Hm, okay -- it's not the tourist swarm that causes the loss of energy. Apparently, it's sitting down in a firm chair in a climate-controlled room after the evening and morning. Understandable. Just need to catch it on the swoop downward, do some breathing, and caffeinate a bit at the right moment. #science
I appear to have taken on Peirce's fortunes, at least as to the financial aspect. We share a simple befuddlement at not being able to get on when doing important things that you're supposed to be doing, and that you trained a rather long time to do. His relationship with Wm. James (and possibly Henry) must have been interesting -- the famous prolific philosopher, a Bostonian of private means, patrician son of a Swedebourgian industrialist, who never claimed much depth academically, in contrast to the ever-swotting, completely unrecognized, penniless, greatest American philosopher of the time, who was completely blacklisted from the academy generally, and more importantly, Harvard.
(And who, in fairness, also had an unwise love affair and risked a grand gesture of purchasing certain real estate.)
I'm not making the argument that those who resist corruption in my society are hived off from the rest, given a hard time and perhaps even done away with, as that would invite a very broad debate touching very large social questions. Frankly, my society doesn't have the social mechanism for addressing these types of concerns. At most, they would be addressed as a claim by an individual, and so my energies are best devoted to surviving the situation, whatever the larger social resonance, and however many others might be in the same position.
Things do look a bit dark at present, and these sorts of notes are the kind of thing I would want to have said, were the time of saying things to come to a close. I'm certain that, at minimum, it will be mined for sentence structure and word choice by some AI bots trawling the web and perhaps used to build a bot to sell cosmetics or luxury time-shares on a website, so, you know, at least some good came of it.
Still mystified by the peculiarities of starting the day in the libraries. After the workout, Mass, breakfast, and about an hour of reading, I go through the security search, get into the building, find a place, and then a swarm of tourists descends for a little over an hour. In the middle of which, almost invariably, all of the energy vanishes from my body rather quickly. Still can't fathom that.
I could delay the library for an hour, but then finding a place would be difficult. I could go to the other side of the room, but they apparently have the vents on double there (and nil on the better side, which leads to some thin air late in the afternoons) which makes for a drafty day.
And to top it all off, they're staging some incredibly misconceived immersive theatre performance twice a day when a lounge singer comes in and belts out "People who need people..." twice a day for twenty minutes apiece. I abscond for the duration, but can still hear it in the distance.
The collections are really the only useful thing about the city for me at present, but getting to them is starting to drive me a bit mad. Onward -- steady as she goes.
Interesting time getting to Mass -- finally found out that it was in the Lady Chapel, and managed to get through the security for the patrocina grand event. This is a complicated city; I've recorded many of the complications in this blog. But the church manages to still provide a window, a windowed monad, perhaps, on the reality of the faith. The difficulty is that almost everyone is caught up in rhythms of habituation, imitation. and competition -- the thing itself is obscured, and it would take some doing to point out that there is grail there to be uncovered, let alone the disposition and work involved in bringing the inner truth of the event to light in the present time. Never let the world teach you about unworldly things. At most, it provides a window.
The church is a ladder supply warehouse, not a ladder machine. I prefer this metaphor to the analogy of a hospital (apparently one with a peculiarly ineffective psych ward).
---
Standard daily paean to southern Europe -- the desire to return to a minimally sufficient existence, interesting cultures and art, and the dignity of civilizational context. I'm remaining calm and carrying on, but this departure and return really does need to happen rather soon.
Was doing some private devotions on the walk from the gym to the cathedral, and encountered a father talking to his very young son in what I suppose he thought to be a normal voice, but one which any sufficiently well-grounded observer could tell was primarily an instrument used to attack a hostile world.
Contrary to the received view in the New World (Prospero: "Tis new to thee...") civilization can also preserve innocence.
Eventually, all of the notions that you projected onto the City wear away. This takes time -- decades, sometimes. Then you see its actual nature. And you vow never to return.
Really, the only reason I moved here many years ago was to work in the theatre -- that was why I kept to midtown and the west side, when the east side was clearly the better part. Now that all of those doors are not only closed, but obstructed by vegetation that's grown in the interval, I look at the place in considerable disbelief. Midtown has become what was, even a couple decades ago, only found in the raciest parts of Chelsea and the East Village. And the old bohemian areas are simply wealth-extraction points via the rent. Between the enthusiastic young epicures and the money-raking owners, there's not really a place for a serious artist, writer or thinker to stand.
Homo, fuge!
Dangerous times, with the Machiavel with certain distinct foreign entanglements leading the armies into battle. But the democracy is usually right -- and its (highly mediated) judgment was that the dangers of the corrupt Republic were greater than the dangers of the mercurial Machiavel.
Frankly, I'm just attempting to survive and understand things. (At times, I'm not sure which is more difficult, or necessary.)
My writing about the corruption I've encountered is not merely reflexive or purposeless. At the Berlin Wall, the guards were convinced to fire on their fellow citizens by being told that the folks trying to get out of the country were stealing the value of their education from the socialist republic. In that there are potential countervailing claims of right, I do need to be absolutely clear about the corruption that I've encountered, and the dispositive effects of these incidences of corruption.
'nuff said, perhaps.
"Walk around the city, examine its ramparts..." The right to roam is one of the things I admire about the UK, though, to my understanding, it has been a bit curtailed in recent years.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/royal-family/article/king-charles-england-coast-path-dqwmvxp2j
There is a recent Russian film. I can't recall the title, set in a small town by an industrial port. One of the workers has come there with the secret plan of swimming to one of the American freighters and defecting. He befriends a local youth, and there's some Bildung -- the space race is on, and there's the cult of the astronaut -- while the fellow is relentlessly training in the gym, planning his bid for freedom. Long story short, he misses the timing, and swims after the departing freighter, presumably perishing in the attempt, and the young boy finds himself in Moscow, randomly face to face with an astronaut at a victory parade, and hands him a bouquet of flowers.
There is more space than one might think between nations, and it's easy to be lost in the space between. From this, in a pragmatic sense, I take the lesson that I need to be a bit more tenacious if I manage to make it back across to the more neutral European countries. Heretofore, I had thought of it as a bit of a temporary refuge while nomading, and was grateful for the minimally sufficient life and culture that I was able to secure. And I tried to return the gift by writing as much cultural criticism as I could. But life is more serious than one might think at first, and given the inexplicable, extraordinary difficulties that I am facing in my own country, I need to become more interested in the other lands that I visit. There is only one life to be had, and I need to be alert to every possible path to an existence that could support worthwhile work, whether in the arts, or the law, or just writing and reading.
I've taken up the habit of the occasional predawn psaltery of the liturgy of the hours. An old form -- the text is hard to find for free in Latin in the right format. Originally, I was using a 16th c. version, but the source website shifted to an early 20th c. version, so I followed along. It is valuable, in that it clears the channel. When one awakens in the city, one doesn't necessarily awaken in one's true capacities. Like good animals. we learn what comportment to have in order to survive, and we default to that. But the true capacities of the human, including the sheer effrontery of addressing heaven before sunrise, isn't necessarily in the urban worker's skillset. People have been pointing this out at least since Plato, but the city has a distorting effect on us political animals. I think industrialization has deepened the problem in two dimensions. First, the worst of the grotesques, and there are many of them, seem to be barely human. Second, proximity to the center of the civilization doesn't seem to have a humanizing effect. The wealthy, as far as I can tell from occasional conversations and reading their sorts of news sources, seem completely lost in a more genteel fashion. In the early 20th c. many of the anti-soviet cultures had, perhaps in response to the humanism at the center of socialist revolutionary thought, a cult of the ideal human. You see this in the art in the figures of steely determination -- not the carefully rendered musculature of Bernini's monumental Roman sculpture or its inspirations in the sketeches of the renaissance, but looming, iron figures of human-scale strength. I noticed this phenomenon clearly in the Croatian churches of Bosnia.
Perhaps to blunt these twin dangers of the idealized human, modern industrial civilization in the West seems increasingly to encourage a sort of blurry incapacity in its citizens. The focus is on personal contentment in a more Epicurean sense. The political and economic calculus is explicitly based on happiness, and while the absence of pain is a good thing, once this metric moves into a more positivist scale, the search for happiness can become a bit manipulable and meretricious.
My country does have its own spiritual resources, as far as they might be from the culture of the present, and I've sought them out. There is a distinctly American way of hearing the different drummer, and one can use this cultural space to set up a Walden of one's own in which to live as deliberately as possible. But again, this is very far from the present state of the culture collectively, so even though this path is distinctly American in provenance, those taking the path become hostem humanes generis in the hyper-real corporatist culture of the age.
As a consequence, one does need to imagine oneself into a place of sufficient freedom -- but what distinguishes this from madness, or swimming out to sea in blind faith, is that the imagined space becomes a place in which it is possible to exercise the powers of reason in freedom. That is both the desideratum and the place of finding it -- the capacity of thinking, the possibility of thinking, and the place of the possibility of thinking are, in a pragmatic sense, the same. The dancer, the dance, the music and the stage are a mereological unity, a single phenomenon of capacity of expression and its proper place in the world.
Perhaps it comes down to this: there are people who understand the things themselves, and those who only know things as part of a larger game. The latter attack and destroy the distracted former as part of their game.
Even so, the only objective error is the claim of right, the thought that the notion of the things themselves is the great error to be solved by the game.
Thinking of one apartment I had in Bucharest -- located off of the oldest street in the city, broad, tree-lined, many businesses, few tourists (like Belgrade's King Alexander as opposed to Mihail). Easy walk to both the opera house and the mall, plenty of bakeries in a short walk, famous municipal theatre around the corner near the embassy district towards Piata Romana -- I saw an interesting and authentic Measure there -- among the more expensive tickets of the peregrination, almost $20. Large German grocery easily walkable. In sum, convenient and interesting. The name of the national 19th c. poet was written autograph-style across the electrical feeder box in front. Obviously not by him, but one of his descendants was a minor poet under the regime, and on investigation, I found that he had lived not far away. I broke my rule of keeping low key around the neighbors of the short-term rental, and asked a few folks in front about it, who professed no knowledge, and considerable doubt as to the minor-poet-theory.
But the fact that it was there opened my eyes to the neighborhood, one of the more prestigious areas under the regime, interesting modernist architecture now gone slightly to seed. A bit like the two old socialist shopping centers that I lived nearby at various times in Belgrade, (Kumikevo Sochache?) and a very large concrete arcade in New Belgrade. Especially to a Westerner, it's odd to see these high-status places from socialist times. The general notion here was that it was all Brutalism and true puritan believers in the road to socialism -- and the dissentients, who were relegated to poverty. Apparently not the case -- the times had their proper grandeur, no matter the economic/social system.
From time, I wonder if I might have been more able to work under societies like those. Times and places with a stronger civilizational context, as opposed to people getting away with whatever they could, and as much money as they could (e.g., our current Leader). Even now, I would jump in a heartbeat at the chance for some Brutalist concrete rooms that I could fill with philosophy paperbacks, a camp bed, and a table and chair. And a kitchen. From time to time, I've been able to have that, and it has been productive.
Hope springs eternal. (Even among folks with a few graduate degrees and decades of experience -- in the free-for-all fairground money-grab of present times.)
Hm. CPAC is meeting in Budapest next week. Perhaps I can cobble together a wobbly aggrieved-and-entitled angry manifesto on social media and sneak into the tribe, and then sneak off at the Nepliget station for points south, after a day at the Szecheny baths. (Excellent strategy for long trips, much less than a cheap hotel room, and even if you don't doze off, you feel like you've had a good rest.)
When I was less familiar with southern European bus routes, I once accidentally got off at the wrong Budapest station in the middle of the night, completely deserted. Saw a map in an adjacent rail station, went over to look, and hopped on the first train in blind faith. Turned out to be the last train of the night, went right to my destination, after a scenic trip over the river. Magyar luck.
Hungary would be near the top of my daydream list, were it not for the firm social divisions. Centuries ago, a cool tribe from Asia took a walk west, and found a great place at a bend in the Danube, and stayed there -- in the middle of people of completely different genetic ethnicities and languages. (Most linguistic borders in that part of the world are slightly blurry -- not that one.) But to keep their identity, they've had very firm social rules -- e.g., the balcony at the opera house. So, a very likeable people, and Catholic as well, but I think I'd always be a Slavic/American stranger.
Perhaps not -- apparently there has been a split between the Buda gardens sensibility and the Cafe New York folks dating to the early 20th c. I've only stayed there for several weeks, given the rental costs. (Sort of my respite from the stranger countries to the south.) So, hardly an expert.
I remember performing in the Molnar festival there as an undergraduate -- my first taste of freedom from the bonds of home. And the literature -- I discovered Kraznahorkai many years ago by keeping an eye on the window of a good bookshop, frequently when walking around in the middle of the night -- and now, the Nobel, as well as an upcoming tribute at Lincoln Center for Bela Tarr. If you keep on keeping on, folks will come to you in search of the better mousetrap.
Especially the New Yorkers -- the greatest concentration of actors and artists on the planet, but everything (correctly) thought worthwhile comes from the outside. So keep an eye on the display windows.
This week was a bit of a muddle, tbh. Bright side: not yet mad, which might have been the chief achievement of the week.
Tried to focus on a certain philosopher, but for some reason found his stuff absolutely impenetrable on the first read, and simple/straightforward on the second. Every day. Odd. The reading isn't a detour\frolic--ramping up to the philosophy readings for the current project. Cranking out CVs daily.
Oddly, recently, I had two contacts for law jobs, asking for interview availability times, and then never heard back. I have some guesses.
Resupply run -- had to swap out the knapsack, as the straps had worn to threads. Found good deals on Amaxon, and was able to resupply $300 of kit (msrp) for about $100. Mixed feelings areas tempted to plow through with rags and threads and get on a plane sooner.
Sorry to decommission the old knap -- BW, nylon, saw me safely back & forth across the Balkans for a few years. If I had storage space, certainly would have kept it for sentiment/spare parts.
Recognizing that the problems of one person in a world like this don't amount to half of a hill of beans, there are enough strange things about my misadventures of the last few decades to warrant a bit of a general hullabaloo along the lines of mores, tempore, etc. Or perhaps these sorts of things are less rare than I think.
If my family had been farmers in Nebraska, I'd have a fairly good idea of how to play things. But, things being as they are, it's a little like escaping from a hypnotist and then being mugged seriatum by three roving gangs of psychologists. The framing of the event becomes a bit wobbly.
---
Increasing thoughts of Orthodox spirituality as a path that might offer a bit of space from the usual suspects while still heading the right direction up the mountain. Probably a wiser course than jumping to another Abrahamic channel entirely.
While I've never been remotely tempted to mendicancy (there was actually one stretch several years ago in which I could only do laundry because I kept my eyes on the path at night and would find spare change presumably fallen from bicyclists), I have of course thought about the conventional forms of funding via websites. But someone in the midst of social divisions shouldn't post online asking for donations or investment (e.g., funding to write books), not least because it would implicate the donors in the conflict at hand (e.g., the waves of prosecutions in Russia over website donations).
I've made a principled stand from time to time, almost always because of things I've been asked to do, or things that have been done to me, but it puts too much weight on the Kantian dictum that I must be able to will the moral law I follow to be a universal one to assume that everyone on my email list would support such a move, or should be asked to. I evidently have my own struggle, and I'll struggle through it.
"You don't ask for mercy while you're still on the stand." (Leonard Cohen)
A cunning plan: I shall read Ivo Andric so intently that I either find myself magically transported to Belgrade, or go mad and think myself to have been magically transported to Belgrade. (If the latter, I would actually save money on airfare, rent, $6 theatre tickets, $2 coffees, etc.)
Likely not Sarajevo, as he's not that popular there these days, at least gauging from the condition of his books in the (foundation) library, and the amount of pigeon commentary on the statue. Puzzling, as Tito seems to still be quite popular, cult of Walter, etc. But the elephant himself appears to have angered the beys.
Over a decade ago, when these extraordinary and inexplicable troubles began, I imagined that it was an interlude or caesura in the narrative in which a bit of heroism would be required, and I did try to rise to the event in the manner of an intrepid hero. At least to my own mind, I pulled it off rather well -- despite sometimes going 4-5 days without sleep, ill-fitting shoes, thin nutrition, etc.
Now, after all of these years, it's clear that the event is not an interlude or a caesura. I've kept to the heroism -- no vices, no mendicancy, firm physical, spiritual, and mental discipline. But it's clear that the original narrative, the one in which I grew up and received my education, and made a solid go at three professions, is no longer the story.
It must be a new story, then, or nothing at all. I've set the task of getting back to southern Europe, and I will make that happen, despite the fact that circumstances seem to be conspiring to keep me just shy of the resources required to do it responsibly. The event becomes the story, and the narrative was a simply a dream of childhood. Onward.
It's a bit like being a prisoner in a Russian gulag of a little over a century ago, but thanks to some VIPs in the local Party, the gulag has an astounding library with every title he could possibly need. Nonetheless, he plots his escape, all the while trying to figure out how to continue the work outside of the gulag, and without the providential library.
--
Train Station for Two is a very good film, not least because it enunciates a complex political reality within the framework of a popular film. The protagonist is a concert pianist from Moscow, and it's an open question as to whether he or his television weather reporter wife was behind the wheel when they struck someone on the road, so he's been sent off to the work camp prison in the north. Long story short, he meets a waitress in a railroad station restaurant, and the happenstance encounter works well for both.
Translation: elitist, obscurantist artist enduring a purgatory, one that that he can't quite understand, or know whether it is justified, in the people's state on its path to socialism. Some explicit contrasts to more Katchatourian-like music favored by the ethnic types and melon sellers. In fairness, Katchatourian is a lifesaver for second-world orchestras on hard times. Jaunty.
These three or four preternaturally warm days arrived just in time. The wind tempered. For graces received. It was beginning to be a bit difficult to stand up and walk. #draw...your...sword #princessbride
---
At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that I must decamp abroad soon, or else. Not the hysteria of a moment -- I've been dealing with this level of inexplicable adversity for more than a decade now, and I'm inclined to trust my judgment in distinguishing trade winds from the edges of a distant storm.
Not really a discretionary calculus; income has been highly attenuated for several years now, and being able to have, for extended periods of time, a life that isn't inherently destructive of body and mind becomes increasingly important over the long haul.
Among the frothy lives of the prosperous middle class here, individuals' situations such as mine don't even register, except as a salutary warning not to challenge the prevailing corruption. But if there is a way to find a minimally sufficient life that will allow me to do the honest work of the mind and implicitly testify against such things, it is incumbent on me to find it. Being attacked by robbers in the road doesn't release the crusader from his vow.
Most people would describe the situation as a bit desperate, and would be at their wits end, willing to make any deal necessary to extricate themselves from being the focus of such things. But I'm sort of taking the very long view, and merely cabling objective descriptions of the situation back to the Home Office, keeping to the Officers Mess, and occasionally whistling "Men of Harlech" as I scan the horizon for puffs of smoke.
In short, "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it."
tl;dr:
Many (20+) years of adversity, encountering corruption in large institutions when trying for three careers: theatre, law, and the academy. Everything documented, and a brief overview linked to online CV. Degrees and experience in hand, and the work continuing as an independent scholar. Barely surviving the present situation (not exaggeration), and trying to get back to digital nomading in the Balkans, which offers the double attraction of a minimally sufficient life and cultural encounters and development in my fields (see my latest, a self-published compendium of reviews, available on Amazon).
And... what's to come is still unsure. But we are definitely at the stage in which marbles are being played for keeps (and perhaps occasionally lost).
So, tune in next time, when you'll hear our hero say...
Two lessons from the experience:
-- Never think that the present condition is inherently a derogation of the necessary things. You have to work wherever and however you find yourself. I had thought the nomading uncongenial for the work, as it was an exile of sorts, going from one Humble Quarters to another, and keeping a very close watch on the discretionary spending, even in the least developed areas of the Second World. When the sustaining factors unexpectedly vanished, and I was launched into the present existence, the ability to function in the world immediately previous suddenly became plain. Always the case, I suppose. The grass is always greener in memory.
-- Be ruthless about rooting out any quiet pining for some times in the past. In Macedonia, I might have mused about the research libraries, cheap gyms, and relatively inexpensive high-protein foods in the city, and although I was careful to add the caveat that having such things at present would also likely involve immense hardship, I can't be absolutely sure that the spirit catches all of our caveats. Fleshpots of Egypt. Nostalgie de la boue.
I understand now why Shakespeare named the fellow in Measure and from the Inns "Master Froth" -- surrounded by this bubbling, unfocused energy upon which the culture has come to rely.
A teacher of mine (although never formally so), a Czech scenographer and director, staged a piece one in which each death (and there were several) was depicted by the popping of a balloon (thin, like a bubble) and tossing a bit of dust in the air -- each happening as the character left stage, so, just out of the audience's view. Similarly, I remember a bit of law school banter in the Midwest, a fellow talking about his grandfather from Indiana, whose request was that there be a popcorn machine at the service, and that the guests partake.
Froth is the small bubbles. The abortive rises. The point is the longer, deeper lines of force and expansion. Where a culture insists on the former, doubt the culture.
A very warm day in the city, it has the feeling of a holiday. Had to check the interwebs to see which holiday it was that I had missed remembering. Everyone seems filled with an energy, although it all feels just a bit off. Most concretely in some of the rough sleepers wandering the streets shouting insane things. Saw two between the cathedral and the breakfast cafe. The Greek is εκρασια, and if memory serves, it comes from the sound of the ice in the rivers breaking in springtime.
Gently down the stream. And to foreign shores, as quickly as God will allow.
As the reading has been interrupted for a moment, a few quick thoughts:
The ability to get to southern Europe in the next few months
for an extended nomad trek is shaping up to be an existential objective, as
they say. Given where I stand after past
events, I can’t hold this position. The
adversities are likely pushing me towards a simple throwing the hands up,
dropping all work, and seeking animal survival in the city, but that simply won’t
happen. It would no longer recognizably
be me, and the obligation to preserve the self is higher than the obligation to
play the option with the highest percentage of animal survival.
Running through the events of the last three months, I can
honestly say that only a handful of the people I’ve ever met could have
survived that sequence of days, while continuing to work and think. This is a very different country when you’re
placed outside the charm of things. And
it has been over ten years since that reality began in force. Iron discipline, of course. Teetotal as always when I don't have a place of my own. Daily physical and spiritual exercise. Never mendicancy. Respect all laws. Christmas chocs allowed when 75% off in January. (Seriously, chocolate is a survival food, not a luxury. It is good fuel.)
So, I must get there.
And I will be able to work there, and provide a minimally sufficient
life. And there will be time enough, and
pocket-change enough for theatre, music, and coffee. And I will continue to
discover the place, whichever one of the likely half -dozen it turns out to be.
The critical point is that although the primary motive in
selecting that region is that, even in these circumstances, I can have a minimally
sufficient material existence, material sustenance and housing are not the
highest ideals.
The work must continue, because that is what I am, and if I
were to surrender it, the thing that would surrender it would no longer recognizably
be me. The Samurai must survive as Samurai. The thinker must survive as thinker.
Constantly haunted by thoughts of Belgrade, Skopje, the mountains of Bulgaria. These are not entirely adventitious plans and thoughts. My own country is veering too far away from anything I can recognize as good, both in its larger acts and in the commonplace interactions with the people here. There is a seamless link between the sort of sensibility that did in my family, and the corruption that I encountered at the state universities, and the stories in the newspapers, and the craven people I walk past every day. There's no longer a sense that one should try to be good, or pursue inherently worthwhile things. All is craven imitation and competition, and the pursuit of money. Omnis homo mendax, as the Psalmist has it.
Southern Europe is the one bit of Europe I could afford, on an absolute baseline income, and there is theatre and music, and I can get the texts I need electronically. So there is a path, and I shouldn't fault my own mind for ceaselessly glancing towards it.
Difficulties, yes, but with the barrier of an iconostasis comes the possibility of the holy doors.
The careful foreign policy of the UK as to the present special military operation is laudable in its attention to principles of international law, but it's likely not to be read that way by the participants in the conflict, who will be more inclined to see pro-Arab forces within Whitehall and institutional forces as the culprit, rather than the Sherswood? Sharwood? principles about conformance to law and independent advice. (Apparently it took the ministry four or five days to realize that it might be wise to deploy the carrier.) There is a sense among some at the highest levels under the blue flag of the Levant that if the WW2 holocaust hadn't happened in Germany, it would have happened in England. And the grain of truth for these musings is the genuine intransigence inside Whitehall, likely from the cultural transmission that occurred in Protectorate and oil development days. An episode of Yes Minister makes some reference to the phenomenon.
But I'm inclined to allow the person who does the right thing the best possible explanation of their actions, given how rarely those in power seem to do the right thing.
The depths of the winter seem to have passed. It's lighter in the mornings now, and the nighttime cold is starting to become less onerous. The boots proved to be a problematic purchase. It's a good brand, so they're strong, but they're associated more with law enforcement than military, and the lasts are clearly not top-notch. Extremely difficult break-in, but hopefully they'll endure more than the three months the last (milspec jungle) ones gave me. Bit of congestion as well, as I shed an inner fleece layer perhaps a week too early. But after a week or two of a rare cold with difficult shoes, hopefully everything's on the mend.
Perhaps these difficulties were useful. Many cultures fast in springtime. In winter, we fed on the fats and slept when we could, and pressed forward as firmly as we could through the cold. With springtime, we need to re-tune the engines. Perhaps, in the pressing-forward of the wintertime, we've lost a bit of mental acuity. We need to awaken from our own strength, and so we fast, and think, and rub the feet a bit.
Feast of the Angelic Doctor.
Henry James said that we were as if riding a horse at night, and couldn't see whether it was black or white. ("It's grey until dawn," mutters the German farmer in the next field.)
My devised thought is a bit more optimistic. We are on a mountain, and can't know how high we have managed to climb. We might be meters from a mountaintop grove, we might be only a few feet up the path. Choosing to climb, or choosing to fall, therefore, have unknowable consequences. But we can know what it is to climb -- as well as the other thing.
One might write a compendium of the faith and only have advanced a few steps on the mountain. One might have had a single thought and found him or herself on the mountaintop. Grace is what we have to lose, unknowing.
When your family has been fragmented and dissipated by their work in confidential areas for the government, and you've encountered some rather spectacular corruption in the (large) institutions you've studied at, leaving you with degrees and experience, but virtually no chance of a basically sufficient life or career in the society, the only possible thing to do is to do work of undoubted worth every day, and attempt to get to a place (almost certainly, abroad) where it would be possible to do real work and have a minimally sufficient life. This is my present task.
The feeling of exhaustion that sets in in the morning (after workout, Mass and breakfast) when I sit down to work in the library, particularly when the ventilation is low, or the tourists are ubiquitous, or I move around a bit to avoid the coughing/contagion is very, very strong. Almost a paralyzing physical incapacity. Without a doubt, the last few months have been the most physically trying in my life -- and between the years of outdoor drama and the years of prior adversities, that's saying something. We're certainly into the marble-keeping (or for that matter, losing) stage of the game, and it's not necessarily clear that this one will end in triumph and glory. To the event.
If language is the dasein of geist, Henry James is a gymnasium of the spirit.
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Peculiar, at Mass today -- stood near a fellow who recited all of the responses correctly, but in a bored, sing-song tone. The Mass as revised by the last Vatican Council brings everything into the language, and shares the language with everyone -- almost no secret prayers, or mumbling behind an iconostasis -- but we have yet to reckon collectively with the dangers of identical repetition and irony.
I'm very fond of iconostases, but they do have a certain historical role. I was speaking with an Orthodox priest in Transylvania about the glass painted icons that were characteristic of the region, and he was quite dismissive of the iconography/theology, saying they were just for the simple people, like the images on the iconostasis.
In the Latin church, everyone's now at the table -- there's no distance, no wall. But it can very easily turn into idle banter. And where there is no wall, there can be no holy door.
The phrase I seized upon to express the difference between the people in my own country and the people in the countries that I had been visiting was "civilizational context." Unlike the US, even when just buying a cup of coffee, it happens within a shared understanding of a certain culture, and everyone involved considers themselves moral participants in the exercise. It's not unusual to see the "rights" of the customers and employees posted near bank tellers and railroad ticket offices, specifying the whole social contract down to uniforms and break times. Of course, "right" has a different inflection in these contexts, as it is synonymous with "law," as opposed to a carve-out from the general social procedure, or a specific protection within it.
Although my country is very prosperous, it is a continental prosperity generated by some fraction of the population for a second, slightly non-coterminous fraction of the population. And there is no general claim of right, and cups of coffee are not served within the general sensibility of the civilization. And many are not included in these engines of industrial prosperity set up after the war, and the decision on inclusion or admission frequently has nothing to do with merit. No one is inherently smart or hard-working enough to think that he or she won't be set aside. The machine needs no additional genius.
Much of this has to do with the loss of religion. And its falsification beforehand.
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I listened to the live broadcasts from the beginning of the Bayreuth season this year in Belgrade. For Rheingold, I hopped on a tram (this was the first visit in which I relaxed the rule to always walk) and went to the sbux across from the parliament building, which was visible through the panoramic windows. As darkness fell and the lights came on, it made quite a scene for the completion of Valhalla.
I also recall going there after visiting the House of Flowers (now, technically the House of Small Pebbles) and reading Pynchon for a bit, and becoming conscious of the two extremes of the earnest socialist and the confabulating Westerner. Each needs the other, of course. The real danger is in attempting to avoid them both.
Would very much like to get back to that world of eight months ago or so, sleeping on a couch in a small studio across from St. Mark's and cooking on a hotplate, with a small wooden table and chair under the window, but it will take some doing. For now, when I remember these times of basic sufficiency in desirable places, I try to remember what I was angling towards there, and try to set my course to those same stars in these surroundings. Hence the days entirely at the libraries, and the nights with the e-readers until the danger of sudden sleep becomes too great, and I stow them in the bag.
A first acquaintance with Blaga's philosophy -- I had only read secondary sources before, but apparently the research collections here are stronger on Blaga in English than the Cluj research library, which is peculiar. I encountered this phenomenon often in Balkan wanderings -- in Skopje, for example, you find an abundance of works in English (including entire bookstores), but you will not find a single Macedonian work translated into English (unless you're better at that sort of thing than I am.)
At any rate Blaga seems, unfortunately, to have come under the spell of Spengler, and writes with a similar freedom. That said, there are some very interesting ideas. The notion of negative knowledge, called "Luciferian knowledge" after the conceit of the angel, together with the "abyssal categories" that define it (reasoned from a deduction? what are they?); the notion of characteristic style, presumably after Schopenhauer (who I'm almost completely unfamiliar with); and of course, the section on mioritic space, which he's most famous for and possibly the most resonant of his ideas. (Possibly, in the notion of fictional space, we are going back to the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience, and re-making a world in which, contrary to the present one, it is possible to live.)
There are etexts of the trilogies, and I suppose it would be the work of a moment to AI translate them and then go through them, but I can't handle that now. After a few hours, my best understanding of him is as a sort of correlative to Ivo Andric -- both, retired diplomats, one a sober novelist with perhaps a few keys hidden in the stories, and the other a cultural philosopher of Spenglerian freedom (whose work I likely don't yet understand), and in this, in their styles and metiers, they reflect something essential about the two countries which they represented to the world.
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Thinking about the apartment in Zemun that I rented after a month across from St. Mark's during the big protests. That was an excellent place to write -- bells of the Franciscan church and the small chapels in the park, the distant flashing lights on top of the Usce mall, and the city beyond. My one disappointment during that time was the injury that kept me from running, as the quay is excellent for that.
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In sum, I'm presently dividing the day between trying to ameliorate my condition (cranking out CV's, applying to content writing gigs that I'm vastly overqualified for), and doing the actual work, on the assumption that I will never get past the locked doors, and will have to reach my own understandings and make my own work. A bit like the Shaker precept of Mother Anne -- live each day as if you were to live a thousand years, and as if it would be your last. The second type of work is the last-day scenario, only the essential philosophy, art, literature. While still trying to land a gig, or a career, preferably one that can get me to a country in which I can do some real work. Not being able to change my condition, and not being able to finish some real work is not a thought I'd like to have.
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Interesting, a Western-leaning news portal in a Western-leaning Islamic country runs a piece on an important night of Ramadan, the battle of Bed'r (?). Oddly, though, the Quran was revealed on the same night of (a different year), and that's how the night is usually marked -- including at this portal in past years, if memory serves. The present Persian campaign has likely made a lot of people very angry, and I still haven't seen the justification for it. And the Ides of March upcoming.
Some of the things one notices when attempting to slog out the winter in a northern city under very difficult circumstances. Onward.
Another reason I am looking to the Eastern sections of southern Europe is the difficulties I've encountered in my own country due to ethic origin, tbh. Being a large fellow of Slavic ancestry, I'm conscious of the fact that some folks, and folks from some ethnic groups, treat me a bit differently. (A few anecdotes there.) There is no cognitive dissonance for them in thinking that a large Pole should be facing the sort of difficulties I've been facing, regardless of the degrees, experience, and work ethic.
Not a proximate cause, but certainly a but/for cause.
The ideal would of course be a Jeffersonian democracy blind to ethnicity, but as that doesn't yet exist (despite my best, usually unconscious and ingenuous efforts), when I steer my ship, I should steer it to familiar nations.
It is a sign of an overly circumscribed life to pine for the familiar. And yet. To generally hope to be in a better place doesn't get you much when lost in the woods. Best to set out for the known bivouac, and places where you could work -- hence, I set my face to countries of tall mountains, woodsy violin sections in the orchestras, generally accessible coffee and theatre, and Cyrillic grocery receipts.
The difficulty last time was the books, mostly. But I'm shifting everything to ebooks now, and I'm going to compel myself to like it. Getting sufficient vegetarian protein might have been more of an issue than I thought -- will have to budget a bit extra for eggs and nuts. Smoking is another difficulty. I/m sure half of Sarajevo thinks me a rude and uncultivated person for getting up and moving away whenever someone lights up, or worse, puts a vape to their mouth.
But these are minor difficulties, and I am facing major difficulties here, so...
The trick, of course, even with the degrees and experience, is to find a way of paying for the worldly goods. Which is frustrating, as many of the folks who studied law with me, and who unlike me, went along with everything placed before them, are making millions of dollars per year after this many years out of school. And even those at the immense, corrupt and mediocre state university who went along with things are likely almost reaching the six-figure mark.
Money is the dung of the Devil, as a recent pope observed. Which means, among other things, that it's occasionally very rare and difficult to find.
After reading the LRB piece on Romanian politics, I had a run at Cioran -- luminous threads, and I am back in Sibiu and Cluj in my mind, and alive, if only for a minute or two. On the day I took the bus to the resort and walked back through the mountains, the path ended at Rasinari (resin, from the lumber industry), from which there was a long walk back to my humble quarters in Sibiu (which were actually quite nice on that visit, a garret 1BR in a very old 18th/19th c. building -- I was the first rental, and the monthly rental is now well above what it was -- and I was there during the big theatre festival, to boot). Cioran's father was on the faculty at the Orthodox seminary in Sibiu, which is right across from the cathedral, ran past it many mornings. Long commute from their home in Rasinari (I think) especially in the early 20th c. And then his stories about the paralyzing fear he felt from the Hungarian policemen. The SJ church in Sibiu is quite remarkable -- the Jesuits and Franciscans left a considerable amount of infrastructure in this part of the world. One curiosity in Sibiu: the number-puzzles in the inscriptions, in which some letters that double as Roman numerals are slightly larger than the rest of the lettering, and can be summed or taken severally to give meaningful dates or numbers. I never managed to solve any of them, but I think you would have to know a lot about the place to so.
"a drowning man clinging to the idea of shipwreck" (Cioran)
Today, New Gods, the title essay of which is a sort of distilled Bogomilism -- praise of the demiurge, as a perfect God could never have made such a world. Whenever you visit a place and St. Michael is very prominent in the ritual or the imagery, you can be assured that there are a few folks thereabouts who have some profound reservations about the essential goodness of the world. He's quite prominent in Transylvania.
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