I'm honestly not sure how to think about these two random events.  Perhaps just a coincidental overhearing in a city with global tourism.  Perhaps providentially carried past a devisement of some kind.  Philosophy of Mind teaches that we don't quite have the handle on the mental mechanism that we generally think we do, even with respect to physical actions.  Perhaps this city exerts a peculiarly strong force, especially after surviving a rough winter in reduced circumstances.

It seemed impossible to turn around and inquire into the event.  I'm not quite sure why that was. Perhaps I have sufficient freedom here in the writing, and had sufficient freedom abroad, but a different circumstance obtains in the city.

At any rate, Ulysses is free to ponder the Sirens, as his inner determination in any case won't affect the outer determination of the course already firmly set for other shores. 

 Another brief salutation, a word or two of Romanian, borne like a vapor on the soft (very early) summer air as I was going from one place to another and roundly execrating the tourist hordes sotto voce.  Not quite sure of the event.  I must trust the empiric.  Booking, boarding and disembarking on a flight to Bucharest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, or environs.   Then: work, culture, and freedom from the corruption hereabouts.  Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

 Browsing recent Scotus.  This is puzzling.   

Here's the statute:

(a) A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:

(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.

Structure:

Any apple pie made in the home kitchen and that is to be sent to or subtly gotten to any of the following people can be sent from the office.

1.  Uncle Sam, or any divisions of his company, or anyone important in his company (or anyone acting under the important person) for or relating to any good deed Sam's done, or anything he's powerful enough to do, or for disciplining his kids or saving some funds in a piggy bank.

Here's the thing.  "Relating to" here is talking about the res of the suit/reason for sending the pie, not the actions of the people working under Uncle Sam.  There still has to be an act directly under the color of the office, rather than an act merely relating to the directions under the color of authority.  Relating to doesn't touch that relationship, structurally.  Or perhaps I'm missing something.

Odd.  Knee-jerk reaction, likely wrong, don't rely.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-813_3e04.pdf

He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary.  We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2025/documents/20250420-omelia-pasqua.html

[at 4/21/2025 04:33:00 AM]

#archives

https://aktorpoet.blogspot.com/2025/04/is-no-longer-prisoner-of-death-he-is-no.html  

#2025 #Cluj #Easter

 This is very puzzling.  I assumed it was a mis-translation when I saw it in a secondary source, but it seems that every translation of the reference to Aesop's Rhodus salta proverb in the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Law runs "One cannot jump over Rhodes."  But, from my primitive Duolingo German (as confirmed by the great and terrible Google AI), uber can also mean "beyond." And if you translate it as "beyond," you retain the original sense of a fellow who claimed he could jump only in Rhodes.

Original German:

 Es ist eben so thöricht zu wähnen, irgend eine Philosophie gehe über ihre gegenwärtige Welt hinaus, als, ein Individuum überspringe seine Zeit, springe über Rhodus hinaus.

And Google Translate of this gobbet gives:

It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy transcends its present world as it is to imagine that an individual can leap beyond his time, leap beyond Rhodes.

(I might change the first "beyond" to "outside".)  

Undoubtedly, I'm missing something, but... peculiar.

 A steady stream of unprompted memories from the travels (qua exile) of the last few years.  Given the present lack of a proper situation, and consequent pressures, it seems that I only am living in these memories.  

An illusion, of course. I felt the inconveniences of exile and bare-bones life in southern Europe keenly.  And I am managing to do some proper work now (when not blogging).   But an illusion is an appearance, and an appearance, at minimum, makes a proposal to the mind -- that it set itself in a certain manner towards certain things, and give none of them an absolute right to the veridical, and then take it from there.  I survived then, I survive now.  The truth as to the question of better conditions for survival and work is relevant only as to the times to come.

And yet -- the very welcome unprompted succession of these memories.  It suggests a clear answer to the question.

 Lasciati ogni speranza.  No joy in Mudville.  Dover beach.

(Bright side: it's a beach.) 

Beautiful day, though.  Odd two or three days.  

Sunday, as I was heading in to the pontifical, there was a fellow at the bag inspection line with his bag on the table, standing there, fiddling with his phone.  I waited a few moments, then asked him to move the bag.  He moved it around on the table a bit, and shot me an ironic look.  Then slowly removed it.  He said something, I can't recall.  "Friend, I want nothing to do with you," I replied.  Then he said something ending in "God bless."  "Be careful with that,"  I said, all the while showing the innards of my bag to the guard.  (In NYC, this happens a half dozen times every day.)  He took some umbrage at my not accepting the blessing, and said loudly "Do you know who I am?"  "I couldn't care less," I replied.  "I'm a CIA agent, and you're harassing me!" he shouted.  At which point, the guard had finished his quick look, and I left for the nave.

Oddly, he didn't have the appearance of a crackpot.  Careful appearance, conservative haircut, new backpack only slightly full.  More like a law enforcement type than the type the laws are enforced upon.

Then, last night, at the cafe, a fellow walked in with an enormous, very hairy dog.  I had seen a half-dozen animals there that evening--taking your pets into a no-pets area is apparently a NYC power move.  But the shaggy mammoth was a bridge too far.  I complained to the guard, who told me to go to customer service, who in turn told me to go to the guard.  Eventually, the guard was paged, but he demurred, and an assistant manager type was dispatched, who oddly ignored both the dog and me, and walked to the back of the cafe.  I went back to the customer service stand, and eventually the other fellow walked back around.  

In the meantime, as I was standing right near the entrance, an older gentleman behind me gave me a sharp poke in the kidneys with what seemed to be three or four fingers, before walking past.  I pointed out with some firmness that this would be considered civil assault, and asked him not to do it again.  Oddly, a minute or so later, he walked back out of the cafe through the same entrance, and I repeated my injunction.  I told the management type that I'd simply move to another part of the cafe, and headed to the back, finding a place just in front of a fellow shouting a conversation into a cell phone and a completely insane old woman in a facemask making rhythmic noises, hunched over her food.

Was sitting on a parkbench later when a peculiar fellow walked up and stood there looking at me, at which point I decamped to another area.

I've lived here for many, many years, and I remain convinced that the preponderance of the population is composed of sub-human creatures who are trying to kill you.  But there are some worthwhile souls in the minority.

 The cloud that was on the mind yesterday seems to have lifted.  Virtually 1:1 reading time and thinking time.

With the springtime, without the spiritual discipline and meditation practice, I'm certain I would have gone completely spare.  

These aren't superfluous or discretionary practices; humans are animals, and if they are engaged in the unnatural condition of intensive cognition, certain artificial strictures need to be in place to defend the thinker from nature.

 Another week.  Certainly didn't anticipate this stretch to reach into April, though it's much to be preferred to January.  When the editing revenues crashed without warning, I was thankfully able to get a cheap flight back from Bucharest, after a final stint in the Pirin mountains, but without reserves, the times have been lean and threadbare.  And immensely difficult.

Coming back after a few years in these circumstances had the unintended effect of reintroducing myself to the American mindset from a position of extreme difficulty, and my prosperity-boosting country has proved to be a bit difficult to take at times.  Not the extremes, the basic mindset.  And to be the evidently un-prosperous one is to hoe a tough row here.  The contempt of the craven is a peculiar thing.

Fortunately, I still have the spiritual grounding in the church, however alienated from the local homiletics and pew-chatter I might be at the moment.  And the library work, now almost exclusively centering on philosophy.  After the last few years of eavesdropped courses online and reading focused by Oxford Bibliographies, I'm inclined to claim a bit of a competence, especially given the scattered graduate coursework in philosophy departments.  And the physical discipline, despite the difficulties of the inexpensive gym: "When the water is muddy, I wash my cloak.  When the water is clear, I wash my head covering."

Onward.

 In four hours of focused work, perhaps five minutes of thought.  Very bad.  At first, started in an empty room, but it filled up.  Decamped to a second location when some folks arrived reeking of beer.  Then was surrounded by a few tourists with respiratory infections.  Likely that none of them were using the collections, of course, just there for the scenery and the free internet.

But five minutes is better than nothing.  And perhaps whatever mental condition I was in after workout in the discount gym with the ventilation on the fritz and a somewhat dispiriting Mass required 3:55 of mountain climbing to get back to par.  If course, I could have walked the miles to Anglican vespers the massive cathedral by Columbia, but now's not the time for idle descant.  Only the work.

Thinking of the rooms I rented in Cluj.  Perfect small monastic place, concrete walls, ten stories up, overlooking the town and the (small) mountains beyond.  Decent kitchen, table by the window.

Never gripe about exile. The gulag might be next.

#onward

 I should add that these difficulties in thought are unique to thought.  I could easy socialize, or turn on a computer and browse.  Actual thought reaches a further room, and at present, this is a real struggle.

Against the erasure.  Against the inability to think.

The physical struggle of the last several months, as described in this blog, usually with considerable understatement, is merely the engine-room difficulties.  Scotty's bailiwick.  The real fight has been, once I survived the night or the day, to focus the mind sufficiently on the work.  

It is odd, to have a geist of which no one knows (or really has reason to know, or care), and that quite logically would be snuffed out by these struggles.  But if that were ever the case, it would be better not have survived the difficulties.  

My private understanding and reason will not have been in vain.  That is the concept of the struggle.

Wing-and-a-prayer (hold the wing) technology cost me today.  Windows kept trying to download a massive update bigger than the HD, so Word stopped saving, even with multiple Ctr-S.  (And remote autosave was disabled for reasons too tiresome to mention.)

Luckily, lost only half of the 4 hours of work, as I found a local spun unsaved copy.  

Considering shifting to wax tablets and abacus.  Needless to say, I wouldn't be using Windows if it wasn't a positive requirement of the task.  Chromebooks have been a much more robust option in these years of the lean kine.

To Whet Thy Almost-Blunted Purpose

On my way to the cafe for dinner last night, I passed the busy traffic circle, and then paused for a moment.  I thought I had heard someone speaking in Romanian.  Which isn't entirely unlikely, given all of the visitors in Midtown.  But it seemed that it was a woman, and that she had been addressing me.

In the Comedie Francaise performance that I saw last year in Budapest (a show from the current season, not a tour), the scenic conceit was that the entrance and exit doors were composed of an almost invisible lintel and two half-beams for the sides, forming a sort of upside-down "U" when suspended from the ceiling.  Moments before a character exited or entered the scene (or, I suppose, began a new scene, as it was a classical French piece), the frame would light up, seeming to come into existence just before it was required.  

It was a difficult winter, yes.  And I suppose that I've sort of of fashioned an ice-breaker that could make it through the time.  Now, it's springtime, and the birds of the forest remind me that I need to change this back into a research vessel.  (While, perhaps keeping some of the useful machinery in abeyance.)

We are like prisoners, being hastened to execution.  And the way is so difficult, and we are so caught up in our own strength in traversing it, that we sometimes fail to notice the luminous door that appears alongside.

Perhaps I was carried past an inauspicious encounter, or questionable devisement.  And it's much more likely that I simply overheard her addressing a compatriot in her native speech.  But to have traversed the place of encounter without marking it was genuinely troublesome, and I gave it much thought last night night and this morning.

...und noch, wie ein Traum, war
Ihm das innige Volk, vom Gottergeiste gerustet.

 Odd, the Sibelius violin concerto last night at NY Phil, and today, at St. Petersburg.  Perhaps there's some common anti-springtime programmatic thoughts.  Mix in some Part and Lygeti as well.

Comparing the two tapes would be instructive as to the cultures.  Very clear difference, both in the reading and the rendering.

 "And rays of light you cannot see are flashing through eternity."  (Poe)

--

Given the length of time that immense numbers of very smart people have been thinking about how to control other people, it's likely that our personal sense of reality is a bit askew in ways that tend to nudge the mind in a certain direction, although the mind thinks itself its own master.

We return, then to the Cartesian demon.  On the observational side, Rorty once offered the hypothetical of a machine that could know every thought that you have in advance of your having it, and posited that the operators of that machine would still not understand your thoughts.  In the intuitive view, he's wrong.  If you think more closely about the mind, certain truths become apparent, and the possibility of him being right about this seems to arise.

At any rate, the one thing you can do is set a definite marker, in the faith that the Cartesian adversary didn't have a hand in its conception.  

In my case, I know that I need to get back to Europe, likely southern Europe, and within that civilizational context, and away from the corrupt folks on this side of the water who seem to have me in their sights, to read, think, and work, and perhaps make contact with some cultural endeavours.  It's simply the task, and I've resolved to do it, even if it should suddenly seem to be a very bad idea, or impossible.  We have life to do things, and while I have life, I will try to do this thing.  That's simply the fact of it.

 With the last kit resupply (knap, boots), given the sale prices, I did commercial/milspec as opposed to proper surplus.  A mistake.  Boots (a brand favored by security guards and police) were agonizing, shapeless lasts, etc.  And the knap is starting to show hard wear after less than a month.  Reinforced the latter with some nylon stitching yesterday, but I doubt I'll get more than another month out of it.  

 At the Philharmonic again, against my better judgment, as they're playing Dvorak's Seventh.  I recall listening this piece on the outdoor speakers during the season-opening festival under Gilbert.  Listening to the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth in sequence, usually the old Szell tapes from Cleveland in the Fifties and Sixties, or Bernstein at the NY Phil is a habitual choice of mine for writing music.  Including the Ninth at Yankee Stadium, I think.  I recall hearing the Seventh in Belgrade a few years ago, when the European war had freshly broken out.  It was at their usual hall at the university, just above Studentski Park.  The taut, focused energy of the playing seemed to put the politics of the moment into sound.  

According to Grove, Dvorak used to write "thanks be to God" In Czech at the end of his manuscripts.  I had head somewhere that he also marked the bottom of each page with a devotion to Mary, as John Paul II used to finish each page with a TT, for "totus tuus".  Possibly not, but his Stabat Mater apparently went over very well in England.  He had gone there at about the time the Seventh was written, which was his second published symphony.  He was famous, though, for his Slavonic Dances.  Even when rising into the rarified air of Vienna, Antaeus rooted himself in Czech folk music.  At about the time he was received by the Emperor at court, he was conflicted about the loss of this distinct identity, this Czech sensibility. (Grove again.)  

With the Seventh, perhaps in imitation of Brahms, the energy of poesis is engaged.  The question of being one thing or another is secondary; music is change, and becoming.  It defies understanding, because it revises understanding by its existence.  Music, like all intuition, is the negation of everything we understood in stillness, and we must revise our understanding, or refuse the music.

Now, I'm not in Studentski Park.  I'm in the lobby of the NY Phil, having been searched on entry by the security folks.  There's noise from the cafe, people shouting.  The upper west side retirees who were another part of my aversion to these JUmbotron sessions.

There was no menace in the opening, there was no sense of danger near.  The first movement, which should hover on the precipice, seems an innocuous bit of embroidery.  And now the thundering chords that should start the descent, but they're empty. Merely a well-crafted wall of sound in perfect synchronicity.   

This reading replaces danger with grandeur.  The latter is more salable as a luxury good, perhaps.

The seriously overweight old fellow in a white t-shirt sitting against the back wall of the lobby spent the intermission loudly discoursing on the Iranian war, and the f--ggots.  I'm not sure which angered him more.  I rebuked him on principle, and he quieted down.  

I suspect that the Seventh would find a powerful reading in Tehran, or nearby countries these days.  Music isn't something to be made in order to the desired and then sold to overweight retirees.  It is a signal of the present time.  The way that we seek out certain pieces, finding them meaningful for the present, makes that meaning palpable and perceptible in performance.  (If the audience is paying attention.)   

This, precisely this Jumbotron performance in a wealthy and occasionally ill-mannered neighborhood, with the cafe to the side and the sound a bit dicey through the overhead speakers, although the video images are clear as day on the immense triple screen covering the wall, with the lights turned off for some reason -- and then the musicians upstairs dutifully embroidering the luxury good to be desired and sold -- this is perhaps the death of music.  Or at least the beginning of its noisy silence.

Again, the applause between movements from the folks upstairs who paid quite a bit of money for their tickets.  Not a few confused folks, but a fair percentage of the house.

The scherzo, now.  When it pauses to allow the brief idyll, there is no sense of the immense movement of the piece, nothing for the sense of peacefulness to oppose. 

How was it that Szell and Kubelik and Bernstein found so much more in these pieces?  Perhaps they all had the real understanding that nations can make the wrong choice, that forces can be unleashed against enemies without and within.  The music doesn't invent this threat, it depicts it.  And in the depiction, it shows the time its face.  

Which, perhaps, more in the breach than the observance, is what's going on here. C.S. Lewis titled one of his books "until we have faces."  We look at the face of the time and see only an emptiness.  And yet there are these odd wars.   But, unlike that night in Belgrade, I can't hear the Persian war in the music here.  Not because it isn't there in any objective sense, but because it wasn't sought out for that.  

But why was it sought out?  That's the question.

Odd news item a day or so ago -- "Shakespeare's House in London."  Which was odd, because its existence and general location was already known.  But apparently, someone found a map that showed the actual structures of Blackfriars (or, as the Defender of the Faith called it, the horse stables), and based on the fact that it was said to be close to one of them, his London digs are rediscovered.  

And now the TLS is all Shakespeare.  (In fairness, 4/23 approacheth.) 

Methinks someone is fiddling with the Empires of the Mind knobs again.  Perhaps a production of the Tempest set on Chagos island next. 

 The inexpensive gym seems to have upped the karmic ante -- the showers were shut down completely, per a bright yellow note on the front door.  Diverted to another branch, did the full workout, shower, then laundry, then breakfast with Henry James, and now to the work.  In short, everything except in-person Mass, as that timing was inflexible railroad time.  Accomplishing the work of time outside the constraints of time. And there's the time-shifted Mass from the academic chapel in the UK.  

I have a peculiar relationship with the American church.  Of necessity, much of it is picture/pauper bibles, but that's because of the general condition of folks here.  From time to time, I've found churches with solid homiletics, canon lawyers, usually.  So my sympathies are more with the publishers of the picture/pauper bibles than any enthusiasm for the things themselves.  And it is necessary.  Todos, todos, todos.  If the Catholic church doesn't remain the universal church, it has lost its central legitimacy.  The point is that a common road is possible.  And perhaps the eventual union of the common road and the correct δοχοσ will bear much fruit.

It's my understanding that normal folks look at pictures of movie stars and other attractive people on their computers after work.  As for me, I look at Brutalist housing blocs in the second world.  Obvious reasons, I suppose.  Concrete bunkers ten stories up that could be filled with paperback Hegel, et al., a wooden table, and a camp bed.  And a proper kitchen, not the hot-plate-in-the-counter-and-a-fridge rooms that seem to be the default now.

It's human to imagine a better world.  The difference is that I'm imagining a place with fewer things, and fewer ideas, and fewer charms of its own.  The ideal, and one not hidden behind a cloud of ideas and marketing concepts.  The thing itself.

One reservation: the concrete of 75 years ago might be of varying health now, especially the aerated types.  Roman concrete lasts for 2,000 years, but ours is a bit more provisional.

When it was first built, I used to read the Sunday Times at the glass-fronted coffeehouse in front of Juilliard at Lincoln Center.  One day, a fellow came by who claimed to be the architect.  Seemed credible, so I played along.  I asked him why they hadn't made something of stone that would last for centuries.  He seemed more interested in expressive, windowed forms that would get a hundred years or so.  

When we try to invest everything with art, and meaningfulness, we stop paying attention to what they are in their essence.  These houses and apartment blocs have a life, but it's not the angle that is played up in the newspaper sections and magazine, for the simple reason that newspapers and magazines are limited to variations on the common vocabulary -- making the thing itself, of which there are as many as there are monads in the world, always a simple refutation.

(Rereading Houses of Belgrade, incidentally.)

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