felt in the second half of the exam, but in retrospect, I don't think that was it.

There was also a very peculiar episode in the second year of the JD that had something to do with environmental toxins, but I've not talked about that, for a few different reasons.

But this was much the same, in that the unease, aside from the mild fever, was entirely conceptual -- to put it bluntly, there was no chance of my revisiting my lunch. (I can't recall the last time that that happened, tbh.)  But very intense, and some lingering feelings of toxicity.  Will hydrate, rest, and try to get back to the morning exercise, but certainly not for the next few days.

Once I was ambulatory again in the (late) morning, I washed out all the clothes recently worn, swept all the floors and wiped the surfaces.  Seemed wise.

 Well, that was an interesting 24 hours or so.  Seem to be okay for it.  #breadcrumb

 Went to the good supermarket (source of cheap good vegetables) for a bit of rooftop cafe philosophy reading with some kefir.  Which, for some reason has become one of my paradigmatic habits when visiting here.  It's a decent place, right across from the national legislature and the old museum.  But they've made some upgrades since I first stumbled on it a few years ago -- outdoor air conditioning (water spray) in summer, and a net around the place to keep the birds, and perhaps other flying things, away.  And, of course, the ubiquitous piped music.

But the habits of the city are quite strong.  Despite the fact that its literally on top of an abundant supply of vegetables and fresh dairy, everyone seems to eat greasy food and smoke a lot.  That's the way of this part of the world, admittedly.  It's presumably the default reaction to public space.  Perhaps a Shavian cult of vegetarianism and aerated bread could take hold, or something.

At any rate, it's better than the vaping, but I still relocate myself, with my kefir and book, whenever I find myself downwind of smoke.  When I first visited the city, it was during the film festival, and there was an outdoor showing of an old restored Yugoslavian Stakhanite film about coal miners in the country -- wives in veils (lifted above their faces by visiting Party functionaries to greet them with a kiss (2, not 3)), and train engines co-opted to serve as vehicles to the wedding.  It was very interesting, but a group of American tourists who had sat near me began to smoke, so I moved, and then someone there started to smoke, and I moved, and the sequence repeated itself, so I just slipped out the back.  I suppose if if anyone had been observing, they might have thought I disliked the film, but it's simply a question of healthful air, water and food.  

In the neighboring country, there's a standing joke -- "eat a salad, live forever".  Which is a good humility, I suppose.  We know not the day nor the hour.  But, you know, the odds are that that sort of thing might give you an extra few days or weeks, if you made it a habit.

Memorial of St. Jerome, priest and doctor of the church.  Rather vulgar fellow. 

"Parce mihi Domine, quia Dalmatia sum"  --  "Forgive me, Lord, I'm from this kind of place."  (Dalmatia, technically.)   A surprisingly common prayer in this part of the world.  Borderlands, and the proximate strangers.  The mimetic competition to exceed in virtue is good, but it soon turns to violence, and the violence becomes habitual.

The melody for "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" was an older French song, "Malbrough s'en va en guerre", about the rumored, but ultimately only rumored, death of Churchill's ancestor, whom apparently the French disliked.

Perhaps the French thought up the new lyrics just to get everyone in England and America to sing it.  Which would be pure Gallic genius.  The divine anointing oils of the first court of Europe did some fine work there.

Clipped under fair use from today's Times -- a photo of the large protest last year in the country to the east.  The photoshop-genius arrow indicates my Humble Quarters at the time, which was either the lit windows in the frame or another set of lit windows just above the frame.  Quite the ruckus.

As I was a neutral tourist, I thought it wrong to swell the crowd by adding one to the number (presence is protest in these situations), and I thought (correctly, as it turned out) that it would be impossible to get back to the apartment afterwards, so I stayed in that day, but I did wander the city the night before, which was interesting.  I still have the sleeve from the Sbux (at the bottom of the cylindrical building on the right) from the day before. (Sbux name: "Gandhi.")

 Tried the local kiln yeast flatbreads (of the nan, pita ilk) yesterday after Mass.  Went to the place famous for it, and took a couple back to Humble Quarters for the Sunday reading.  There are relatively new blue laws here, so the malls and shops are mostly closed on Sunday.  It's my understanding that it's a revival of an older practice, which would make sense, since the country to the south does it as well, though it's a much less metropolitan-based economy there, mostly the beaches and mountains, which tend to stay open non-stop, as the country to the west puts it.  There's apparently a political angle on it, as the mostly Orthodox Christian suburb to the west (but called the eastern part) doesn't observe similar laws, and it sort of stalls the economic engine of the tourism-based city (mostly Muslim, as of this writing).  

At any rate, although the fresh bread made the knap smell idyllic, I think I'll keep to the traditional loaves from the older bakeries.  It's a bit oily, a bit like street food, something I've avoided for many years (realizing that neither the hot sauce nor the white sauce is a good bet).  When I first realized that  parsimonious travel abroad was a possibility (I was sitting in a Starbucks near my undergraduate in the mountains of the Shenandoah valley of Virginia at the time), I landed in a place in the newer part of Belgrade, across the river from the old (named, for some) houses of Belgrade.  It was apparently the epicenter of Balkan street food, but I never partook, with the exception of the 24-hour bakery chain.  Fresh bread is something I gravitate towards.  When I'm based in a place for some time I usually get into a cycle of baking my own, though that rarely happens on these travels.

Panem quotidianum.  But this isn't just an upper bound for the purposes of humility, as the Greek εχουσιαν underneath the vulgarization stands to witness.  It also speaks of bread worthy of the day.

All relatively inexpensive, of course.  Everything about a dollar, even at the centuries-old bakeries near the mosques.  Between the first and the second Balkan peregrinations, I went back to the libraries of one of the Midwestern universities to build a few courses that I was under the impression that I was to teach in India, come the autumn.  (This did not  come to pass.)  After being in cities where everything was walkable, suburban Illinois was a bit of a challenge.  I would walk for over an hour to the Starbucks by the mall to read for a bit, and then walk back.  On the (long) walk to the gym, I was excited to notice a building with the sign "Pekara" -- bakery.  Imagining that I would find a bit of the old world, I made the slight detour from the long walk, and walked in --  to find that all of the loaves were wrapped in plastic, and and averaged about 8 or 9 dollars per loaf, while the majority of the business seemed to be at the deli counter.  Musing about it as I walked on (bread-less), I realized that as soon as the commodity was outside the normal course of life, it became an object of desire, and the price crept upward, and the distance from the trade routes of life increased.  

So, yes.  Daily bread.

CV casting upon the waters continues.  Nary a one has floated back, let alone with a scrawled reply.  I had a burst of replies at one point earlier in the year, when things were extraordinarily difficult, and followed up with all of them, and promptly never heard from any of them again.  Which was odd.

I'd say it's a fair bet that much of this has to do with the corrupt folks who seemed to gravitate towards me -- I played by the rules and did my best work, which was usually ignored amid much talk of networking and cultivating relationships so one can have a career.  Humbug.

But a path to a basic way of life and work does need to arise somehow.  If I keep working and thinking in the Christminster in my mind, I'll be off to the asylum long before I'm able to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The work is at hand.  And this will sound odd, but I need to recover the person capable of doing it. And though I do mention it often, it is about restoring the mind and body from last winter (even as the evening chills of the impending one begin to intrude on the velvet late-summer in the Balkans).  Hence the mountaintops and the reading Hegelian philosophy amid the cries of the muezzin.  (Which in the old city here are sometimes quite cacophonous.  Putting the din in the din and devlet.)  

Nice line by Tolkein in the Times books section from a couple of weeks ago (still mulling whether I should re-up with the TLS, or if that would draw me into the web rabbit-holes -- the only reason I subscribe to the Times at one pound per month is that there's a facsimile of the print paper available for the efficient mornings); Tolkein was wandering the colleges during an electrical blackout in his quasi-retirement, musing that "e" meant out from it, and "meritus" meant deservedly so.

 Reading something Hegelian.  Russian, but old Russian, of the right kind of Hegel.  To do this kind of thinking is an uphill battle -- and most of the work coming out of he universities is of very little help  -- a few prominent exceptions, and thankfully a lot of their stuff is available.  

The universities sometimes take useful thought in odd directions.  Consider Peirce, polymath philosopher, one of the most brilliant American minds, and in profound dialogue with the central philosophical force of the last century in James/Dewey pragmatism -- and the majority of work on his stuff focuses on very thin slice of semiotics, obsessed over as a superficial framework for a heavily left-leaning critique.

So I trust my own lights, of necessity.  Sive necessitatis.  And the transcendental focus that's essential for my thinking is grounded in the sacramental character of the Catholic faith.  Some might say this risks falling between two schools, but the reality is different.  While Socrates might have had some reservations about the cult of Asclepius, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was largely written by folks well-steeped in Christian concerns, and with the seed of faith, certain purposes were being fulfilled.

And coming to the schools with a sacramental faith provides a purposiveness, something far more productive than simply using the professors as mimetic models, and taking on their concerns unreservedly.  Wittgenstein didn't knock on Russell's door as an acolyte -- they spent the evening arguing, and BR wasn't able to prepare for the lecture he was to give later that evening.

You must have your own purposes.  The sacramental character of life can ground you in the life you seek to examine.

 If the world could sense how forcefully its own way of living carries it past experience, things might be changed profoundly.  This is perhaps the root of the old Jewish teaching that if a sabbath were to be universally observed, the reign of heaven would begin.  

But attempting to systematically accomplish this gains little.  It is like Aristotle's metaphor for thought -- the army is in flight (to death), and then one soldier stops, turns around and looks, and then another, and then another.  The army can't be commanded to do that.  Its command is flight to death. 

It is an age of industrial prosperity, so it's a sort of venial sin to pause from work.  But the mechanical logic has to serve humanity, not govern it.  And now that the logic of machines is encountering the linguistic turn, it will start to get an ascendency over the mind, a power based in words, and we will again have the same old danger of adoring the work of our hands.

 #saturdayradio #stuporintelligence

https://archive.org/details/hhgttg-radio/HHGTTG.Phase1.Fit04.mp3

One element missing from the usual kit: waterproof windbreaker.  Will have to source one locally, along with the Quest for a Proper Travel Alarm.  

The setup in present Humble Quarters is a bit more comfortable than the last two, as cheap proximity to mountains was guiding those choices.  Still quite economical -- dramatically so, compared to US apartments, but a conscious decision to put myself into the center of a bit of civilization after the rough bits.  There's a reason that James Bond goes to a proper restaurant after slogging through the mud all day.  Completely apart from civilization, I could make an ideal Rousseau-like existence, given sufficient books and a properly set up room, but on the fringes, especially in Southern Europe, it's impossible to stand entirely apart from things.  So I read Henry James.  The λεγειν.

When I was slogging through the graduate work in the Midwest, one of the interminable number of electronic assignments that I was told to grade was a short film  project made by the students.  I caught glimpses of the workspaces of the students (this was before the pandemic, when these spaces became public spaces).  I was very surprised to see that almost invariably, their working desk or table faced the wall.  At first, I thought this might have to do with Asian culture, but it proved to be general.  As someone constitutionally incapable of functioning when staring at a proximate wall, I was very surprised, and even thought about mentioning the possible repositioning of workspaces in one of the group emails.

Similarly, when I had a day job developing and then editing a theatre website in the city in the early Aughts, during office setup, I was given carte blanche as to size and style of desk, within the inventory of the used office furniture store.  The other full-time employee, more natively a tech fellow, while I was more subject-matter expert and content, elected a large conventional desk and overstuffed chairs around it.  (The concept comes from bank practice of standing behind something so that only the top part of the body is visible, through the Portuguese banca.)  They were quite surprised that I insisted on two tables, one large, one small, a desk chair that was actually a chair, and two guest chairs.  Of course, tables became the standard tech office furniture within the decade, most famously at Amazon, with the legendary door-table, an old door propped up at the four corners.

The old Russian practice of extending the center of the desk with a second, orthogonal table surrounded by chairs has some merit to it.  There's an interesting production of a Serbian piece at JDP about an industrial operation in the days of state socialism, where at lights up, you see the desk of authority center stage, while off to the side is the table that had clearly been built as an extension to the center of the desk, (metatheatrically, as it fit the rake of the stage), while the guests and collaborators in the office were relegated now to a distant couch.

The present Humble Quarters, although absolutely ideal for my purposes in many respects, has the one flaw that all of the surfaces that I might use for work are bound to walls.  So I turn the chair around and face the window, and use the laptop just as I used it in the last apartment, when there was only a deck-chair and a small patio table in the room.  

If I can set up what I need, and how I work, it's been my experience that I can do rather useful things.  But both the things that I do and the setup that I do them in are usually at odds with what those around think would be the best things to do and the best setup with which to do them.  I know what I'm about.  One of my chiefest difficulties has been that others have invariably seemed to think that they had better ideas on the subject.

Thinking about past professors, it strikes me that two of my three betes noire in that department would either tell stories about past students who claimed that they had ruined their career, or explicitly state that they'd almost certainly be called for a reference, and explicitly say that if people didn't play along, they wouldn't have a career.  (Both were at state universities.)  The thing is, most of these experiences were actually in the classroom, during seminars that they were being paid (sometimes quite handsomely) to teach, and as I think about it now, I can't fathom how the subject might have come up.

(The third bete that happened to be noire was in conservatory, and probably judged (correctly) that we wouldn't have let her get away with that.)  

I recall JK Galbraith's musing on the universities of India, when he was travelling with JFK -- they struck him as being like the American state universities: either play along with things or find yourself back working the fields.  Hardly a fringe figure.

 

No one should go to war for God's sake.  He's perfectly capable of caring for his own.  People go to war for societies based in their religion, which is a noble, and slightly different thing.  As I look at the long story of Milocz called the history of the cross and the sword, some common themes seem to emerge.  At least in the popular mind, in the mind that comes up with a reason for a war that the rulers might have embarked upon for a completely different agenda, a Christian attack on another Eastern monotheism often comes off as a bit of an attempt to wake a sleeping brother, to bring them into a more active and enlightened form of life.  And of course, if the one you are trying to wake starts kicking and punching you when you try to wake them, you usually aren't dissuaded from the task.  Many societies based in Eastern forms of religion veil their liveliness from the public area, from the marketplace.  Perhaps if they were to show more signs of life in the public sphere, there would be less of a sense among the common people in the other countries that their spirits were asleep.  The Middle Eastern societies do this with their immense construction projects and business deals, but so aggressively and ostentatiously big-project that it doesn't always ring true on the street.

Somewhat relatedly: I recall a column in the Washington Post by one of the Steppenwolf actors who went into the film world.  He was talking about working on his first big-budget action movie.  In one scene, he was on a plane, and he was supposed to hear terrorist gunfire, and then attack the terrorists.  In situ, he heard the sound cue, and realized that it could have been any number of things on the plane.  It was only the logic of the action movie that required him to think that it was terrorist gunshots.  But he was being paid an immense amount of money.  Anyone can sleepwalk their way through a Hollywood career on such terms.

It's an interesting neighborhood.  Anciently where the schools stood, and very quiet, so they apparently knew a thing or two about the acoustics of the city and the mountain.  Audible backyard chickens from time to time (very Brooklyn), and sometimes automatic rifle fire from the shooting range closer to the top of the hill (less so).  But I suppose, given the usual way of things, I can't fault the birds for using the time to get a bit of small-arms proficiency training in.  

Perhaps they'll make it in Hollywood someday.

It doesn't augur well for a town when alarm clocks are so difficult to find.  I did find one store, but it was a bedside, not a travel unit.  Will check the outlying stores, but if not, I'll shift my focus to digital kitchen timers.  Merely requires a bit of math at night.

Historically, I've been using the travel kindle (broken front panel, highly unattractive to thieves) for things like alarm clocks and showing transit tickets, but a smaller, simpler device seems wise.  

Whenever I go to the theatre or a concert, the next morning, I have some clouds around me.  Like a desert hermit the day after stopping into the local tavern for an evening of conversation with the locals.  Clearing my mind of the less strong ways of thinking.  Of course, the difficulty might also be a sign that I've been more strongly grounded in existence, and therefore feeling the headwinds a bit more.  So, the wisest course seems to be continuing on with the occasional $6 play or concert, but getting as clear as I can the next morning.  Labora et ora.  

Plays and concerts are actually work for me, work in the true sense (despite not having been able to find such work in the city or the Midwest).  If more people thought of them as a worthwhile social obligation rather than something guaranteed to entertain them, we might have more meaningful plays and concerts.  People didn't go to the spring and winter theatre festivals in Athens for a good time, I think.  

Those were had at the local tavern, with an an evening of conversation with the locals.

I'm being drawn back to the Inklings, edging back in with some Charles Williams, likely to return to Lewis's sci-fi trilogy for the umpteenth time soon.  I think some of it comes from the fact that they would read chapters to each other at the pub, and you can kind of catch the tone of that, the occasional reference perhaps missed by the huddled masses reading the mass-market printing in outer Slough.  Still plowing through the complete novels of Henry James, approaching the end of his second tone, with The Other House.  Clearly a stage play of his own that he made into a novel, so it's a sometimes uncanny look into what an evening at the theatre was like then.  The staginess of the characters is very different from the intimacy of his novels.  Perhaps one day he was wandering through rehearsals, and then said he would take it back to the house to work on it.  Perhaps the theatre folks then asked if he wanted a table and a light at the back of the auditorium.  "No," he said... and then he had the title.  

 Interesting dance piece at the national theatre tonight.  I was expecting something completely different, based on the tiny portion of the source novel that I was able to auto-translate, but much food for thought, especially in light of the political situation in the Visitors' country.  Bit maenadic.  

Immense political divide between the visiting country and the hosts, but the art made it across.  I've actually seen a national theatre/ballet of the third country in the equation of the recent wars at the national theatre of tonight's visitors, and it went over just as well.  Themes of the source were much the same, but the interpretation was vastly different.  

Thinking about the peculiar production of a Joseph Heller play that I saw in Romania's second city (Romania's first city in terms of real estate prices, and with a high number on the Hungarian waiting list).  They somehow managed to stage it completely without irony, or any metatheatrical sense.  It simply wasn't in their cultural vocabulary -- it ended up being a rather heavy-handed Brechtian parable on war.  I like the theatre there -- completely unrestored from its construction over a century ago, and the Hungarian theatre down the street, in a restored old summer theatre by the river, is very worthwhile.  I hope to not be priced out of the city in the winter, if I'm fortunate enough to keep up this wandering through the holidays.

But it was tremendously odd.  I sat there, deep in the balcony, sort of looking around to see what people made of it, and everyone seemed quite dutiful.  It's saultary to remember that we can often be of the most service to a strange place in preserving our own ways of thinking.  Sort of why I spent one January in this city listening to a tape from the RSC every night.  Preserving the λεγειν -- the way of making the world reveal itself to other people.  Another example, from last week's reading, Chesterson's trifle The Flying Inn, when the Englishwoman mulls over the Gurdjieffian teachings of the strange prophet, and compares them to her own sensibility, realizing that while the ideas were logical, they revealed themselves as not aware of the deeper reality that surrounded them.  And simple logic prevails when speaking about a machine, but deeper logic prevails when speaking about the world in which we have our being.

On a prior visit, I saw a production of Streetcar at the war theatre here.  No subtitles, but in addition to knowing the play well, I had worked on it in one of the more worthwhile method-based training programs in the city, with a very highly regarded teacher.  I watched them, and though the production was a bit of a trifle, I could see that they were using it cut across the open field,  no road being there, but the simple matter of a quick improvised decision or two, and they were in the same place that the folks in that room in NYC were in.  This despite the fact that with all of the cultural revolutions hre, the acting pedgagogy has been completely emptied out -- they've collectivley thrown out the Stanislavskian bath-water, and something was peculiarly heavy in it, and landed outside the door with a thud.  But in scattered moments, they got there.   

And the peculiar slow, Pinteresque production of the Sam Shepard piece in Bucharest, walking down the street afterwards wondering if the the instruction at the beginning of the play that it was to be performed relentlessly and without pause was lost in the fact that the local word for intermission is "pausa".  I recall a well-heeled gentleman in the lobby expressing some concern at the fact that I didn't speak the local language, and there were no titles -- I refrained from telling him how many nights in undergrad were given over to arguing about the nuances of Sam Shepard's work.  I skimmed through a biography of his that suggested that many of his experiences in the city were similar to mine -- if you don't engage in certain social rituals there, you'll have plenty of time to sit in a coffeehouse and read.  Which isn't entirely a bad thing.  Spent quite a few evenings with Gurdjieff, as I recall.

Back in the Romanian second city, I recall visiting a statue in the neighborhood (that, full disclosure, I had found on Google Maps), and then tracking down a cumbersome translation of his works at the local university library, which made for a pleasant afternoon.  That's the sort of thing I try to do, and the sort of person that does those things is the person who is a bit of a stranger to the place.  So to encounter the place, (and perhaps say some things that might help them understand things like Joseph Heller and Tennessee Williams), I must be a stranger to it.  Three's a reason the Bosnian Serb border guards call me "cowboy", and the Sarajevo Canton veterans marching in the parade call out to "Indiana."  I am simply from the other place.  And if that's the case, one might as well be that, if only in order to meet the strange place.

This begins with writing.  And as I try to rebuild things, despite all of the interposed forces and faces, I'm going to have to start getting more words down on paper.  Or whatever paper's become these days.

 Large parade in the city today.  Using discretion in my comments on it, given the Prime Directive, though there was a great deal of bonhomie about, especially for the older veterans in the back.  The folks up front were marching with arms, and some very heavy machinery, so I entered "travelling neutral" mode.  At one point, while I was wandering alongside, one of the old veterans called out "Hey, Indiana!"  (I was wearing my tan traveller's hat.)  I hoped he didn't take amiss the fact that I responded only with a smile and a nod -- no signs toward the marching columns, just observing.  Just in the same manner as when I had to cross the paths of the marching students in Belgrade, I made sure to cross against the flow.  Neutrality is a vanishing practice in the world -- given the 24 hour news cycle, everyone generally picks a side based on the information at hand -- and this has resulted in the loss of neutrality generally at the state level.  The Alabama arbitrations after the American Civil War described a completely different world.  But when armed forces are marching, I don't cheer or join in, I observe.

I cut through the city to the destination point, the large concrete complex built for the Olympics. there was a small band playing there, mostly marches unfamiliar to me, but at one point they broke out into a march time/ragtime "Hold that tiger".  I watched the faces of the veterans and the recruits as they reached their destination, just like I used to stand across from St. Pat's and watch the faces of the marchers as they saw it.  Marching in a parade is an event in someone's life, and as they reach the important place they were marching to, you can catch a bit of the glint of the soul in their eyes.

Most units marched down a set of stairs at the end of the concrete plaza, vanishing like the soldiers marching into the mountain in Kirosawa's Dreams.  But they sent some of the units, including many of the older veterans, through the side door, and it was interesting watching these retired mobilized police officers (combatant status varied during the conflict, but given the way wars are generally fought here, that was largely a post hoc determination), who had clearly been out of uniform (and training) for many years, attempting to school one another on keeping the lines straight and heading in the right direction.  Humans.  Those sorts of Dogberry and Verges moments were perhaps my favorite part of the parade. 

Afterwards, did a supply run.  This is a good city for that, because unlike some other places, there are very good supply lines coming to it, and unlike some other other places, the prices are very reasonable. Some bits of the kit were were wearing very thin. 

Opera last night (~$7, side balcony).  My return to theatregoing in the Balkans. The opera was a new one, contemporary sung-through theatre, no breaking the gesamtewerke for aria applause, with only one or two exceptions.  Orchestrations heavy, and basically equally weighted throughout.  Score an interesting balance of influences -- I heard Orff moments, and a good deal of populist Shostakovich/Janacek.  But mainly a popular piece of sung-through theatre.  The story of the legendary 14th c. king (Christian, I think, though the local church didn't really see eye to eye with Rome or the East at the time, and that part was underplayed), who also ruled some areas that are parts of adjacent nations.  But many heartfelt paens to the present motherland, speaking its name reverently.  

If you didn't know what a country was, and you witnessed a human singing about or speaking about their country you might observe something interesting about their manner of expression.  More to come along those lines, I think, once I set down some proper writing on the evening.

 

 

 

 In every place, dividing the chance for a brief repose from the sleep of the place.  Every place has its own unique form of sleep, and they are all uniquely dangerous.

This is a consciously sophisticated city, long looking askance at the emissaries of distant powers.  The dominant faction and faith here are the Sadducees, not the Pharisees.  In contact with the distant center, against the local rebellions, keeping to a faith they hold to be true, despite the wraiths and wreaths of the mountains.  And, in an entirely pragmatic sense, the danger this presents to me as a visitor here for a brief moment is the ease of quietism.  At the end of the morning runs (now back to four days per week, and pushing onward, still rebuilding from the disastrous winter, even as the chills of autumn begin to appear), I can see the three parts of the city -- the pre-Enlightenment, the Hegelian Republic, and the post-Enlightenment.  Each essential for the present recollection of our purposes.

So, to the λεγειν, to the division and unclosing of the world through philosophy and art.  The work continues.