Walked past a media-celebrity SJ at the inexpensive gym.  Shot him a quick Christos Anesti! in passing.  Polite smile in return.  American SJs can be peculiar.  Sometimes one wonders if the John Foster / Avery Cardinal line is as bright as it should be.  But it all works for the greater glory.  Insh'allah.

---

Continuing with the morning Mass at the cathedral, with the exception of laundry days (when I head to the parish).  It is an exercise of will, admittedly.  And to some degree agnostic as to creed and faith -- a Japanese cleric of an indigenous faith might do precisely the same, for precisely the same reasons.  You do have to have the right disposition -- with the daily amplified repetition of precisely the same words, it is almost like the regular rhythmic bells of a meditation exercise, while at the same time you are focusing on the origin of the words in time and their present truth.  Or, you know, simply repeating the same words over and over for the comfort of today's similarity to yesterday, as a child might listen to precisely the same audiotape day after day.  (The last sentence should be read with some irony.)  Kierkegaard on repetition and irony should perhaps be on the liturgists' agenda.  Consider the phenomenology of the event, given that it has been newly instituted -- less than a century ago.

So there's the mental discipline of will, and there's also the hope for the extraordinary, something to break through the dull fog of the day.  A philosophical insight into one of the texts read by rote in anodyne translation.  A locution at the altar of the Blessed Virgin.  (Difficult to authenticate in real time.  Like wondering if the telegraph signal is coming from the Celestial City, or someone tapping into the line.  Piecing out the truth from the party line.  And not always at the altar--sometimes when sipping kefir and reading philosophy above a supermarket in Bosnia.)  But these are all prefigured hopes, and the point of sacred ritual is that it is originary, and for this you need self-possession.  

When I attended the 7AM at the cathedral (usually the Abp's mass in years past), I would go through the liturgy of the hours beforehand on the steps, and after that, and before the mass, I would imagine the place a century or two ago, the small SJ college, seminarians in the small building focusing their minds on the same things that I would be spending the day reading at the research libraries later that day.  Otherwise, St. Pat's is a bit of a Disneyland for the tourists.

And it is tied to the book.  I would usually stop during my morning run in front of the old medieval Hungarian church in Cluj, on the ab oriento centerline, and think about the book inside.  And the importance of those ideas, and the way that the stone rose around them.  One morning, a stream of SJ seminarians (still in predawn darkness) streamed out of a service through the front door.  I was a good distance from the door, so what followed was genuinely peculiar.  As I stood there meditating, they walked towards me seriatum, some going to my right, some going to my left.  Partly perhaps the Balkan notions of personal space.  But it is important to know the things that draw you to the place, the originary function of the place, and that which issues from the event.

Many mansions.  The great societies and orders have their cruise ships (or perhaps convertible merchant marine ships like those before the two big wars of the last century), and I have my canoe.  The general proposition is that all men are kings and priests in this country, and perhaps that's the issue being tried in the changes of the present hour.

Circumstances seem to be conspiring to keep me stateside and impecunious.  Will have to rejigger things.  Shake the snow-globe up a bit.

If I have the history right, many of the Irish folks who came over during the famine literally couldn't afford passage back, so they stayed here.  I'm not inclined to accept that sort of augury and indication.

But always--the transit and struggle is to work, and think, and write (writing having now taken the place of making theatre after some years of alienation from those crowds).  Everything serves that point.  The entirety of the obelisk exists to hold up the small pointy bit at the top.

Onward.

Listening to the Valaam Easter night service as #workmuzik.  Orthodox chant -- very powerful and clear.  Near the end, they read the beginning of the Gospel of John, first in Greek, then in several other languages, including English.  The last time I heard them read it (on broadcast) was last year, in Cluj -- I had just come back from the (RC) night Mass at the medieval Hungarian church, and had made a slight detour to visit both the Greek Catholic and the state church -- the latter was extraordinary, basically a large village, all were standing on the low hill outside the church, between the two roads (including some road workers from the nearby construction in high-vis vests, holding candles), like Blaga's notion of the Plaii -- the reciprocal calls of "Christ is Risen / Truly risen" in the local language, from the white-bearded folks around the altar constructed on the porch, calling to every soul in the village around them.  Extraordinary.

 

I'm not quite sure how else to make clear that for a very long time (from the beginning, actually), I've been surrounded by very questionable people doing very bad things (and the degree to which they are questionable is not necessarily publicly apparent), and that for most of the last decade, my actual experience of the day has been comparable to political prisoners under authoritarian governments in the context of the gulags.  Really, this isn't an exaggeration.  Things are very bad, and are likely to get worse, and the reasons for that seem pellucidly clear.  American corruption, like the corruption found in other places, is a real thing.  Three careers torpedoed, and not even a basic existence for much of it.

Not to demonstrate my own virtue, but to make the lines of causation clear, I should add that I've kept to a very rigorous intellectual, spiritual, and physical discipline, and I don't suffer from any addictions or afflictions of which I'm aware.  Except, perhaps freshly-ground peanut butter and coffee.

So, I'm not sure how else to make that point.  Highway billboards, perhaps.

Spring in full fig.  Social forms ennervated and alive, folks laughing and shouting in the city.

It's likely the case that a thousand years ago, precisely the same phenomenon ennervated the social forms of the time.  And those with fortified homes likely knew that this was the time of year to run the portcullis down.

Spring comes to every social reality.  It doesn't fix the injustice and corruption, but the one who makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust hopefully uses it to remind those caught up in the spell of the world that there is a much larger and more substantial world at hand.  Life always serves life.

Notably, I didn't (and still do not) pine for Midwestern universities after my candidate's application to defend was summarily refused.  Despite the immense libraries (of books in my language) and the reasonable number of arts initiatives thereabouts.

I have focused my intentions on the neutral place where it will be possible to work.  And it certainly seems, that given the totality of the circumstances, this will have to be abroad.

So, not really the childish desire to go where the will inclines me.  More the considered view of how to exist and work, given the personal attacks, corruption and mediocrity that have characterized the last decade or two.

I am not for all waters.

Rather difficult to think when sitting down to think in the last day or two.  (At other times, cognition seems normal.)  Hopefully a trifling and brief inability to focus, prompted by any number of things.  

But I do have to get somewhere I can work.  Present difficulties are possibly seriously compromising the mechanism.  

 Hm.  Apparently about 90% of the wordpress site has been de-indexed.  ("Crawled, but not indexed.") And this "ephemera" subsite has never been properly indexed -- Google is somehow unable to read its own sitemap.

So, if you're reading this, or any of the other materials on the site (although I can't imagine why you would), count yourself among the "few, we happy few" of Shakespeare's Agincourt.

More distressingly, lack of indexing generally leads to lack of archiving, making these words writ in water a bit more watery than most.  I'm attempting to manually prompt archiving, and the occasional outputs to an Amazon self-published text seem to be a good idea.

Curiouser and curiouser.  Onwards.

Ten minute wait for a not-out-of-commission shower at the inexpensive gym, so about ten minutes late to the Pontifical.  Which, as it turns out, was all about Poland and JP2 on the occasion of Divine Mercy Sunday.  White over red furled at the corner of the quasi-transept seating.  

JP2 and I had very different experiences of the world of theatre, but share a liking for walking in the mountains.  Understandable in both cases, perhaps, given the goings-on below.  Levavi oculous meos ad montes...  A great saint of the age.

In the world of appearances, this continues a remarkable string of incidental graces.  Idyllic weather for the octave, skies clear and blue (one or two slightly chilly nights).  Quite the change from some weeks ago, or a month or two ago.  Still not quite sure how I made it, and if these incidental graces in the world of appearances continue, I might start to wonder if I did.  There was a peculiar sea-change after the second blizzard that, and I'm confident that the changes were in the empirical world and not in my perception, seemed to re-order the word considerably.

Gadamer has the notion of θεατρον as angle on the action.  Where we sit in the Lycurgan (of Athens, not of Sparta) stone theatre during the festival has much to do with the direction and distance from which we have come.  For example, in the Triduum liturgies, I was uncharacteristically in the south quasi-transept, since I was coming from the research libraries for the daytime service, rather than the gym for the morning service.  The angle on the action is uniquely a function of the σκενε of the Greek theatre; once the Romans double the theatre (amphi=two natures), there is no longer a directional sense to the action, and so there's no real corresponding angle from the audience.  Literally, the word means "looking place," and so the phenomenological context is what the stage looks like from that seat.  We have a relation to the event which isn't neutral or anodyne, but meaningful, and the beginning of the meaning of the event.

One of the interesting discoveries in looking through the (apparently paltry) published correspondence of Andric is his fondness for Krakow, and the Polish kingdom generally.  A great interest in the centuries-old kingdom, perhaps a bit like my own interest in the Yugoslavian lands.  Before the second peregrination, I was actually looking at Gdansk, but prices in the north put the ancestral homeland out of reach.

It has occurred to me that these stretches of difficulty, and less obviously, but still in a logically valid sense, the wanderings in the Balkans on a wing and a prayer (occasionally sans wing) might have been thought to be durations that would have a destructive effect.  Thankfully, and due to strength not entirely my own, I have at least the appearance of having survived, with my discipline and spirit still intact.

So these graces in the world of appearances are welcome.  Nonetheless, the world of experience, existing underneath the world of appearances, is what conducts us to the appearances and determines our condition within them.  Any number of Cartesian demons might have put together the idyllic weather and amiable liturgies of the last fortnight; the reality of it is that things are still within the time of trial, and I still focus my mind and my actions on getting to a neutral country to read, think, write, and work.

Macedonian Pirin is the gate; I went there at the end purely on instinct, and it has proven to be the right call.  The mountains, the trails, the foods and the waters have given memories of the place that are with me constantly as reminders that it is possible to live deliberately and get back to a basic sufficiency, outside the madness of greed, deceit, and corruption that has been my experience of my own country in recent years.  It is the gate, and I now have some acquaintance with the lands beyond it.  

But the point is the work, and I can accomplish a shadow of that here, as the gulag panopticon has excellent libraries. There is a stack of books in front of me that would be the stack of books I would hope to find had I access to all the libraries in the world, for the coming task.  (Really, the collections here are excellent,  though there are reasons for that.  Robber barons used to think books worthwhile.) 

To it.

 One part of this third peregrination that I'm hoping to set off on (despite all likelihoods and present realities) would be the ability to engage more with texts.  During the first wave of hard times, after the JD, I was able to read on a Kindle Fire 6 or 7, which is a bit like reading on a phone, but I made it work.  But that sort of adversity in the reading condition itself (lit screen, small text array) makes for strain in the long run.  The ideal would be an e-ink 10 or 11, some of which apparently can be found reconditioned for under 200.  It's likely as much as the airfare, but I'd probably be using it 7 or 8 hours per day.  

It's a bit like an early modern English Jesuit on the scaffold thinking about the coffee after dinner later, but perhaps that's the point.  Imagine the contrary scenario as carefully as possible.

Thinking about the state dinner in the UK some months back.  No one said anything, of course, but it was clear that the US President was completely out of countenance, and incapable of rising to the occasion.  These sorts of moments are very old tests for fitness for power.  The gossip at the English court of Elizabeth I was afraid that she would take as a public consort the sort of minor cavaliers with whom she was dallying, and that person would disgrace the throne by being put out of countenance at the other European courts.

The irony, of course, is that the fellow built an empire on a cult-like personal herrschaft.  From personal knowledge, there was a real cult of personality in his real estate office.  So he was using these same sorts of inchoate, interpersonal dynamics, but not in any ennobling sense.  It wasn't a case of a scientific ruler simply being put out of countenance because he was so suffused with the scent of the lamp.  Instead, it was a mogul from New Amsterdam who had made his fortune by using personal domination of others and aggressive lawyering, but he had never thought to use the power in the service of noble ends.

Perhaps this is a civilizational fault.  I keep thinking back to the festschrift for Dewey's 80th, and the simple one or two page contribution from Whitehead, who simply said that whatever Dewey had done, it had created the necessary mind for America.  

I'm still resolutely nonpolitical.  Like Washington, I'm above party, but capable of judging parties.  And I'm currently in the closest correlative to the political gulag that a prosperous market economy has, so my words really aren't worth all that much.

All the more reason for them to be true.

 I will make it to a neutral country, and I will read, and think, and write.

(Voice from off) Hic Rhodus!

(Calling back in that direction.) No, it's not!

But nonetheless...

(Reaches for stack of books.)

 As any Eastern ascetic might have told you, the error that left a gap in the palisade wall was the pursuit of happiness.  In fairness, their minds were probably focused on trying not to mention property.

--

Pipers in the park.  Scotland the Brave amid the fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment.  And yet, looking around, the music appears not to have an ennobling effect on those around.  Except perhaps the writer.  #cadence

Anecdote from Chambers yesterday:  An old Scotsman was inspecting the hand-pumped musical organ of a fellow traveler in a hotel room.  "Are ye a kirk man, then?"  No, I'm not."  "Well, what d'ye have all these whistles for, then?"

---

No man can smell better than his shower stall.  #gulagpanopticon #cheapgyms

Slogged through a bit of history for The Project, and it didn't go well.  Might be pausing that for at least a week or so.  Now back to proper philosophy, which has been my lodestar for the last few years.  (Long story.  I did a fair amount of graduate coursework in the field, and there's a lot of courses, talks, seminars and texts out there on the web for eavesdropping in on and reading while nomading through distant lands.)  

"Ah yes," the mind says, as I open the text.  "Now for the good stuff."  

Tu autem servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc...

The reason for the qualitative change in these quotidian blog posts over the last several months is quite simple.  It has been a time of extraordinary physical and psychological stress, due to various factors, and at times posing a real risk to survival, and it seemed wise to use this as a means of focusing the mind on its essential thoughts and intentions.  

This might have seemed maudlin at times, but there is a reason for this.  Romanticism and classicism have this in common: the suggestion that we should be a bit less cynical about expressions of emotion.  (This is very important when training artists; they need to learn to take themselves more seriously, and less cynically.)  These were heartfelt, not as expressions of emotion, but because they were mirroring a mind that was focusing on simple and important things.  The sort of things those living in bubbles of prosperity their whole lives are inclined to hide beneath a cloak of irony, a practice which in turn usually becomes a class signifier.

The times are extraordinary.  The world is false, both in the corrupt institutions that I've dealt with, and more generally with respect to the culture.  No serious mind can look at the present government and think that it has any conceptual legitimacy as a republican government.  What it is remains to be seen, likely when the force of its glamour abates a bit.  But powerful forces, many of them from foreign entanglements, are making the most of it while it lasts.

But that which we are, we are.  (Here, the first-person plural signifies the single person.)  It is still possible to read, and think and work.  Though one should avoid the society generally, as it was unwise to go around socializing during the Terror in post-revolutionary France, the halcyon days of Bolshevism in Moscow, or the first hundred days of Savonarola.  The dangers of these shared ideas are considerable.  Cultivate your own garden, as the fellow said.  Reason will survive the time, even if many of the reasonable don't.

There is a sort of stupid happiness on the faces of most people in the city, and it concerns me.  Life is serious.  Even in a prosperous society largely on political autopilot vis-a-vis effective history.  If no one is being serious and honest in the shared life, then something's gone wrong.

I'm obviously in a difficult place, after having tangled with some very corrupt and powerful folks, and I didn't have much of a safety net, as my family has always been involved in confidential government work, which sort of ended up tearing it apart.  And it has been a rather difficult winter.  For a sense of it, try sleeping on a parkbench during a blizzard with a wind chill of -10F.  In the preceding autumn, I despaired completely one evening in northern Romania, when it seemed circumstances would force me back to this sort of difficult life, and the paradigm then was a prior stint, when the worst of it was dozing off during a light snowfall on a parkbench in the Village.  (But still a very difficult life, and beyond the experience of those who have never been forced to it.)  The last few months have been  an exercise in meeting a challenge orders of magnitude larger than anticipated.

And I've kept to the discipline, without exception: intellectual, spiritual and physical.  Teetotal, needless to say.

So I live, or at least it seems that I do.  And while I live, it is possible to read, to think, to work, and to write.  I will get back to a neutral country, but this is the time for work to the extent that the situation allows.  To it.

 

Second missed Mass of the octave.  Alarm clock on the fritz.  In fairness, the disciples were awol for a good part of the first week of their own historical epoch, if memory serves.

I will make it to a neutral country, and work, read, think, and write.  

And until then, imagination will have to serve: Hic Rhodus.  With grace, the imagination will outlast the circumstance.

My place is now with Beckett and Cioran.  To return to the easygoing (and greedy and vicious, at the drop of a hat) norm of the people who grew up inside of bubbles in the prosperity would be a betrayal of life.  Omnis homo mendax.  And yet, it is possible to think, and perhaps there are a few righteous ones still around.

I discovered Cioran on the last trip, although he appears to still very much be in the academic canon here.  Not all of his works, of course.  If there were a bit more distance between the powers that be here and the powers that be there, I would really be looking at northern Romania (he lived near Sibiu, apparently just outside Rasinari, and his father taught at the seminary in Sibiu) as a place to work and think.  

But these things will be decided by the event, not by my extravagant planning.  

When the window opens, shoot an arrow, and then follow it.

Orthodox pascal mysteries approach.  I'm certain that these cultures have their own corruption, but I'm grateful for a vantage on the event that isn't looking through the corruption here.  The church belongs to the world, and is subject to its corruption, but this is so to allow it to preserve the sacraments within time.

And on earth, peace to those of goodwill.  Second half of the rather important message that arrived from the other world that night.  #roadsidepicnic

I've abandoned the second Knausgaard -- it got a bit blue about 250 pages in, but a very skillful writer.  Foregrounds the moral circumstance as clearly as Tolstoy.  I had the same problem with things getting blue with the most recent Sororkin.  It's not an objective call -- I slog through the blue in Pynchon and elsewhere, but I just get a sense of when the writer has moved the train onto the spur, and I hop off and find another.  (This sort of real-time route-changing between unknown trains can be exhilarating in vivo when travelling on second-class rail in Romania, as I found about a year ago.)  Perhaps I'm a stick in the mud.  Or the pond.

Onward.  I await the event.

Springtime in the city of the power of evil.  Had very much hoped to have left by now, and I wasn't just whistlin' Dixie then.

It will be a very difficult season.  The geist.  They awaken with a peculiar force.  

Hence, perhaps, the paschal mysteries' place in the spring rites of Jerusalem.  

And the gulag panopticon.  And those who seem to feel my place is within it.

Passio Christi, conforta me!

 Bit chilly last night.

 In most cases, when a culture begins to go bad, the darksome elements within that culture crowd out the more normative folks.  The difficulty in my country is that the general cultural neutral, the 'first position,' the episteme, the topos, the what you will -- the general disposition that characterizes encounters within that society is precisely where the indolence, malice and corruption are arising.  

The contrary would be some sort of Prussian/Napoleonic ethic, I suppose, one characterized by its claims to being the proper set of proprieties, and rigorously observed.  But there are other dispositions and comportments.

 Yesterday, reading about the disaffected and dissentient protestant scholars of the 30 Yrs War  ("Hey, I've just heard the first shot of the Thirty Years War..."), my mind and spirit was very much in the old buildings and neighborhoods of Transylvania -- Sibiu, Cluj, etc.

Sibiu was the old capital of the heptarchy, and some of those structures still survive -- churches, bookstores, coffeehouses, etc.  Refuge for the Socians and a-Sociated anti-trinitarians. (Many of whom were quietly alchemists and devoted readers of curious old books.)   

Just to state the obvious, if, in a certain civilization, you can only find employment "if you know someone," which is to say, through back channels rather than the front door, the civilization is corrupt.  Gaining a position through these sorts of personal contacts should be the exception rather than the rule, and only done in certain circumstances.  The practice becomes more general because the people involved, instead of working for the exclusive benefit of their company or organization, are looking to strengthen their own relationships, and giving jobs and providing access to jobs are ways of increasing their private social capital.  

Another consequence of industrial prosperity.  It's not just that it's not a meritocracy -- it's also not a desperate fight to find the fittest, as the only way to get a position is to be the opposite of competitive towards contacts and potential contacts.

Lamentable, yes, but lamenting things gets us nowhere.  Increasing the respect for degrees might be one tactic (the phrase "academic citizen" for those holding a first university degree is common in parts of Europe), but given the corruption at the universities, that's difficult.  After structural reforms there, perhaps: compulsory outside examiners for advanced degrees, outside scorers for term-end examinations or papers, formal procedures for hearing intramural claims of right rigorously observed, etc.

But there as well, those involved are rent-seeking.  And rent-finding.  (And they complain when their own rents get too high.)

One of the yoga precepts that I picked up at the Sivananda center when taking drop-in classes there around the turn of the millennium was "Simple living and high thinking."  That, combined with the Poor Theatre ethic that I developed in the years of Grotowski/Barba work, and the simplicity of life taught by the Church, especially in the texts of Western monasticism, have produced a creature that cares very much about discipline and strength, but very little about wealth.

Which is good, as wealth, or even sufficient bakshish, has become an unapproachable dream in the present circumstances.  Things were bad during the Balkan travels, I was barely scraping by and renting the cheapest places I could find.  I still remember a very meaningful concert that I very much wanted to go to in Bucharest, but didn't because $20 was far above budget, and the many afternoons not spent in the Sbux of Romania, as the coffees had the same prices as Midtown.  And now that things have gone from bad to worse, and I'm pining for the lean times abroad, I'm still keeping an even keel on the academic work, reading, and physical training, but the abyss of not having money is increasing in size and drawing closer.  (Somehow, in this reality, abysses can move.  Presumably profoundly.)

Nonetheless, I keep to my strengths, and the way of having my own existence that I know, and I intend to do that until I can't do that anymore.  And at that point, well, one hopes for the resurrection.

Over Holy Week, I shifted the reading to Leibniz's theology and philosophy.  Now back to boring Law things in service of an actual project, but leavened with some proper philosophy at the end of the evening to keep my mind alive.  And another Knausgaard for the evenings.  And the usual quotidian lectio divina from Henry James and Heidegger. 

While I breathe, I hope.  And I hope it won't seem colportage to point out that these are two completely independent (though harmonious) phenomena.  The mind has its own life, and the mind, in this life, is the gate to the spirit.   

Enter by the gate. 

 Bit off the clock today, missed morning Mass.   (On Tuesday of the octave, no less -- like calling in sick on your third day at the new job.)  Gym much more crowded than in the usual predawn hours, many more marihuana vapors on the sidewalk en route.  One must wake earlier than the evils of the city.  Or, you, know, somehow manage to get to a city that isn't characterized by the power of evil.

 Orthodox Annunciation -- apparently, the event usually depicted on the Holy Doors of the ikonostasis.  First Contact, in a way, at least for Mary.  It's one thing to organize your perception of the world on the assumption that there are other, higher orders of creatures and being, but it's quite another matter when one (or three) of them stops by to say hello.  Cf. perhaps, Roadside Picnic, in the spirit of Chariots of the Gods.  But it's an article of faith, I think, that these higher orders are entirely native to our humble sphere of dirt and water and fire.  Pace, perhaps the elaborate interplanetary scheme in C.S. Lewis's science fiction.

When I read  Aeschylus in Athens for the first time some years ago, it was a bit of a revelation.  Slaves dying in the mines of Athens while the politically heterageneous [sic] discussed the fine points of democracy above.  As late as the 19th c. in the Anglo-American context, it was taken as an immutable rule of life that a certain fraction of the population lived in a manner to keep alive high ideas (hence the ruthless censure of immorality -- it wasn't necessarily from private censoriousness), and the rest contributed to society by their brute labor, and had no such social obligations, and would have been thought presumptuous if they had assumed them.  

Then, things began to change, although this change had been anticipated in many ways.  The gentleman farmer of the enlightenment had been a phenomenon from Dover to Moscow.  Private claims of virtue from the religious revivals and protestant cults.  Even earlier, the Elizabethan ("Leicester's Commonwealth") shift in power away from the aristocracy generally and towards the merchant class.

With the massive industrialization (and associated wars) of the late 19th c. and early 20th c., the population became a fungible mass.  Elitism was instead associated with institutions, ones which any given man (and later, person) could hope to enter.

And now the mechanisms of industrialization have assured prosperity to a large part of the world.  But there are still people with many possessions and much power, and people with few possessions and little power.  And I don't think we have a way of understanding this.  The default is some protestant-virtue justification, in which the poor are thought to be insufficiently conditioned, and in some measure that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But if this prosperity of a healthy preponderance were to have been gained by the ruthless and amoral conduct of its corporatist managers and informal syndicates, and there had been little claim to a meritocracy and much corruption in allocating positions, I'm not certain that we would have have perceived that, collectively speaking.

Admittedly, working through real philosophy when slogging through difficult times is a risky gambit.  The first read is like listening to a songbird in a hurricane.  Then, after another read or two, you have the gist, and can reverse-engineer the recitative line-by-line.  Afterwards, though, there's a bit of oddness, but very calm and balanced.  

Mental stolidity is the usual tactic of the soul when in such circumstances, so it's a bit of a risk.  But the game is worth the candle, and vice versa.

 Prayer embroidered on an ancient Serbian Christian relic: 

...so now my prayer is twofold
nourish me and calm the fierce storm
in my soul and in my body

Vest still fitting a bit loose.  Will take a few summer thunderstorms to shrink it to a proper fit.  Hopefully, these will be Bosnian summer thunderstorms.  A strong vest, a strong hat, strong cheap jeans, and strong boots are very necessary for these little adventures.  Along with a small pectoral cross, when one appears.  For most of the last journey, I wore a small wooden one from the centuries-old Orthodox church in Sarajevo (not the 19th c. gilded and highly nationalist one).  Belgrade, and by extension, Sarajevo have become, entirely accidentally, places of freedom for me. Of course, I rely on the strong local ethic of hospitality in both cases, given my nationality and religion.  But it's possible to work and think there. Have downloaded Houses of Belgrade from the local library, and look forward to reading it once I slog through another Knausgaard.  (I enjoyed the rebus on his name in English in the last one (my first), when characters kept breaking their noses.) The last time I read Houses of Belgrade, I was leaving Belgrade within a matter of days.  Traviata at the national theatre.  Walking back to the stellar writing place in Zemun afterwards and packing through the night.  

I'm aware that these meditations on foreign travel might seem to most Americans like the coveting of a luxury good, but if they were to look more closely, it would likely seem to them like taking a vow of poverty and joining a utopian community.  The reality is that, there, I can travel and write and think for less that it would cost to rent a place and live stateside.  Conversely, though, a much richer cultural and artistic life is possible there, so in fact the intuitive American view is sort of right, although it would reject its own reasoning, if it were to make everything explicit.  They are places of mental strength for me.  I think of being there, and am better able to handle present difficulties.  It's no exaggeration to say that existence is basically predicated on the possibility of return to such things, especially given the present circumstances.

Easter Vigil in the Night at St. Pat's.  (I well remember watching the same service from the back corner of St. Sava, orthodox psalter in hand, a few years ago.)  I went back to the south quasi-transept (the place to the side of the church where the bell-ringer lives), given the continuity of the Triduum, and for much of it had the entire section to myself.  Read a bit of Tolstoy and John in the Koine beforehand, felt a strong connection to the narrative of the passion at points, and a bit of second sight, perhaps, at the postcommunion.  Didn't light the candle for the rites after the Gospel, as much of the flame in that part of the church appeared to be coming from ushers with electric lighters.  American pragmatism.  On the up-side, I noticed several people carrying flame out of the church at the end of the evening, bringing the holy fire back to their apartments and houses.  It seemed a common practice in at the Hungarian church in Cluj last year, but I'd never seen it at St. Pat's before.  The most memorable post-Vigil event I recall was bumping into Ed Koch one year and exchanging Easter greetings.  Genial fellow.  

Then, on the day itself, the 10AM at the cathedral was ticketed.  There's usually a standby general admission line, but I decided not to risk it, and went to the parish church, which is a few blocks from the gym.  Absolutely packed, and it's a very large church.  The pastor (a very nice and genial fellow) for some reason decided to devote much of his homily to singing "In your Easter bonnet...".  Given the crowds, I decamped at the intercessions, and walked up to the Episcopal cathedral by Columbia, one of my favorite buildings in the world.  As I walked up the steps of the porch to get out of the cold rain, I could hear a Dixieland jazz band inside playing "In your Easter bonnet...".  Hic et ubique.  The ongoing American party reflected in the divine mirror, perhaps.

Stopped in at the bookstore down the block, formerly a usual haunt, just to see what the kids are reading these days.  Added some items to the ever-sifting mental list, to try to track down at the libraries: a new Kant biography, a history of analytic philosophy, a transcript of D.T. Suzuki's lectures on campus, the new Tokarzuk, minor Platonov and V. Grossmann, etc.  Some interesting peculiarities of the curation -- some areas drastically overrepresented, while, for example, Pynchon and Solzhenizen had substantial omissions in the shelf-oeuvre.  On the plus side, a solid showing for Cioran inside the philosophy shelves.

Circumambulated the campus as I waited for evensong, and sat outside looking at the church for about an hour (absolutely immense, it's the ecclesiastical vista equivalent of Niagara Falls), then inside for evensong, which I frequently attended in my first decade in the city.  Some of the same characters are still about, and observing the changes in the spirit of the place were interesting.  Episcopal politics and church politics are much more liberal than the RC equivalent that serve as my OS, and while I remember the music as being careful, precise, and generally excellent (some of the best artists and conductors in the city, usually performing for a few dozen people on most afternoons), there seemed to be a general lassitude in comparison to my memories.  Perhaps the quintessence of it was the appreciative wolf-whistle that sounded just after the closing notes of the postlude toccata, but several seconds before the sound had finished decaying.  Politics changes forms.  The change of forms changes things.  That said, I was still in rapture for most of it -- in the toccata, for example, the distant upper registers sounding from deep in the nave (perhaps some from the trumpets of state) hovered above the low ostinatos like glinting flames on the edge of the sound.  Absolutely magical.  

So, things continue.  As they continue, they seem to become thinner, and missing some of the usual notes (one concrete example might be the details lost in this repeated essay) -- some grace notes, and some missing from the main melody. The general principle for me these days is the old Shaker precept to work as if you were to live a thousand years, and as if you were to die this evening.  I force myself to get into the projects that my instincts tell me should wait for more stable working situations (Hic Rhodus...), and I probably have a better argument there than the instincts. 

That which we are, we are.  Seek.  Strive.  Find.  Don't yield.

 

Just lost another essay (~45 min) due to oddness with the internet connection.  Will attempt to re-create it, on principle.  (And if that doesn't work, I'll try on a computer.)  

There's a reason I restored an old typewriter to type up my notes during the PhD work.

Chrome>Blogger, which is supposed to be safe for that sort of thing.  Bit frustrating.  Perils of the $50 laptop, perhaps.

Hail thee, festival day

Heidegger says something very interesting about the festival, if I'm reading and remembering him right.  It's in one of his parsings of Holderlin, the writer who was a thoroughly educated philosopher who instead wrote as a poet, in the short time that he had.  (There are a few such fellows about.)  The holiday comes before the festival.  In other words, the preparation for the commingling of the divine and the earthly functions to mark the time of the observance, when we take a step back from the culture and recognize the larger reality.  The festival itself is a specific engagement with the things of heaven, not at all a day off, or a celebration.  The spirit of celebration, rather, inaugurates the time when men and gods (in Holderlin's language) are to engage in their common rites.  The celebration marks the time, and then separately, the time fulfills its nature.

Adorno wasn't impressed with the American holiday.  Benzedrene-fueled excess was the description, I think.  

Given the events of recent years, I'm at some distance from the prevailing culture in my own country.  I expect that the extraordinary difficulties will continue and increase in the coming times.  An accident of birth, followed by inexplicably landing in several places marked by extraordinary corruption.  But I've come to realize that what I've encountered is the spirit of the time in this culture.  That which struck me as craven mediocrity when I encountered it was actually the prevailing spirit of a culture that exists to provide prosperity for between 60 and 70 percent of its society.  This is a very high number in historical context (cf. Picketty's second book), so the artifice has an argument for itself.  But the permissive spirit of "we're all in this together," combined with the distrust of higher things and ideological claims, while it might make for many happy backyard barbeques in Ohio, has some limitations as a governing civilizational claim.  (And there is likely some question of how much of the prosperity is an inherent result of the abundance of the continent, rather than the civilizational posture.) There's an argument to be made that all my country has is its wealth, and everything else traces its justification from that.  At any rate, my personal difficulties, as someone governed by ideas rather than hopes of empirical wealth and possessions, have been extraordinary.  I've succeeded at every task and test according to its terms, but success here is apparently governed by other social norms.  

So, then what is my relation to the festival?

Well, this is where the twofold nature of the holiday becomes important.  If the festival is simply a leavening of society, a few days of sweetness and light (like the Czech fireman's ball in the film), then those outside the charm of the society have no real place in the festivities.  But if we recognize that this leavening of things, the holiday, is merely prelude to the mingling of earth and heaven in the days of the festival, then the outsider has not merely a place, but a peculiarly strong claim to the time of a more true existence.  

In the present time, the people in my country are buoyed along by a sort of non-rational exuberance.  The mechanism underlying the society, that which provides the wealth, provides the assurance that would usually come from a personal ontology, a personal understanding of the civilizational context of encounter.  Instead, things have shifted with us, so that we live not within an understanding of our civilization, but simply an awareness of the rules of the game that must be played to survive.  Adorno described it as being like a grand hotel, an existence that demands a different skillset than a more artisanal existence might require.  (His opponents derided this notion as "the Grand Hotel Abyss.")  To gain more wealth, a certain lassitude and viciousness is required; this is how people are conditioned to behave, and they are rewarded appropriately.  So, the holiday makes perfect sense in this context -- a celebration within a culture that already sees itself as an ongoing party.  (I've always disliked parties.  Never really understood the spirit of them.)

The subsequent festival, though, if it is to come to pass in the days following (in the octave, perhaps), presents a different proposition.  These are the days which, for Holderlin, gods and men commingled, and came to understand their particular destinies in relation to each other.  We can understand this as living life in a quotidian sense in light of the highest truths, as opposed to the principles of convenience and rewarded behavior.  (The language of divinity frequently bears relation to the relationship of humans to their ideas.  Compare, for example, early modern philosophers' views of Christ's human and divine nature with their understanding of how ideas and empirical reality relate in our awareness.  The assertion of divinity logically entails the legitimacy of ideas.)  

So, then, the battle-scarred and weary fellow outside of his society's charms isn't buoyed along by the celebrations of society.  The permissive spirit and lassitude of the holiday in fact can inspire a sort of revulsion, and this is perhaps where many lose the plot.  When the society around us seems to have gone even deeper into its non-rational exuberance and frolicking, perhaps it is best simply to register the change, like noticing the sky somehow darkening before dawn. (The stage directions in Parsifal indicate that the lights are to dim generally before the appearance of the Grail.) 

We see a change in the people around us, and understand that the time of gods and men walking together for a bit have drawn near again, which at least entails living in the light of our highest ideas for a short time.  In the festival, there is truth.   And then the times will return to their own nature, and will fulfill their purposes according to their own character.  Mysterious wars, and the meaningless froth of the culture.  And the fellow outside the charms of the place knows exactly what those days will mean for him.

Nonetheless, the festival has come.  Χριστὸς ἀνέστη.

 https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/paschal-greetings

Why do I keep thinking about Cluj?  Perhaps the church.  Every morning (as following my habitual practice when there was an important church on the route), I would stop on the centerline, in front of the doors.  Usually before dawn.  Some interesting things happened.

The church is aligned, I think, ab oriento, which puts it at some angle to the street grid.  Which isn't unusual, but in this case, at least gauging from the ruins visible under the piazza, the grid dates from Roman times.

There is a fascinating mural in the baptistry chapel that appears very old.  Christ, with the swords (presumably) of temporal and spiritual sovereignty.  The trumpets beneath the higher sword cross, the trumpets beneath the lower sword point opposite directions.

Although renovations (as is the case for most churches in that part of the world) were paid for by the state, it appears to have been conceded to the Hungarian population, with the Romanians and the internationals praying at the church on the campus of the university -- 19th c.  The older, larger formerly OFM church on the campus has been given over to the protestants.  

There is a tympanum on the front of the Hungarian church that dates from the 14th c., placed there after a peasants revolt.  St Michael.  Who also figures prominently in the Baroque ornamentation that remains inside.  And the present (socially and liturgically conservative) liturgy.  Shadows of the Bogomil.  I am very sensitive to these things -- to finish the Christian liturgy and then address an extra prayer to an archangel can endanger the faith.  In fairness, I feel the same way about prayers to the BVM during the Mass, and I'm very much in favor of the BVM generally.

If I'm able to survive this and prevail, and find a source of sufficient bakshish, hopefully that part of Transylvania will figure in the years to come.  Inshallah.

 The difficulties of the conservatory master's degree.  Struggling as a penniless artist in the city.  The difficulties of law school.  Struggling as the American equivalent of the briefless barrister.  (Not in the sense of living comfortably, and not having much to do, but in the sense of the most difficult life it is possible to have, economically speaking, in the first world.)  Fighting an extremely corrupt and mediocre (and immense and politically powerful) state university.  Then more of the briefless bit in the city for several years.

Twenty-five years.  Difficulty, corruption, circumstances that would prove lethal for most folks.  (Try sleeping through a blizzard on a parkbench with wind chills below -10F.) 

The common mindset does not describe the reality of life in this country for those who don't play along with the corruption.

I will live deliberately, quite likely elsewhere.  I will work, and read, and think.  

And perhaps it will be given to me to think the thought that will free the time.

Away from these corrupt institutions.

Away from these corrupt circles of power, ones that it took me decades to see and understand.

Honestly, someone could walk up to me and offer me ten million dollars to forget the last several years and just quietly fall into line as a government prosecutor somewhere, and I would turn around and run the other direction.  A sufficient number of years without money teaches one to guard the soul against surrendering to it.  Alone among these protestant virtue-grabbers, I can honestly say that I have no desire to be financially wealthy, and I don't think I've ever had that as an aim of my life.  But the people who think otherwise can certainly get in the way of the people who are trying to actually do things.

---

I am, though, hoping to make plain that I have a sincere and strongly felt desire to decamp to a neutral country to study, write, meditate, pray, and perhaps make some theatre.  Should folks wish me out of their way, they merely have to let time do its thing, and perhaps interfere a bit less with fortune's machinations.  There's no need for stronger medicine than that.

 Triduum.  In years past, I've made it a point to be in this city for these rites.

Enough, no more.  Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

It gaveth joy to my youth and then proceeded to kick the tar out of me in subsequent years.

 Braving the locker rooms of the discount gyms for the post workout shower is definitely one of the more trying bits of this little adventure.  I bring antibiotic soap, but it's like smuggling a handheld perfume atomizer into the vast and vaporous stygian darkness.

Otoh, the clean air and water of the Romanian or Bulgarian mountains, the breezy quays of Belgrade...

Everything in me is focused on the absolute necessity of getting away from this place, these circles of influence, and this culture.  Every iota of my being.  Every strength.  Every thought.

 Slow start to the day.  I'm not sure where this mental inertia is coming from, but it must be overcome.  

 Ducked out to the Chrism Mass at St. Pat's.  Found an out of the way bench in the quasi-transept under an image of O.L. of Guadalupe.  Was thinking about the historicity of the church, and what it meant that the Christian sacraments were being celebrated in a post-Enlightenment city.  Amid the rabid fundamentalism found in dark, primitive places like the television national news and the Pentagon.  

It just seems that the society is increasingly dominated by imitation and repetition, and there's very little serious thought about the way things are.  We are in the midst of the technological and civilizational fruits of the Enlightenment, which had a lot to do with Christian notions.  Hospitals, skyscrapers, planned suburbs.  Very different from some other nations and cultures.  Christian nations are generally more economically developed, all else being equal.  (Oil wealth makes for some exceptions.)  Part of that is the historical accident of being in Europe and America, but still.

And yet, there are some rather bad things going on in these Western cities.

Thoughts that went through my head as I sat under the image of the BVM, remembering hearing the calls to prayer as I sipped kefir and read philosophy in Bosnia.  

Part of acknowledging the historical reality is keeping the door open to the other world.  Repeated ritual can become rote, or just matter for comforting repetition.  But this is where the rift is for us.  And if, even in the churches, we begin to think that the present reality is all there is, we've lost.

Heidegger was walking with Arendt in the mountains.  They stopped in to a small Catholic chapel.  As they left, Heidegger genuflected.  Arendt turned to him, very surprised, and asked why.  (He had long been lapsed from the faith.)  He thought for a moment, and then said deprecatingly, "Well, one must take the historical view of things."

These are events extending far through time.  Mind-independent realities that have shaped nations and millions of individual souls.  If it seems humdrum in the worship multipurpose room, look out the window (the one that John XXIII cracked open) at the centuries of the past, and the strange and sometimes deeply problematic forms that have resulted from them.   

This is what we would be in the midst of, if we attempted to ground ourselves in a true understanding of the time.  But it's much easier to watch television.

Midtown does seem at times a de facto gulag panopticon.  Ubiquitous surveillance, glowering private security folks, etc.  A wealthy city, and all have the freedom of the city, but only some have the freedom of the wealth.

But the difficulty isn't in the structure of things, or the economic system.  It's in the way things are thought about.  That's what's gone bad.  Without religion, the spirit has faltered.  

Without a vision, the people perish.  A vision is an understanding of things -- cf. the beginning of the Metaphysics.  Without a way of thinking about the way things are, individual people lose their existence.

 By analogy: the dissident has survived the winter, walking the streets of Moscow.  But he knows that even though it is easier to survive when the days are warmer, in the same manner, the society around him is coming back to life, and if he isn't able to make it out of the country, he might not survive the hostile culture in its floreat.  The extraordinary challenge that he survived was a physical one.  The danger that impends is rooted in the spirit of the place.

 A meddlesome, yet surprisingly well connected family (now completely disintegrated), and many years surrounded by very corrupt people and institutions.

It becomes difficult to fashion even a very basic existence.

 “Holy Mary, woman of the third day, grant us the certainty that, in spite of all, death will no longer hold sway over us; that the injustices of peoples are numbered; that the flashes of war are fading into the twilight; that the sufferings of the poor are breathing their last. And grant, finally, that the tears of all the victims of violence and pain will soon be dried up like frost beneath the spring sun” (Maria, donna dei nostri giorni).

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2026/documents/20260329-palme.html

During Mass, I heard a strange bell of a distinct tone.  Letting my imagination run, I associated it with the Chrism rites later in the day, imagining that the bell was to be sounded when the oils were received in the manner of the French coronation oils.

One must allow the mind to run like this, while reserving belief.  Vailhinger.  The what if.  Cf. the film They Might Be Giants, starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward.

As it turns out, it was the grizzled, venerable fellow who sometimes sounds the bell while pacing Fifth avenue, wearing holy icons like a sandwich board.  He was standing up outside the entrance of the cathedral, sounding his bell and apparently blessing it with the cross in his hand.  I uncovered as I passed and made the sign of the cross, hoping he wouldn't notice that I was doing it the wrong way.

 I've never prayed for my own good fortune.  God & I have our own view on the merits of worldly prosperity.

Notice, in the parable of Lazarus and Dives, Lazarus is silent.  I suspect his interior monologue was something along the lines of "Oh, thank God that's all over with."  Woe, rich ones.

And at the same time, we now have a society in which, like the 16th c. English theatre audience, signs of wealth are signs of favor, displacing aristocratic or royal claims.  And, in the fullness if time, it did happen.  People pragmatically defined the ultimate good as that which brought empirical wealth, claiming the other notions of good were illusions of the mind.  It happened.  The writings of the philosophers, like glowing trails in a particle chamber, are evidence of this.

And now I find myself in a position in which the position far less remunerative than I might reasonably expect, given my degrees and experience, but which almost allowed me to read and think and write and discover the world appears to have for some reason suddenly decided become much less remunerative.  In such a position, one would be expected to scrounge for money, or at least pray for it.

Nonetheless.  Like Rambo and the Prime Minister of Italy, I take things day by day.  Keeping in mind that the days are numbered, I try to do the necessary work, whatever the situation.

 Random thought -- the ethnarchy in Judea was about to be abolished, after its diminution at the death of Herod. Presumably, the Powers that Be were privy to the political rumblings from Rome.  Perhaps the procurator conceived INRI as a political symbol.  

Two years ago, Holy week was in Mostar.  Interesting services, very revealing modifications in the rubrics.  But it's difficult to point out the borderline idolatry to a roomful of people who have just survived a religious war.   There is some comfort in the obviousness of such things, and with years of peacetime, the seeds in the practices will lead them back to a more reflective understanding, I think.

The folks from whom I was renting (a rather difficult) apartment told me that there was a Good Friday service at the mountaintop cross, so on that morning, I walked over to the Franciscan church at the base of the hill, had some coffee, and made my ascent.  Extremely difficult and somewhat dangerous climb -- the path had just been reopened after de-mining.  Finally, I made it to the top, a bit perplexed that I was apparently one of very few people climbing the mountain.  At the top, others appeared, and then a huge crowd, all of whom had walked up the paved road on the other side.  A very interesting afternoon.  

--

And then, last year:

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/04/19/a-balkan-triduum-i-ii/

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/04/19/a-balkan-triduum-iii/

Of this year... it is best to remain silent.  Next year in a holy land.

#holyweek #salvationtothesavior

Someone should investigate the habit of Americans to signal virtue by pounding especially hard upon their keyboard.  Like Tchaikovsky trying to signal an ardent passion, but not quite as resonant.