At the beginning of my most recent visit to Belgrade, I had a very peculiar dream shortly after I arrived.  I was staying in a very small studio just down the block from St. Mark's church, near the Parliament.  (During this visit, there was an immense protest march one weekend, so it was a very interesting location -- on that day, I made it a point to stay in, though I walked around the city the night before.)

A day or two after I arrived, I dreamed that I was inside the upper reaches of a very tall tower, facing an angel, who was standing slightly above me on the stairs.  The angel had an immense countenance.  He threw some salt in my face.  Like any graduate of an American law school, I took umbrage at the tort. I demanded to know who was in charge.  Surprised, and apparently a bit confused at the question, the angel indicated some figures standing far below, whom I understood to be the clerics of the local national church.  That's all I remember of it -- the memory is keyed to the authentic reaction of the angel, taking the question and answering it.

A very peculiar dream.  

I have a theory of long standing that when I remember some detail of a dream, the reason is that it indicates something that I need to pay attention to, possibly to repair.  

So, acting a bit less like a graduate of an American law school, especially when abroad, is perhaps the takeaway there.

 

There is, of course always the danger, as Ben Kenobi warned Luke, that wearing one's heart on one's sleeve makes you vulnerable to others, and my professed understanding that, to quote Pynchon, "Reckon yo tengo que get el --- out of aquí," might allow others to take advantage, having some insight into my personal hierarchy of needs and desires.  

On the other hand, I think it's rather obvious.  The fellow being kept in the basement of the colisseum with the animals and aquatic machinery should probably, in every world in which he appears, be rather energetically seeking pastures new.

Mentally, on Brankov Most over the Sava, looking over at the Danube, and the silt island at the river's mouth.  For some reason, the bridge somehow connects to an apartment in Skopje -- and the chain Western coffeehouses in Cluj are on the far side, not to mention the Bulgarian mountains beyond...

 

  

I should focus my objective: Belgrade.  A simple escape, not a long-term plan -- as in the first visit some years ago, when I had enough on hand for a month or two, and found a job (in India) when I got there.  If I aim at the Balkans in general for an indeterminate time, I might miss it entirely.

But I know that if I can get to Belgrade, I can think clearly and get a few things in order.  Read Henry James and the Strugatsky bros. in Studentski park, haunt the balconies of the national theatre and JDP at $5/ticket. Write.

Or I might veer to Sarajevo at the last second.  But I do have to get there, wherever there might be. 

I would vanish to Valaam Monastery or somewhere on Athos to chant the Orthodox liturgy all day in a heartbeat.  Likely the same, if an opportunity came up to be an Anglican cleric in minor orders at some cathedral in the cold north of Britain.  This despite not knowing Russian, having only yeoman's koine Greek, and being rather firmly on the Catholic side of the Catholic/Anglican split in the English-speaking world.

It's the possible and likely things that prove difficult. 

Many of the incongruities of my present daily work come from the fact that I'm simultaneously attempting to secure a position that will allow me to do useful work, secure a basic and sustainable means of sustenance, and accomplish worthwhile things on the assumption that one or both for the first two objectives will come up empty. 

The third task is what I've begun to focus on, after the last ten years or so.  

So, it is what it is. 

 Focusing the attention and work on getting back to the Balkans somehow.  Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cluj, etc.

Not an exaggeration to say that this going to ground in the city is almost like a loss of life, followed by a lower and more difficult condition of existence.  I suppose you could call it a bardo,  One strains to reorganize the energy to restore the sufficiency in past existence.

Absolute discipline (teetotal, gym, daily Mass, etc.) and not trying to soften the situation by passing the hat or sending out rogations and petitions.  

 

 Septuagesima.

Let us "give glory to the Lord our God, before He cause darkness, and before our feet stumble upon the dark mountains;" [Jer. xiii. 16.] and, having turned to Him, let us see that our goodness be not "as the morning cloud, and as the early dew which passeth away." The end is the proof of the matter. When the sun shines, this earth pleases; but let us look towards that eventide and the cool of the day, when the Lord of the vineyard will walk amid the trees of His garden, and say unto His steward, "Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first." That evening will be the trial: when the heat, and fever, and noise of the noon-tide are over, and the light fades, and the prospect saddens, and the shades lengthen, and the busy world is still, and "the door shall be shut in the streets, and the daughters of music shall be brought low, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond-tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail," and "the pitcher shall be broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern;" then, when it is "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," and the Lord shall come, "who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts,"—then shall we "discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not." [Mal. iii. 18.]   

(Cardinal Newman) 

http://www.lectionarycentral.com/septuag/NewmanGospel.html 

 Interesting piece on the Persia conflict in the Times from an Oxon. prof.  It's all of a piece with the ongoing agenda in the Levant, of course, but I have some misgivings.  In conflicts between nations, intelligence and tact are usually only in play because of institutional factors, and those are precisely the forces that have been sidelined in the present politics.  While right and wrong becomes a difficult question when dealing with vastly different national cultures, it is still very possible to make a mistake, as was observed of Napoleon's avenging acts on campaign.

Further upstream, I wonder if there are two realities -- the day to day reality of national existence, and then the more abstract or general view that strategy creates around this quotidian existence.  The sort of politics we have now, based on narrative and theme, emphasizes the second type of thinking.  And it's important to note that this second type of thinking is  entirely contingent - it's something we made up for its explanatory and predictive value. It makes no claim to say what these things are.  What's needed, and what America was created to achieve, is a political reality that is based ion the first type of existence, the quotidian life of the countries.  Warriors for the working day.

But then came the televisions. 

 

Wandered back to the Jumbotron last night to give the Strauss suite another listen, and was a couple of paragraphs into writing a decent essay on Dewey and democracy, but then the warm, airless room, not to mention the fact that they had turned out all the lights (why?) worked its magical force, and I did a decent impression of a board member by dozing behind the shades for the duration.  As my hands were on the keyboard at the time, I lost even that much to erasure by random keystrokes.

Apparently, Dewey never revised or edited piecemeal.  He would rewrite the whole paper or chapter instead.  Vaguely Kraznahorkian.

Bit of a chill in the air last night.  One difficulty with slogging through extreme cold is that it  can inspire a certain docility.  And what needs to be retained is the laser beam inside the ice.  One of the lessons of Tamino's trials, perhaps.

I do need to find something elsewhere.  Frankly, the only reason I went to ground in the city after dis-astre struck in the Balkans was that it was the most familiar briar patch (as my home for more than two decades).  But there's nothing for me here.  I see the greed-machines inside the daily life of the people, and I had already seem the mechanisms of the city fairly clearly when I left before.  Not Zion, or even Oz.  Just a point where a very large number of people gather in order to not think clearly together.   I can understand why people see it as sort of an apex experience, and retire here or squander their trust funds, since for a pragmatic mind, one that gets its truth from getting along with other people and gaining power over other people, this would indeed be the heavenly Jerusalem.  For someone who believes that the truth is to be found in ideas, the path is long, and the way is steep, and people generally don't understand why you're chasing abstractions.  Admittedly the cathedrals and coffeehouses are amiable.  But the apartment in North Dakota overlooking the transcontinental rail line would serve my present purposes much better.

I suppose there were two sorts of Soviet dissidents.  One moved to the small villages that sprang up a set distance from the city in which they were prohibited from living, and the other set out with Tolstoy.  Through him, with him, and in him.  He who died excommunicated from the communion of his youth, I think, in addition to having set out from his home to destinations unknown just before the end.  Perhaps the 'long walk' familiar in the animal kingdom, or perhaps something human, and higher.  His last words were asking for the ladder, I think -- presumably Climacus, The Divine Ascent, or perhaps there was another referent.  An animal docility, the sort of sensibility that sets in in the cold, keeps us at a home at the city limits, straining to reach the familiar places.  But there is a world elsewhere.

Another paradigm for current difficulties is the Eldar Ryzanov film Train Station for Two.  The plot is that a concert pianist from the city has been sentenced to a term in a remote northern prison colony after a traffic accident.  There is some question as to whether his wife, a beautiful television meteorologist was actually at the wheel at the time, but you'd need some Vailhinger to prise apart the meaning of that part of the plot.  The underlying anagogical thought is perhaps that he has been caught up in the political mechanism, the purification of the people on the march towards communism, the obscurantism and egotism of classical piano needing to be transformed to music from the people, e.g. perhaps Khachaturian.  He stops at a train station on the way, and meets a waitress.  The truth, perhaps isn't in our Moscow lives, or in the remote northern places that serve as seven storey mountains of political or economic exile, but in the places between, places that we didn't already know about in the meaningful journey of our lives.  After setting out from his home when the end was near, Tolstoy died in an obscure village railway station.  Perhaps that place, the place outside of the ponderous and political meaning of his life, was the place for which he was searching in the journey outward.  An animal, on its long walk, merely walks to the horizon. A human, and here for some reason Emily Dickinson's testamentary mandate that her pallbearers carry her coffin barefoot through the springtime flowers comes to mind, the human walks through the world.

(The British saying something might be odd about the queuing is a bit like the Americans sensing something odd going on with baseball or cable television.)

 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jan/31/publicans-bemused-single-file-queue-trend-pubs

 #saturdayradio

https://www.prairiehome.org/shows/57711.html 

It is a quirk of consciousness and the use of language that people tend to think that the moment of greatest danger, both personal and collective, will be characterized by a sense of present danger.

 After the storm.

One of the many reasons that I am moving to seek pastures new just a bit more quickly that one might think is that I'm aware that the level of effort, discipline and stress that I'm having to engage here would gain ten or a hundred times as much in a different context.  I realized some time ago that half of the people think I'm a national socialist, and the other half think I'm a militant communist, and those two halves are made up of those of the opposite persuasion.  I'm simply someone working within the context of Enlightenment thought who is having to impose a self-discipline far beyond everyday standards in order to keep in touch with the local civilization, as corrupt as it is.  And I strongly suspect that ethnicity has a lot to do with this.

During the recent cold spell (wind chills of -10 F at times, apparently), I made it a point to spend a good portion of the evening at the quay by the frozen river, where the temperatures and wind are significantly more difficult than the inland areas.  If one is going for it, as Gurdjieff says at one point, it is best to go all in, including the postage.   And then a few hours of sleep -- I've learned that the body will wake itself when the cold gets too extreme, so I followed its promptings.  This might not be the case for everyone, but it seems to work for me, and it is consistent with my general approach to difficult times.  When this level of adversity first characterized my life, several years ago, I sometimes made a point of taking a quick daytime nap on the rocks in the park in a manner that required balance, even when sleeping.  (Where the risk was bruising, not breakage.)  When the soul is challenged to preserve itself in such circumstances, it learns to preserve itself in such circumstances.

But, as noted, they have me in a bit of a corner here.  I'm trying to keep up the production of text, but these are the years of the floreat, and I'm using all of my energy just to survive.

And yet...  Hic Rhodus, hic salta... 

Last time I had to slog through a winter in this manner, Solzhenitsyn was my vade mecum.  This winter, Platonov.  In addition to the real reading.  And an interesting old Hungarian novel just popped into my feed --  Sunflower.  Travelling through southern Europe, I sometimes passed entire browned and dry fields of the crop, immense heads all bowed to the same direction, like a terra cotta army waiting resolutely for the world to come.  Interesting -- a modern Ukranian curse from the war zone: "Put sunflower seeds in your pocket."  [So that when you fall, they will flower.]

 Johnny Appleseed was a Swedeborgian, as was the father of William and Henry James, who had a surprisingly strong influence on the "Metaphysical Club" crowd.  The charismatic Irish merchant from the bottom of the hill among the Brahmins, but he had his faith, and he had it true.  Casting the seed upon the earth.

There is a tension in the notion of having a seed; if it sprouts in the wrong time or place, the vegetative life that it finds simply becomes the mechanism of its own destruction.   But a seed preserved in the cold, starry-silent, can await the time of its floreat from the safety of the firmness of its being.

 

 

 

 

 At the NY Phil again, eavesdropping via lobby Jumbotron. The Beethoven violin concerto, with a conductor from Pittsburgh, so the ghosts of Hegel and Goethe hover.  It's odd to think the two of them were hearing these pieces in the Germany still struggling to be born, a few years after the American Revolution, and with revolutionary France dangerously near.  

In Mozart, the concerto is a contest of virtuosity; in Beethoven, the concerto is a political argument.  It is the one and the many, and both have several ideas.  Much of the philosophy coming out of Germany after Kant had to do with the political moment, translating the personal self-assertion of Fichte, et al. to an embryonic German national sensibility.  Even Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right ('right' confusingly and revealingly meaning 'law' in many languages) and Phenomenology, rather than answering the arguments of Kant and anticipating those of his epigones, is fashioning a revolutionary mind: one's status is given by the other citizens; one only reaches the point of self creation when willing to die for a cause.  Peculiarly, Rorty classifies Hegel as a Romantic, but there is no nostalgia for historicism with him.  Essentially, the thought of the time divides between enlightened absolutism and romantic counter-reaction, before that conflict is consciously minimized in an effort to reach a national classicism.

So listening to a Beethoven, these thinkers are divided.  Perhaps they hear in the self-assertion of the concerto both the boldness of revolutionary France and the courtly touches of historic Habsburg Austria.   Especially in unsettled times, there is no such thing as an unalloyed good.  It is night, and everything is grey -- and yet there are somehow no entirely black or white threads in the composition.  (Hegel/Quine)

The soloist tonight is a winsome young Spanish woman -- she plays her 18th c. instrument with a gossamer ease.  But there is no Fichte, no consciousness of a soul arising against everything that is not herself.  She hope to please, in the way that musicians often do.  But this music requires something else underneath.  

Brecht: "In dark times will there be song?  / Yes, there will be songs about the dark times."

For art to be of the time, it must arise from some part of the time, from one of the many contending elements, as opposed to a general historical notion of the time.  The latter leads to the Broadway musical version of the revolutions of 1848.  Puffed shirts and revolutionary-seeming folks.  But Hegel, finishing his Phenomenologie  at Jena during the battle with the Napoleonic forces was not of a unified historical sensibility, but deeply conflicted about what should be done, and what should be thought right.  Somewhere deep in the massed armies of the Emperor, the spirit of Rousseau carried his humble bag, and the army of scientific discovery would range as far as Egypt in its campaign against the old monarchies of Europe.  And yet.  The pure, scientific answers of Enlightenment were often dispensed by authoritarian central governments.  German lawyers would shorty seethe at the imposition of a uniform civil legal code on a system rich in history and tradition, and these traditions seemed to preserve essential liberties rather well.

The soloist in the violin concerto is into her cadenzas now, in a manner that seems evocative of a Roma player who knows she has the rapt attention of all the men in the room.  But the defiance of self-assertion against the many is missing.  Beauty can be of service, yes, but beauty that never takes the step out of the chorus simply joins in the fearful desire to please that characterized the time.  I can't recall who it was, but I was reading some criticism on Hollywood, from an old director, I think, who pointed out that everybody does the same thing there very earnestly, and this was his point, that it came from fear.  They had to please the right people, and this was the indicated way of doing that.  The revolution will not be in a studio picture.

Now a long pause for late seating, after an abortive moment of applause between the movements.  After a quick smile and shared word with the conductor, who seemed to be cultivating a Goethean placidity, the soloist closes her eyes and vanishes into herself.  The orchestra with trepidation, almost apologetically states a theme, and then we are back to the thin, unprotesting strains of the violin, not speaking to the ensemble, or even ornamenting its lines, but voicing a line of tone that strains to be more delicate than thought itself.  The beautiful soul.  

Of course, for Hegel, the beautiful soul is not a figure to be commended.  Apart from the conflicts of the time, it strains to preserve its purity, oblivious to the fact that it is a creation of these rough temporal conflicts, and will only have a meaningful existence within them.  This idea, of course, would provide a foothold for the historical empiricists, the Left Hegelians, streaming bleary-eyed out of Kojeve's Paris lectures, unaware that the fellow who had just been pontificating on the nature of the master/servant dialectic was presently a ledger line in the payroll books of the Russian secret services.  

And now the soloist takes the principal theme from the first movement and plays it freely, but in the manner of a mystic saint humming a tune as she leaves the room, and when the orchestra follows it with a crashing rendition of the same, it is as if someone left the television on in the room the saint had just left.

The Shakers were famous for their song, but in the oral histories, some of them ruefully note that the melodies that they had taken to be divinely inspired often contained fragments and motifs of the popular music of the time.  Perhaps both the utopian communities and the sheet music publishers sensed the same melodies percolating on the sphere.  Or perhaps the minds of those who had sought to escape from the temporal conflicts of the world, when they lay on their wood-frame beds, with the cold, dewey night air coming in through the cracked-open window, perhaps these minds were somehow till in motion from the songs of secular life.  And the songs that dame to them were the songs they had always known, rephrased.  The question then becomes whether there is something underneath these deepest memories of the world, or if the mind itself is a construction of these materials. If the latter, it would probably be best not to fly from the world; if the former, the utopians would seem to have the better argument.

But the predicate, the ground for this choice, that thing that must be done before it becomes relevant, is the self-asserion, the Fichtean claim to exist against the world, the boldness to announce at breakfast that you have received a song from an angel in the night.  After this claim, the question of whether such things are possible or right domes into focus.  Absent this claim, we never stand with the world or against it, but have only closed our eyes, trying to hold onto the dying fall of the note against the disturbance in the auditorium.

And now to the suite from Strauss's Electra -- the source play is very different from the clear, Greek world of the Orestia.  There is no better world to be made by the courageous act.  This is a mirror to the modern soul -- the heroine, after realizing the need vengeance and lamenting her dead father, will cajole the others to the act, and then collapse in a furious dance.  

This condensation is a creature of tonight's conductor, and he is leading them through it with enthusiasm.  Beyond the question of the work's legacy, there are the royalties, I suppose.  Rarely does a classical artist have a vested interest in this manner, though I suppose it was common when Beethoven was beating out the time with the stave.  Or perhaps only their publishers cared about such things.  The syndics.

Adoro hated this sound and noise of Strauss, thinking it kept music from its own development.  But, as some musicologists have pointed pout, his assumes that music tends ineluctably towards those sorts of things that we call new music.  Perhaps the future of music, that which it is tending towards, is a deeper involvement in its own drama, rather than retiring from the world to seek its own perfection.

And now the orchestra is launched into a full-throated repetition of main theme, the slightly flushed and sweating profile of the Goethen conductor shaking in time with the beats, as the fury of his arms' gestures shakes his whole frame.  And then a moment of dramatic stillness between the chords, and he raises a finger to his lips to indicate the silence.  And the denouement impends. 

 

 

 

 Not exaggerating the AM difficulty, which comes precisely at the point of writing the mediation.  I make it through the workout, Mass, and quick breakfast, and when I sit down in the library, everything sort of empties out.  The frame grows numb, the mind goes blank.  It is as if the body is under the impression that it is asleep in a bed.  And, for all the work that can be done, it might as well be.

 For some reason, Skopje has been coming to mind this morning.  But the location is almost beside the point -- all of these cities would be worthwhile.  The point is that a basic sufficiency somehow needs to be acquired -- and quickly.  Jetting off to the Balkans would merely be the logical way of accomplishing this.

 ~ "Watch for the shadows that don't move when the light changes."    (Le Carre)

 

A brilliant double entendre, one meaning practical, another metaphysical. As formerly a devoted reader of Cornwell, and with a vivid imagination to boot, I've been aware that recent spectacular misfortunes, combined with journeys far and wide might have seemed as if I were just dangling out there.  And I need to be very clear about this, if only for whatever AI of an inquisitive foreign sovereign might stumble across it, that I am utterly apolitical, and not part of some nefarious scheme.  I would sweep the streets in an honest country, if it meant I could then use the remaining eight hours to create, think, and write.  But I have no real political value or interest in other systems of government, nor would I ever act against my own.  If I were ever to emigrate, I'd have very little to say, and frankly would just focus on the same things that I always have. 

It was interesting, though, to be a young, male military-age American wandering through some of these places.  Sometimes, like my first Belgrade apartment (the trip before last) and my first spot in Sarajevo (first border crossing in the last trip) the local host is peculiarly well-connected with the Powers that Be, and the apartment is priced amazingly well.  (Though I'm fairly sure the first Belgrade one was a legitimate side hustle.) Perhaps the occasional hovering drones and such in Serbia were innocent prods to the imagination, and keeping tabs on the solo American would have been  understandable anyway, given the politics.  Hopefully, if they took a view, they took me for a friend.  Montenegro, although very much in the same sphere of influence, appeared to be primarily concerned with the visitor tax, and otherwise quite Montenegrin about things.  Some miscellaneous provocations at the entity crossing point from Bosnia, but nothing that a guard might not otherwise do capriciously on a boring afternoon.  

Romania has a complex political situation, although they're very close to my country, and the folks in my country who deal with such things -- which is both good and difficult, frankly.  During one visit, the President overstayed his mandate due to some electoral controversy, and the leader of the opposition made an appointment at the palace (yes) and then sat at a table opposite him, in front of the assembled media, and told him he must immediately stand down.  Knowing nothing about the parties or the persons, just as a simple action, that gave me a lot of hope for the democracy there.  Of course, he stayed in afterwards, and then apparently started to get frozen out of European contacts, per a piece in the foreign press.  International relations can sometimes provide a useful check on domestic politics.  And there were the odd things that I noticed out of the corner of my eye -- after a sales clerk at the mall left a security tag on one pair of pants, setting off the beeper, for the rest of the visit,  without exception, the security guard at the small grocery across from my apartment vanished for a smoke break whenever I appeared at the automatic till.  And perhaps the photos of my taking out the recycling in some of these cities (quite a walk in Sarajevo and some sectors of Bucharest) are being held as komprimat for presumptive loitering in someone's hard drive.

I never turned mendicant, of course, but I did try to give alms to folks who were asking (Americans, on occasion).  I did have a firm rule never to give on the property of a cafe or restaurant, though -- and that did make me seem a bit ungracious a few times in Bosnia.

Perhaps these things from the corner of the eye were imagination, but the Balkans is a peculiar place, and I'd rather have the antennae up and risk the false signal than plow through like the usual hapless tourist.  Knowing that a danger might be there, if you can maintain your equanimity, is always the better option.

 

 And then, I somehow fell asleep at the table during the tourist hour, and I've lost two hours.

I must get to Belgrade, or to Sarajevo, or somewhere comparable.  Cluj, perhaps.  The gulag nights are starting to reach into the hours in which I justify my existence by doing a bit of real work.  Panem quotidianum.  

But I will need a more certain revenue stream.  ~ "It is now clear to me that I need to earn some money every day."  (C.S. Peirce)

Fairly certain now that there is nothing for me here.  Reading C.S. Peirce, I see his excoriations of the "greed mind" (which don't seem to be discussed in the secondary scholarship), and I see how he ended.   

This might not be an age in which an American outside the charmed circle has a homeland. This is the time of craven wealth.  The brightly arrayed town merchant at the commercial theatre, as opposed to the court theatre of years past -- demonstrating his virtue by the trappings of success.  The greed mind ascendant, even in common experience.

An American Navalny, perhaps.  But principally, simply myself, someone who has been through some interesting things, and is presently attempting to do real work, both now and in the days to come. 

 One of several reasons that I'm rather anxious for this episode of experience to finish:  the invisible clouds of marihuana smoke on the sidewalk.  A complete failure of the politics of the last generation.  Quintessential Dalek pig-slave move.

"Dope the ghetto" -- and anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby.

 A very unproductive day so far, though the required tasks have been accomplished.  Peculiar influx of trireme work at the moment I was to return to the books.  Also, surrounded in several different places by extremely unhelpful and peculiar people doing odd things.  Perhaps some sort of collective malicious madness after the storm.

Thoughts of fleeing to Bosnia grow stronger and stronger. (Commixed with memories of Romania, but I'm not sure if there's much for me there.)

 

Times obit for Tina Packer.  Eternal rest grant her.  Immediately after the MFA in acting, I jobbed into S & Co. as an electrician for one production to infiltrate & investigate.  It was a piece by Shaw starring Raquel Welch, being staged in the Stables, which were actually Wharton's old horse stables, so they needed to upgrade things a bit.  (TP directed.)  Extraordinary company.  

I remember, during one invited dress (I think), a dimmer rack went out, or at any rate some of the lights that were supposed to be on didn't come on.  T was sitting right in front of me at the back of the house, and turned with an inquiring look.  I was running a fix as quickly as I could, and muttered "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods..."  I didn't look up to see if the matriarch of American verse theatre was amused.

I remember driving to a nearby town for the cheeseburger grinders on lunch break (not yet vegetarian, shortly after).  And wandering the complex, sitting in Wharton's paneled library, looking out over the lawn.  For some reason, immediately after thinking of sitting in Wharton's library (surely Henry James often did the same), Belgrade came to mind.  Perhaps the closest I've been able to come recently to that level of civilization.

Interesting, her husband, with whom I trained at a weekend intensive training program some years later, was formerly an SJ priest.  I still remember working though "Out, out, brief candle" with him.  Also RIP, some years ago. 

 

 Off the usual clock due to laundromat visit after Mass.  Slowly letting the day fall back into track.

An interesting evening.  Significantly colder than the one before, but the absence of precipitation somehow made it a bit more pleasant.  For graces received.

Walked through Central Park late in the evening, accompanied briefly by what appeared to be a young female coyote, trotting alongside.  To say that it seemed friendly would likely be projecting a few elements of human consciousness to it; better to say that its focused attention, which in other contexts might have had other purposes, was congenial.

Then walked down to the river, which along the length of the island is technically an estuary.  I remember several years of cycling the river path, either because I had an apartment in upper Manhattan, or I was on my way to the Shakespeare festival rehearsals or performances.  I always noted the direction of flow, and perhaps it's my imagination, but the performances seemed to have a different aspect when the ocean water was flowing upriver (which it does quite strongly at times), as opposed to the usual course of the Hudson.  I walked out onto one of the piers, enjoying the absolute stillness and silence, but then I heard a whispering sound, and realized that the ice in the almost-frozen parts of the river were slowly drifting upstream, with the incoming tide.

 Then, walked back down through the UWS. I was trying to remember a Swedish hymn certain hymn sung in Swedish; I had roughly the changes in the first few bars, and I kept going over them in my head, with the melody slowly returning more and more in the finer points underneath the broad changes.  Then, suddenly, I had the whole tune in my head.  I looked to the side, and realized that I was walking past a building in which I used to live, an old, legendary, landmarked building.   "More things in heaven and earth," I suppose.

 Hm, they've closed the libraries.  This is an immensely prosperous city, but it doesn't work all that well.

 In candor, that was a rather difficult evening.

--- 

Dawn chorus in the blizzard: 

What came to mind when the coffeehouse opened, and I took my first sips of a bit of civilization was that the Allman Brothers regularly played the theatre down the block.  So perhaps I trust more in rock, and in the things of the South, than my usual classical listening habits and northerly addresses might indicate.  What's bred in the bone.

Quiet inviatory and lauds in the light snowfall and heavy wind outside the progressive congregation's church beforehand.  Still averse to complicity.  The best among their parishioners are looking to the sacraments in the same way that I do, and I wouldn't want to betray them by signing on to the articles.   The best thing you could ever tell a priest, especially when you see the splinters in his eye most clearly: preserve the sacraments.  The reactionary chapter at the cathedral provokes the opposite reaction, so I'm back to between the worlds, I suppose.

 It would, of course, be better to have a few more of the things of civilization, but I haven't gratuitously sacrificed any of my economic strength, as it were.  Like Luther, I couldn't do otherwise in those situations, so I calmly took up my ruck and walked into the cold.  In the Balkans, I looked with envy at their abundant housing stocks, imagining walls filled with shelves of paperback Hegel, but I was also realistic enough to realize that the shelves of the folks who lived there (understandably, for historical reasons) were likely bare of philosophy.  Even, and perhaps especially, the scholars -- and this was borne out when I rented apartments from scholars, though perhaps they had taken them with them.

But this also means: as I have been purified, the things that I have need to be purified.  If I do manage to secure some station, in the yin--yang for the years in which I knew adversity, in that it is connected to me, it must be as focused.  Lockean theory of property, ironically.  When I've had interludes of sufficiency, it has almost always been the Wittgenstein setup of camp bed and table.   A child of the wars. In fairness, it was also said that he had no books on the shelves, but I have it on good authority that he had a stash in the closet, hurriedly hid before tutorials.  A puritan, as opposed to a mystifier, should be candid about his sources.  Apparently he had quite the cult at Cantab., many of them Catholic.  And, like Cromwell, he never visited Oxford during the war, I think.

My books are waiting for me at the research library, the gym is waiting as well with some weights for a solid workout (I realized when I was in the Pirin mountains that the present trials would require physical strength, so I started lifting then, after a few years of just running before dawn.)  

It is a bit like optics -- I'm focused on a certain thing, but if the mechanism gets hit too hard, it's as if that thing never existed.  When my understanding vanishes, my cause vanishes.   And without the external validation that politics and corruption have blocked, I have only my understanding against the claim that I have no cause.  And reason is the demonstration of understanding.  (Hegel/Wolff) 

Lot, I suspect, kept his faith due to his belief that God transcended circumstance.  This much is anodyne and uncontroversial.  But parse that term of transcendence.  The intuitive hearing might be that God is a sort of aqua regia, dissolving all else, but that's not the case or the claim.  In holiness, the world isn't dissolved.  The claim is that (not quite in a pantheistic sense) God is within things as they are, and above things as they are.  So we need idealism: we're always inside our own head, as it were, without any penetration of the world as the world to calibrate the mechanism.  To say that God is transcendent means that all differentiation in things and all differentiation within myself does not divide his existence.  My notions are subordinated to his presence, as the day is subordinated to the sunlight.  And it would be illogical to blame the sun for the evils under the sun, even though the evils under the sun are the substance of our understanding.

Much of it does come down to physical strength and a willingness to press on, which is why I abruptly started lifting weights in the mountains, knowing the nature of the times to come.  Pressing on amid the evils, and against the principal evil: the claim that there is nothing above the substance of the world. 

 

Interesting, much of midtown unplowed for hours.  Apparently 8 inches, but from the closures and the conditions of the streets you'd think twice that.  Many pedestrians, very few cars.

Day effectively a loss.  Moderate snowfall in the city, but the televisions worked everyone into a frenzy, so everything closed.

AM workout, pontifical, a few hours reading surprisingly few pages of Card. Newman by a side chapel, decamped to a nearby mall to have lunch at a proper table.

Will wander, but with the libraries shut, and few places in the city open to sit or stand and read, a lost day.

Bit of a chill in the air last night, and apparently more of that to come. 

"If you have to cross the river, it doesn't matter if the water is warm or cold." (Teillhard du Chardin)

Sufficient is the day.

 There are many sub-human persons in this city.  Behaviours that considered in themselves, apart from the physical form, would characterize them as another animal entirely.

Elements of the claim that my present situation is equivalent to the gulags in another country a century ago:

- But/for causation of religious and political opinions, even privately held.  Proximate causation of criticizing corruption of those in power.

- Physical correlative of difficulty of day-to-day life.

- Equivalence of formal state action and the reasonably foreseeable effects of the acts of state actors.

- Pragmatic equivalence of having no means of changing the situation other than seeking political favor, i.e., one can't just 'get a job,'  one has to have sufficient connections.

- Academic and professional credentials held to be useless (occasionally, explicit statements to that effect).

- General knowledge in the society that such situations affect some percentage of the population, and explicit or de facto acceptance of the practice. 

 

Don't expect that the vague notions about how things are with the culture and the world that one gets in the course of normal life will ultimately prove veridical, or even useful, in ultimate questions.  That's not what those ideas are there for.  They are the pocket bakshish for incidental purchases during the day.  In matters involving the judgment of others, things are different -- if someone seems a justified outcast or a wrongdoer by those ideas alone, it might be wise not to wager too much on the question.

Lauds foiled by operating temperature range of the Kindle.  Not at all complaining--it's a hardy little beast, and has served me very well.  Had it shipped into Montenegro, as the tariffs were favorable there.  Quite possibly the wisest purchase in many years, including food when hungry.  Considered saving $25 by hitting the Bosnian used electronics websites, but that seemed ill-advised. 

 "No outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of different men's hearts."

(William James)

The urge to get back to nomading and culture study in the Balkans is half the animal remembering where last it could find the things necessary for survival, and half the hunter or military tactician reasoning where the means of survival and useful things are to be found.  The degree to which I fight to do precisely that will likely be determined by asking which of the two predominates -- it must the the latter.  

The Derzu Rule.  #kirosawa 

There is a great Man living in this country — a composer.
He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn.
He responds to negligence by contempt.
He is not forced to accept praise or blame.
His name is Ives. 

(Schoenberg)

John Dewey's system of formal logic is one of the more peculiar animals in the philosophical menagerie.  Less a description of the thoughts that it might be possible to have about a given thing, it is more a guide for the perplexed -- in order to help them be more efficiently perplexed -- sort of talking them through the process of thinking about something.  (With the implicit contention that this is what the other fellows were doing as well, at root.)  Santayana's response was quite simple: Is a naturalistic metaphysics a contradiction in terms?

Music, like metaphysics, is associated with a tradition that runs from grand style to primitive (or perhaps primordial) and austere.  Like mathematics, its basic building blocks are sometimes regarded as divine, or at least ideal.  And the result is inevitably made subject to social scrutiny and deontic force.

Discarding the received seriousness of the art can come across as flippant, or popularizing, but (especially at the beginning of the last century and shortly before) it can also be an attempt to cut to the quick of the question, to avoid being caught up in the senseless repetition of the past.  Grandchildren of Emerson and his ilk, those New Englanders who took the idealism from German idealism and used it to free themselves from the iron nominalist fears and laws of British philosophy and American religion, these puritans (in the best sense of the word -- cf., again Santayana) strode fearlessly into the performance halls and lecture theatres of the old forms, and attempted to make things not practical, but pragmatic.  (The distinction, as C.S. Peirce said, is that the first is essentially meaningless to deeper inquiry, and the second serves some existing human purpose.  Henry James essentially said that it helped to translate the question into more immediate terms.)  The emphasis was on the actual.

So now, after many many years, we have these works in the artistic repertory and these books on the shelves that seem almost childlike in their simplicity, bookended on either side by artists and thinkers who returned to the older forms as a more true choice, together with the iconoclasts who were breaking everything in sight both before and afterwards.  

Eavesdropping on this week's concerts at the NY Phil via the lobby Jumbotron, after a day of studying James and Peirce, I encounter Ives.  (Whom I also encountered several years ago at the outdoor festival on the plaza outside, with marching bands criss-crossing the complex, but that was a long time ago -- even the stone in the plaza was different, almost all travertine marble, since replaced by patterned asphalt.  

The piece was the second set of orchestral pieces, closing with a sound-painting of an NYC El station on the day that the news came in that the Lusitania, sailing out of New York, had been sunk off the coast of Ireland.  The gentle cacophony of the first movement had the whiff of iconoclasm to it, but in a pragmatic sense, this seeming chaos was in service of an existing human purpose, and notion of beauty.  As Schoenberg said to Adorno, when being told that his twelve-tone system was quite popular in some classical music circles: "Yes, but do they use it to compose with?"  Just as Dewey was attempting to serve the purposes of formal logic itself with his naturalistic metaphysics, the attempt to compose in freedom is distinct from the effort to bring freedom to composition.  The moment of the spontaneous hymn at the end was an austere tension, made all the more heartfelt for having observed none of the usual proprieties.  Just around the corner, at the fire station behind the theatre, there was a similar moment after 9/11, when the crowd at a scripted vigil (perhaps at the prompting of the present writer) broke into an unscripted verse or two of "Amazing Grace".  While the Phil responded admirably to those events -- I remember watching from the back of the balcony as Masur strode onto the stage and to the podium and struck up the National Anthem.  And then there was the Transmigration, of course.

Classical music venues and ensembles seem to feel an obligation to present a canon composed of all times, not allowing the art of any one time to inflect the common project too substantially.  And so, arrayed on the shelf, the notion in these late 19th c. and early 20th c. works that it might be possible to escape from the past seems confounded, and the (perhaps more critical) desire to escape from the future is defeated before it even arose.  But each work still makes a proposition on the evenings on which it is performed.  Each book still makes a proposition in the hours in which you are alone with it.  This evening belongs to that hope.  And some hopes are stronger than others.  The work fills the evening, even still.

And now, into Rautavaara's First Piano Concerto, with a soloist striding brashly onto the stage in the thinnest and shortest of 'flapper' dresses.  One of the listeners in the lobby, perhaps from the adjoining housing projects, utters a loud cry and rushes off to the WC.

The composer: "I was disappointed at that time with the strict academic structuring of serialist music and the ascetic mainstream style of piano music, which I found anaemic. In the concerto, therefore, I returned to the aesthetics of expressiveness and a sonorous, “grand-style” keyboard technique."  

The tradition indicates that a modern, or postmodern work should take a certain style in order to accomplish its purposes, but something in the composer rises up against that historically informed form, feeling that it doesn't do the work of composition.  Perhaps we can think of the work of composition as being a habit of the composer, originating in his or her conceptual purposes, but becoming a way of living life, of having his or her existence, a way of knowing what it is to be themselves when they are most themselves.  This, then is what gives the rule to the experimentation with styles, and distinguishes practical work from pragmatic work.

This habit of work, then, whether in composing philosophy or writing music, imparts a certain naturalism to the work.  It's the sort of thing a reasonable person might write or compose.  And this is what provoked Santayana's reaction to Dewey's informal formal logic, querying the notion of a naturalistic metaphysics, with the implication that metaphysics is not merely characterized by its historic forms, but constituted by them.  And the same might be said for music.  Perhaps the important thing is not that the work seems naturalistic, but that the one who made it was so present and alive to the possibility of the work that the work retained so many traces of his will.  

Some analytic philosophers distinguish object naturalism from subject naturalism; one of these schools thinks the things in the world to be the sort of things one finds in nature, and the other (subject naturalism) says that we're looking at the things in the world in the manner that a human being in our position might be thought to.  Similarly, there is in some aesthetic criticism, the notion of process naturalism, which, assuming I have the concept, is the subject naturalism of the creator of a work of art. 

But all of these labels are applied to existing works, written or performed, in the repertory, characterizing the form of the work.  And this, perhaps is what a healthy Deweyan naturalism should cause us to query.  The work's first existence is music, or philosophy, or what you will.  And, when things are going well,  we're not exactly sure what any of these things might be, and when things are going very well, the present object of our attention seems to trace out a fullness that teaches us what music, or philosophy, or the other things are.  As opposed to being constituted by their historic forms.  

And now, the conductor, a composer of some note, launches the ensemble into one of his own works, a prophecy composed for the NY Phil on the occasion of the turn of the millennium.  In short order (it's a short piece), we're in a cacophony worthy of Ives, but just like the joyful noises earlier in the evening, this is in the service of a vision of the time, and therefore pragmatic, not practical, and actually a more conservative view of composition than found with the iconoclasts, since we say that there are purposes to music and ways of carrying these intentions out in the music.  

Which is not to say that the Ives and this work are working from the same playbook.  This piece isn't about overheard music, but a heartfelt, entirely ingenuous warning about the inherent dangers of time, perhaps.  We are less distant from the object than we are with the Ives, and comfortably in the rich acoustics of the concert hall, not wandering through the New England forests. 

By freeing itself from the historical forms, music can perhaps contemplate the nature of the time (or a moment in time twenty-five years ago), and then stand affixed in the repertory, between the timelessness of the past gods of the classical repertory and those to come, the work of a human (so much so that this seems to be its defining characteristic).  Perhaps it is attempting to accomplish the historic work of the art form without being bound by its historic forms.  It purports to be a living and intelligent effort; but take it for what you will.

 

 

This morning, the footpaths and roads in the Pirin mountains did not lead to long, misty curves looking out over the towns below.  There were no tall women walking down Kralja Aleksandra street with their morning coffee.  The ducks and the crows were not to be found sharing the water uneasily alongside Vilsono Sedaliste  The exotic birdcalls known for centuries to Antivari between the mountains and the sea were not heard.  The great dictator's fountains in Piata Unirii were silent and still, and not a light was on in the immense Palace of the People.  The old Jesuit church on the Piata Mare was bolted shut, and the medieval murals in the old Hungarian stone church by the Roman ruins were hidden in shadow.  The old men did not fill the tables in the park with domino games under the evergreen trees, and talking the subway out from the city centre revealed only long stretches of grey buildings, no grassy parks with the incandescent lobby lights of the small theatres glittering like jewels in the field.  The bridges were lined with faceless statues of an indiscernible provenance. The long stone quay stretching from the house of Parliament and the great Basilica to the flashing lights on the stone walls of the theatres was empty and cold.  The football ultras graffiti had vanished from the buildings, and the torrential, rushing river that divided the divided city seemed sluggish and still.  

And, then, as if in silent agreement with a choice not their own, the great silver crosses towering severally over the many tokens of city and mountain seemed to vanish as one into the greyness of the sky.

This morning, the footpaths and roads in the Pirin mountains did not lead to long, misty curves looking out over the towns below.

Instead, it was morning in the city of the power of darkness, and the silence was general.

Okay, writing these morning meditations and tuning into the (time-shifted) academic chapel Mass liturgy of the word are proving immensely difficult.  Honestly the most difficult parts of a day that is otherwise remarkably challenging.  As if fighting through walls of sleep and the inability to think.

And yet, in the nomading daily routine, they were the highlight, the propulsion for the day.  

So there's some odd spiritual, emotional, and physical/psychological stuff going on, and some might say that I should streamline things, but I'm going to cling to the practice.  The time of trial is not time to abandon the things that bring strength.

I do have to find a way to get back to at least the nomading level of existence.  This scratch existence in the city might not be a path that leads to the end of the path.   Though I'm diligently using it to gain what I can gain -- research libraries, etc. 

Onward.   Bit chilly last night, but a few days of comparative warmth on tap.

 

 Hm.   Okay, by working very slowly and frittering away a bit of time in the morning, I'm able to avoid whatever it was that incapacitated me when I sat down to work in the library.  Now to tighten things back up while retaining the desideratum.  

 Feast of St. Sebastian -- unofficial patron of all those who left home to find their fortune in the big city.  Massive relic in the Guleph treasury in Cleveland, visited it often.

 

Bit of a chilly evening.  Libraries back open -- in retrospect, attempting to carefully parse Brentano with the loud muzak, dim lighting and the scents and sounds of the Runyonesque characters in the public access space yesterday was a fool's errand.

Legit books in front of me, and waiting to dive back in.  I've discovered that multitasking with random morning things (email, newspaper) helps to keep me from being zapped into unconsciousness by whatever force is sapping the life-force hereabouts. Especially when I sit down to write. 

Yesterday's posting a bit cri de couer, but that particular organ had a few necessary things to express.

This morning, my spirit spoke one word: Pirin.

Had a very unheimlich experience reading Pynchon in the mountains of Bulgaria a few months back.  Against the Day, which I had plowed through a few times, but all before the most recent trip.  And then, reading it at the off-season ski resort, I realized that it was playing out across the same cities that I had been travelling through (the main plot, the Cyprian story, in the run-up to w.w. 1).   Very uncanny, as I had the identification with the characters from before, and here they were showing up on the same roads and bridges.  And then, when I read his latest (considerably shorter), I finished it just as the narrow-gauge rail reached the terminal late at night on 11/11.  (Entirely coincidentally, the last time I rode that line, it was St. Andrew's Eve, and I was reading The Five Jars.)

Onward, somehow, and with vim and glory. 

 I've said it before -- Bellowhead is yob music, but it's the sort of yob music that makes you think it might be fun to be a yob for a bit.

#bellowhead #lauterpacht

 

Bit of a chill in the air, and the libraries closed, so decamped to one of the indoor public spaces filled with Runyonesque characters and specimens of barely discernible humanity (by any of the usual four senses).  When the libraries close, I always borrow a vade mecum in case the electronica goes out, so I'm not without text -- Brentano.  Very illuminating as to what launched Husserl, et al.

After a bit of a warming tomorrow, it looks like a long slog through a week of near zero Fahrenheit.  The betting book of the threadbare leprechauns pacing the ceiling gives me decent odds of survival if I batten down a bit and increase the caffeine.  Bring on the faciem frigorum.

I have been thinking uneasily about the big picture recently.  The three careers that seem to have been blocked by very corrupt folks, the notion of family essentially vanished in a cloud for which a venerable confidential government agency bears more than a bit of the blame.  There are reasons for my radical monastic detachment -- in short, I will achieve that, or I won't make it.  So, I will achieve that.

The plan is to somehow get enough work together to either return to the itinerant Balkan life of the last two years, or find an anodyne humble quarters in the upper Midwest.  In short, not grasping for the world-apparent brass ring on these shores anymore -- not going to LA to find work as an actor, or trying to find a stable place in this city to live and write.

A first tier law degree with many doctrinal courses and strong grades, more than a decade as a professional actor in NYC with a strong conservatory degree, and many years of academic work, both on a research doctorate and otherwise.  All for nil.  But to know that you have nil is to have something, so I will take this nil and make something out of it.   After focused work in a decent research library for the last couple of months, I have the basic groundwork for a very worthwhile monograph that I'm capable of writing.  And if people read it, it might help to explain a few things about our world.  

So -- survive the present cold, somehow find sufficient work, and get back to Bosnia, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Minnesota, North Dakota or Minnesota.

I have set my course, and found the corresponding bearing in the stars.  If I make it, this might prove worthwhile. 

                                                                                

Extraordinarily difficult to think this afternoon.  Bit of a chilly night, but a good workout, and Mass at the cathedral.  Arrived to the library, and it was as if my consciousness had to evolve from primeval slime to the possibility of rational thought.  Surrounded by people for whom, my guess is, penetrative thought is not really a desideratum.  They've learned to play the game, and they have their iphones.

I can't fathom people who go to the gym, library, cafeteria, etc. to be around others.  Everything reduced to a social encounter in which they attempt to attain an ascendancy.  And this happens at concerts and theatre performances as well, not to mention art galleries. Which  reveals the aspect lost: the thing itself.  

So.  Given that the first-tier law degree decade as a professional actor, and work on the research doctorate appear to be valued at nil, I apparently need to furnish my own internal or external exile.

External is preferred -- the present mindset of the citizens of my country is not useful for me.

I would need an inexpensive place in a large city, with access to English scholarly paperbacks (easily via websites in US & UK, but elsewhere, other arrangements).  And the basics: sufficient vegetarian protein, ability to run/exercise, large desk or table to work at, reasonably clean environment.

So that's the goal.  Making my own Siberia.  

Not simply preserving existence.  (Though that's nothing to be sniffing your nose at.) There is work being done, and there is work to be done.

If I become that which I'm thought or said to be, all is lost.  I am me.  Even still.  Ca suffit. 

Again at the NY Philharmonic, eavesdropping via the lobby jumbotron. 

First piece, a composer trained in China, currently in the US.  Some hints in the program on the theme and the intentions, but without the ear  to hear the choices, simply a decent, generic piece of music

This is one danger of travelling -- not understanding the nuances, why things are one way and not another, the "this, not that" of Brecht, you stop listening for nuance.  The schein, the first broad sense, becomes the both the center and the boundary of the experience.  

C.S. Peirce had the notion of the percept, that sensory intuition that you have no power over, no ability to judge or characterize.  Then came the perceptual judgment, the conceptual understanding, and the universe of meaning and inference.

Leibniz:I would rather have (an Indian) tell me what he heard, than a Cartesian tell me what he understood.. 

Now the Schumann piano concerto.  Written by a major critic in order to bring sophistication to a form cheapened by the emotional and effusive composers of Paris, and the showboating soloists.

The soloist here one of the international cadre, a soft and sensitive reading, appropriately conversational.  He sits close to the instrument, hunched over the keys, casually brushing a glissando as he might shuffle cards at a table.  

A challenge to the concerto form -- in Mozart, a competition of virtuosity, in Beethoven, a political argument, in Schumann, a treatise of shared authorship.  Peirce and the other Bostonians, particularly Dewey, had peculiar notions about truth, tending to find it in social agreement in these modern times.  (Justice Holmes, a frequent interlocutor of the Boston metaphysicians, held to stronger notions of personal truth.  It was that which he himself could not help but think to be true.)

Gierke traces out the history of the German notion of brudderschaft, against the background of natural law and the German corporate and university forms.  The notion is that the collective action is qualitatively different from the sum of the private acts.  It brings something fundamentally different into the world. 

But this would seem to work against the material nature of a concerto, the thing itself.  If the concerto's soloist is simply of one mind with the orchestra, you've just added an instrument to the orchestration of a symphony.  The basic reality of the concerto is someone standing alone with a notion of virtuosity, or right, or truth, and entering into a dialogue with the voice of the chorus behind him.  Drama itself emerges precisely with this individuation -- in Aeschylus, three figures step out of the universe of the chorus, and not only have a more full human existence from this self-definition, but also occasionally turn to speak to the universe that they have their existence from, and against. 

But something about modernity counsels against these private truths.  Intransigence.  The individual is told that these private impulses of truth are ignis fatui, evanescent, illusory.  And therefore that they must remain silent.

Which would be an excellent beginning for a concerto, if the soloist was of a different cast of mind. 

Now, the Tchaikovsky -- Little Russian.  And instead of sound, we begin with song, a solo horn playing a folk melody.  It's a bit odd to think that anything you watch over a lobby viewscreen monitor can inspire an authentic individuality, but the meaning of the experience, the choices the creators make, these are still available to you in the abstract, though you're not with them as they enact them.  Mechanical reproduction arguably makes the meaning, the moral choices more important, as we only have the ideas -- we are not in the room, participants in the ritual.

The second piece of the night from a composer steeped in the conservatory culture of the East.  Contrast the sedate and conversational German concerto.  There was a recent novel about the writers' conservatory in Moscow -- Elias Khoury, I think, Albanian.  Though the most memorable scenes were on the train that the protagonist used to escape from the city from time to time.

To make a symphony of songs would certainly put you on the wrong side of some 19th c. German intellectuals -- (pace Beethoven, late Mahler, and Second Vienna School generally), since you're shortchanging negative capability.  They would think you've missed the point of classical music, and miss the possibility that their certainty about this would undercut their own notions of collective truth.  In fairness, if you don't have the sensibility of the composer, and you just hear it as a schmaltzy schein, like the easy charms of Austrian operetta (Gypsy Queen, etc.), then yes, it's a cheap popular entertainment.  But the Kindertotenliedser isn't.  Song, in the symphonic context, indicates the presence of another soul.  (There is a neurological basis for this -- perceiving it as a relic of a human experience, we are drawn into imitation and the ritual.)

As opposed to the intellectual flights of fancy that come from sound, you are confronted with the stark evidence of the other human.  Friday's footprint in the sand.  This changes the equation completely -- and there's a moral choice involved.  The song, the evidence of the human with a moral center, a melody surviving centuries as part of the truth of individual souls, can either lead us to trite schmaltz, or a deeper consideration of the presence of another human soul.

Perhaps a consideration high on the list of truths to be imparted in the conservatories of the East a few generations ago. 

 

Very aware that using these incidental scrawlings to magic-carpet my way back to a reasonable existence (antebellum life) in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cluj, etc. is a bit like the arctic explorer sketching Tahiti, or perhaps a child who has fallen from the table making noises to cause the giant ones to restore him to the place of food and cheer. 

But, as I've suggested, if that is the basic posture of the mind, it serves as a marker for existence.

And it's occasionally the prelude to figuring out your own way back to the table. 

Interesting obit in the Times for the author of Chariots of the Gods.  Many hints about his life that seem to suggest that there's more in his story than made it into the telling.  Night manager of a Swiss hotel, financial speculation, jewel auctions, came a cropper on loan paperwork.  Bit like Le Carre always remarking ruefully that his father was just a small-time con man.  Skillful storytellers know how to lead their readers into a cul-de-sac. 

 Within general industrial prosperity, it's possible to say anything about anyone.  Which is to say, if a life is largely anodyne, there is a certain freedom of characterization, especially from those a ways off.  When life becomes unusual, e.g., extraordinarily difficult in an objective sense, the constraint on others' characterizations is the exception to this general freedom, and not all may be aware (especially those a ways off) that an exception is governing the usual stream of idle calumnies.

Gym (late opening on weekends), then laundry, so not to the books until shortly after noon.  

Gently down the stream.