Local jazz festival underway.  Wandered down to the mainstage, knowing very little about Bulgarian jazz.  Interesting band, interesting singers.  Perhaps just the act that I caught, but it seemed to be more about standards than the sort of experimental vibe that seems to be part of the tradition in Poland/Serbia (I happened to look through a recent history of Balkan jazz at the Lincoln Center library before I left, and I've found a few Balkan state jazz groups/esembles on Youtube, but that's about it.  Basically clueless.)  Very few solos, and the solos kept close to the melody.  Capapble sidemen.

The old-school standards/songbook vibe was interesting.  Balkan jazz works for the same reason that the Macbeth in Belgrade was so effective -- when the actual shadows in the culture are this intense, the art form expresses something almost primal.  The gentlemen of the syndicate.  And the music.

There's a Turkish-inflected jam going on at a restaurant within earshot as I write this -- that proximity has a lot to do with the culture here, I think.  Green over red.  Alongside the loyalty to the Orthodox to the east who helped them get free of the Sublime Porte and governance by distant purchased firman, there's also a certain sympathy of cultures, a certain cunning.  (cf. "What do you suppose he meant by that?")  

Southern Europe.  Borderlands.

Lengthy maintenance on the the ragtag-fleet computing machines this afternoon, to keep everything up to spec, and surviving long past service life.  Peculiar slew of scam financial emails this afternoon, likely unrelated.  Last time that happened, I had just booked an Airbnb in Budapest -- no recent transactions along those lines, though.  To take a line from Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of techology.

The difficulty with the mixture of corruption and exogenous forms of industrial prosperity is that there are so many more prizes to award.  And prize-winners are historically loath to sue in piedpowder.

Like John Rambo and the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, I take things day by day.  Rigor towards the simplicity, and rigorous simplicity.

Perhaps it's to do with the imbalance in relations vis a vis the UK and countries like France and Germany.  A way of running society on an island nation with two or three universities and a tenacious squirearchy is difficult to map up to the continental scale.  The forms of meritocracy must be more distinct.  Despite the fact that a tendentious earnestness is bound to result. (qed)

 Took some pride in my thick-weave cotton oxford shirt, jeans, found stick and leather hat amid all of the folks with fancy, or at least synthetic, mountaineering kit and togs.  Upholding the nobility of the amateur (amo, amas, amat...)  The fellow who simply sets out from his apartment with the simple intention of getting to the top of the hill louring over the city.  Apparently, the big hill is a rather big draw.  Counted three languages in passing hellos on the way up.

Of course, they were much better than me at most of it, but that's simply because I'm an inexperienced amateur.  Simply a question of getting to the hills more often.

 Absolutely brilliant and exhausting day wandering the nearby hills.  Above the treeline especially, very difficult.  In fairness, I've been at sea level for some time now.

Absolutely exhausted.  Long maundering through a circular bike trail trying to find the elusive trail head, which took me a good ways orthogonal to the range, and ended up just walking up the access road to the larger hills.  Blazes here are a bit spotty.  The assumption appears to be that everyone has GPS.  Much like the blank stares I get when asking at the cheap stores for compasses -- a few had some toy compasses which were quite an improvement on the traditional compass, as the latter has only one direction for north.  Really, any of the usual Chinese bulk-buying websites would be able to get them decent compasses for $4, which they could sell for $20.  (They're trying to diversify the tourist approach, but it's still fundamentally a ski town.)  But the hills are extraordinary.  Macedonian Pirin.  Mythic in the Balkan imagination from the time of Phillip and Alexander.  Gateway to the region.  

After a 4PM turn around rather high up -- well above the nearby ranges, and an excellent view of the glacial lakes and ranges in the distance, made it back to the road before dark, and then walked down, sometimes only turning on the flashlight when a car approached.

Luckily, there was a 24 hour grocery open (at 24 hour grocery prices), so I bought much milk, turned on the tape from last night's first night at the Wagner festival, and some potato paprikash is on the industrial-strength hotplate.  I found an enormous bag of it at the discount grocer for less than $2, and it has done me goodly service.  Budapest in a bag.  Then some Iris Murdoch until I drift off, and the mortal frame can begin its repair job.   

  

 Perhaps the idea itself, as a thing, is the reflection of God.

Another dawn lost to piecework well past midnight.  Slogging onward.

C. Miloscz, in one of his poems, talks about the fate of the poet, always taken for something other than he is, even after his death ~"no  sign arriving from the other world to correct the mistake."

Peculiar events yesterday.  I think I have the cultural context, and I'm aware that the locals who saw me disputing a receipt would have had little clue as to what I was disputing.  But 'here I stand, I can do no other.'  Be just in small things.  Otherwise, when the small things turn against you, you''ll have no way of stopping the momentum.  I'm not offended at all, by the way.  My only concern is that the local folks not come to harm.

In my own country, it seems to me at least that many of my struggles of the last decade or so come from being surrounded by unsophisticated people who thought I was an unsophisticated clod for not realizing how much was to be gained from playing another sort of game.  And if I was another sort of person, I might have believed them, and believed in them.  Many do.  There's a lot of bad stuff going on inside the prosperity.

My virtue, my discipline, my ways aren't as against the others.  They're some of the only things I have with which to defend my mind and spirit against the others. 

Onward. 

 

 But, all else aside, if a customer tells you three times that you gave them too much money in change, and appears to take the situation very seriously, it would be best to try to either understand the mistake or unwind the transaction.  To folks of a certain cast of mind (I don't claim it's a good one or fortunate to have), a troubling transaction is much more costly than a few days of groceries.  

I can understand the contrary view, and why it might be held, but in shopkeeping, if one side invokes the "make this transaction right" rule, particularly when it's not to their advantage, that does need to become the prime objective of the encounter. 

 Well, that was a peculiar and frustrating experience in balancing diplomacy and paying the right price for groceries to the multinational corporation.  Realized as I stepped away from the till that I had the wrong change in hand, but there was a logic to the error, so it took me a sec.  Scribbled some numbers in the pad that I thought would make it clear to the cashier, and attempted to subtly fix it, as I didn't want her to come to harm, but she affected (possibly quite genuinely) not to understand the error. Took it to the assistant manager at the back of the store twice, who might have been confused, or might have been trying to resolve the situation without undue trauma to local staffing, but both times shut down, and the Google translate screen at the end said "...It is okay for you to leave."

So, reader, I did.

Will have to figure out how to subtly return it to the local folks, despite my own wing-and-a-prayer budgets on this leg of the trip.  I once enriched the poor box at St. Pat's with a twenty when I was in a similar predicament stateside.  I don't want anyone local to come to harm, but even though it's less than $25, this runs too close to American Privilege for my comfort.

At any rate, have decided that it won't drive me mad, and now I'm going to focus my mind on the work for the rest of the evening.  Insh'allah, and pace the bakshish.

 Saturday night adventures in laptop cinema, cont'd: July Rain

I'm not sure what was forcing my mind so insistently in this direction, but the whole film seemed to be about the certainty of death -- the July rain being this brief, chaotic floreat of the flesh.  But comes the hour when the springtime rises and washes over the earth, and....  

So.  We 'keep the door open.'

Along those lines, the constant phone conversations with the fellow who lent her his allegedly waterproof jacket in the storm seemed a bit like contact with the divine, with he who provided us with this garment of flesh.  His own, no less. 

The new-wave/verismo still works, even after the lapse of the fashion -- one test of a true movement, perhaps.  It grounds the film in actual experience.   

The rain, then, is our flesh, our life, which is to say the things that we do.  But things in the city are constantly carrying the others out of reach and rushing us along -- which makes the night picnic among the white birch such a relief.  But the ski-jumper girlfriend who blended so easily into the background in the city parties is revealed in the light of the campfire as an unpleasant sort of person.   

Odd double meaning -- the pantograph, both a means of mechanical reproduction of art, and the point of connection between the tram and the wire.  Like the typewriter at the beginning, these machines seem to have life, but the real point is that they bear relation to life, and change our lives.

And then, at the end, she is empty-handed.  After the rain, walking among the veterans, which apparently was a bit of happenstance during the shoot, but it captured the sense of human relations after our midsummers, after the love and the war, we still have our humanity, though the storm has quieted, and might yet grow more quiet.

 If, on a mountain trail, you encounter a family of trees  that seems gnarled or misshapen, leaning in a certain direction, the easy logical conclusion is that some force of wind, weather or land has made them that way.  Similarly, and this is a bit less commonly thought to be the case, people, communities and even nations can take on a certain misshapen form, relative to some general mean of health and open disposition.  And yet, in these situations, we tend to take their disposition as not merely primitive, but itself an irreducible constituent primitive term of humanity.  

In truth, and this is where the idea reaches its furthest point from the usual path, people are shaped by the spiritual nature of a place. (Spirit isn't necessarily a glowing, magical thing, it's simply the changes that happen within time.  The material thing without a substance of its own, but describable.)  In the course of the long logic unfolding within their lives, across the many years, certain types of thoughts persistently occurred to them.  And just as the spirit is material but without substance, these thoughts were about everyday things, but the manner of their occurrence was of a certain character.  This is how to find the spiritual nature of a place -- examine the character of your own thoughts in that place.  And after many years of a certain characteristic pattern of thinking,emotional response and physical action came to shape the organism.  The trees along the path took on a certain shape. 

These are the sorts of conclusions one should come to after having encountered people of many different ethnicities and nations, not least because if you've only explored a few, each would take these sorts of thoughts as a personal criticism.  This is a universal phenomenon, and I'm sure that my own spiritual/arboreal shape, to a dispassionate observer from far away, would reveal some of the storms that I've weathered.  Ah well. Like Shelley (I think), I always made an awkward bough.

I don't have wants.  I set objectives that will help me to accomplish things.  The happiness is from the totality, not the particular circumstance, but it is good to make as many particular circumstances as transparent to that happiness from the totality as possible.

The different view is largely a creature of people trying to sell things.

But in working to achieve the objectives, it can seem that these objectives are desires.  A misleading appearance.  If you were to sop me on the street and somehow hypnotize me and demand of the most remote reaches of my subconscious what I really wanted at the present time, it would likely be on the order of a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee, or a decent used paperback book.  But that's because of the nature of desire.  I tend not to associate happiness with the object, or even the objective.  That can be dangerous in a prosperous society.

We have a rational mind, but it is up to us as to whether it will govern the beast, or a more Humean sensibility will govern the relationship.

TLS on the cult of Oxbridge donnishness:  "The only professors without private incomes who have ever lived a genteel life are those who were once resident fellows of rich colleges." 

Much truth to that, even at the far end of the scale.  I still remember the summer in summerstock at one of the Seven Sisters.  Long afternoons reading in the parlor.  And jobbing in as a technician (just after receiving a top conservatory masters in performance) at a theatre based in Edith Wharton's old estate, where I lingered in the library when not figuring out the electric wiring in the horse stables (where Raquel Welch was shortly to do some Bernard Shaw). 

The piece closes with a quote from a Wittgenstein disciple.  Cantab ascendnt, now that they hold no. 10.  Rumor has it that some of the mannerisms in the Philosophers sketch in Beyond the Fringe have their roots in common-room impressions of W.

The notion of a distant Christminster (or two) is useful.  In addition to Hardy, I've plowed through C.P. Snow and Iris Murdoch, and still return to them as a sort of ongoing mental frame.  But as useful as the distant fiction might be, one hopes that the thing itself doesn't do too much damage.

Brilliant.  Pellucid,  forceful.  And at times just as fast as the Proms version a few nights ago.

Some of Beethoven's contemporaries called him the musical Kant, because compared to Hayden, his works were so complex.  Many subtle ocean currents, perhaps.

 The small scherzos inside of the choral movement are very clear, each one a different run of thought.  As opposed to building to a central monotonic theme, the thousand several souls of the democracy, perhaps.  Each one a universe, and making a universe.

 

 A cruel irony -- that the Enlightenment led to a world in which many just stare at their television screens, and others hope to have a life in which they could just stare at television screens.

 As a precaution, I developed a fondness for radio. 

 Now this is a brilliant Ninth.   In fairness, the house band is firmly in the tradition. 

#chasmofsound

It has been a good few weeks in the mountain air.  In retrospect, I wasn't good for much in the first fortnight, but I kept reading, and held to the discipline, and apparently the innards mended.  Things are starting to fall into place, and the focus is beginning to return to the mind.  Two times up the hill in the morning last week, had been hoping for three, but an unexpected late night made rest more advisable.  Hope to be back to the usual five-day cardio within a fortnight.

I remain more convinced than ever that dispassion is the necessary discipline.  We must be the same in fortune and misfortune, principally because we don't know what they really are.  

The work of thought requires a life; we're not just creating mental and textual patterns, but these exist as extensional forms of the entirety of the life.  The point of a thought is that a soul is having it.  Those worried about some ontological singularity with the advent of these artificial electric brains are a bit like those who resisted cultivating animals and crops rather than hunting and gathering.  Yes, they're breathing and thinking just like us, but the point of our breathing and thinking is that we're the ones doing it.

So, I appear to have survived, but appearances can be true -- or at any rate be associated with the thing itself.  That's one of the bits that the post-Kantians missed.  The appearance is of the thing itself.  We should think about what we do (bring ourselves as characters into the world of appearances) only enough to make sure we're doing the right thing.  Onward.

 

 

 Sometimes I'll start drafting a blog post in my mind and then realize that I used to call that thinking.  #qed

 It's odd that there's some cognitive dissonance in the proposition that a fellow with a few advanced degrees who might have taken a hit or two because he objected to some corruption in the system is also a fairly convinced practicing Catholic.  Given the alignment of the culture, that's arguably one of the most likely scenarios.

 There is apparently a generational divide in the use of AI.  Those of us who witnessed the transition to the ubiquity of verbal machines tend to use it for search, while those new to the thing just dialogue with it and get it to say things.  Arguably, the people who understand the nature of the machine have a point.

It's as if there's an immense lawn on which you know there is a single leaf, despite the fact that you've just raked the whole thing.  Now, you could go back and rake the whole thing, or you could use your knowledge of where the trees are, and where such a thing might tend to be, or you could call up to the aeronaut hovering in his Montgolfier balloon above the estate, an he can tell you where the leaf is.  Now, the utility of such a fellow to me is that he knows where that precise bit of information is, but his actual function is more katascopic, in that he sees the whole lawn.   What it does is fundamentally different than what I want from it.  

Now, someone who hadn't raked the lawn might not know where the trees are, or where the leaves were likely to be, but they could similarly pick up a pair of semaphore flags and make the same inquiry of the balloonist.  In the same way that people who witnessed the transition tend to keep their files in logically structured folders, while the newcomers just use search to find what they need from the fungible mass.  

If you only want to know where the single leaf is, the machine will give you an answer.  But the logic that surrounds the leaf is no longer the knowledge of the tree and the land.  The katascope works by negotiating the logical structure of language, predicting the next word recursively, using the same logic that created the corpus of language that it is ransacking.  If you know nothing of the tree and the land, you'll get the full utility of all past words spoken on the matter, and the logical structure of their relationships.  If, however, the logic within you is what gives that bit of information meaning, your encounter with the machine presents a logic that differs slightly from the corpus.  

But if you just want to think as everyone thinks, it might be a rather useful way of calibrating your logic.  Perhaps the generational divide has less to do with different perspectives on the machine, and more to to with people with different degrees of wisdom, which is to say, different relationships to the accumulated logical structures of the past. 

 Undoubtedly just the usual local for the folks concerned, but the pub that the fellow who was lately first lord of the treasury decamped to is named the Grafton.  The graft-on.  Perhaps the beginning of the party's reign required a centrist, milquetoast fellow to calm the waters, and then the more central branch of the party could take over.  #musings #utterlyuninformed #genuinelyclueless

Piecework until past midnight.  Slept in.

First rule of the campaign: if you get a rest, take a rest.  Note, this is not a good general principle, but merely guidance on how to best conduct a campaign that is inherently active.

Against the erasure.

 Have rousted the pigeons from their apparently habitual roost just outside the window, as I was starting to notice some insect life nearby.  They're making do on the roof opposite, but it appears to be less comfortable, as there's constant squabbling for position.  Occasionally, they'll just stare at the place of which they were so rudely dispossessed.  Undoubtedly plotting revenge and a glorious return to their rightful land.  #birdsofthebalkans

 Feast of the Magdalen.  Midsummer now in earnest.  The noli me tangere against the ways of the flesh in summertime.  

One of Saul Bellow's characters called the undergraduates the noli me tangerines.  Also: Fowles' Daniel Martin, when he goes to California and is befuddled by the easygoing ways of the flesh.  Currency of the realm in Hollywood, apparently, much more so than in New York, and it's pretty bad there.   

In short, there's a lot of it about.

In prosperity, it's easy enough for these things to go on, and life just courses on in the normal manner, with the industrialized comforts.  But when adversity comes, either individual or social, having lived like that will present some problems.  And adversity does tend to come. 

 I query the critical response to that Ninth. The furthest the mainstream papers appear to be willing to go is "patchy" (Telegraph).  No.  That wanted patching, yes, but it was a complete stumble.  

Summer music criticism does tend to the feel-good vibe, but there does have to be some basic recognition of the event.  I'm all for taking risks, and a Ninth at that pace is possible, but apparently not in that manner.  If it doesn't come off, say so.

Zarathustra lulling tonight.  Careful, meditative tones after the sunrise. 

 But the finale saves everything.  With that many voices, hard to muddy the waters.  The democracy.

 Not really hip to these soli, either.  At times like shouting on a rollercoaster.

 Shambolic, sort of doing somersaults over itself, and then straightening up and trying to act a bit regal, but too dizzy to stand.  It might be different in the hall, but this reading just seems a bit too frayed at the edges. 

Flip side, though, only a UK or American orchestra would be this free with it.  Though freedom can be unwieldy at times.

 This Ninth is treading the line between brisk and panicked.  Exhilaration requires measure.  

New First Lord of the Treasury moves in to feed the cat for a bit.  (There's some UK constitutional nuance on the timing of the handle -- it might have to do with privy council, but I can't remember it offhand.) 

Interesting that number 11 is now the formerly disaffected defense fellow.  There's a lot of weapon-buying going on in Europe these days, partially prompted by the folks running the government of my country.  

One of the great merits of democracy is its ability to keep the king from going to war whenever he wants to.  Aversion to ships money and a willingness to neither supply nor be confident in made the mother of all Parliaments what she once was.  Vox populi, vox pacem.

 Vis a vis the relationship between the leader of a country (assuming for the nonce that the executive branch, as head of state, is perceived to be such) and the general climate of interaction:  no matter how firmly politically opposed someone is to the present executive, if their way in the world is characterized by the same crass pursuit of wealth and private advantage, it is a contiguous spiritual phenomenon.  Their stated political opposition to him is merely the relationship to the scapegoat, and ultimately the nature and intensity of that opposition makes the scapegoat more prominent and popular.

The second-most-important job in any government is that of its chief critic.  The specific nature of the opposition to the present executive over the last decade might stand some scrutiny, given the specific actions that ended up characterizing his presidency.

At least with respect to my own nation and culture, I can't be a tabula rasa.  The ledgers, of experience and otherwise, mean that I need to maintain my cognizance of the nature of these places, the law schools, the research doctorate programs, the commercial world.  I know a lot about the nature of these instruments of power in my own society.  But at the same time, I don't bring that determination to my interactions with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker in the towns, no matter how naive their beliefs about the larger world and its instruments of power.  'All things to all people' means that one is wise to the wicked, and truthful to the simple, wisdom being a species of truth, and vice versa.  And as the lot of the democracy is cast with the numerical preponderance of the latter, this is important.  

This is apparently the lot of honest people in this culture, with such a president, and with such a commercial climate.  Time will decide the issue.

This isn't a novel aspect of American society -- reading some early Royce, I see that the two principles of making it in America at the time were energy, and 'playing the game.'  So, the words are the same.  But perhaps the nature of the game, and the game of the game, which is to say the spiritual condition of gamesmanship, have changed.  

 In Europe, public discourse operates as a check on power.  In America, public discourse tends to effect the purposes of power.  So when someone tells you a rational story in Europe, more likely than not, it's an attempt to generate a rational critique of power, possibly in support of the exercise of power, possibly critiquing the exercise of power.  In America, though, when someone tells you a rational story, they're likely effecting the purposes of power.

This is the paradox: For the democracy to function, it needs to be able to recognize when the rationality comes from above, and when from below.  And especially in the context of populism and mass media, when the discourse that appears to be from below tends to control, it requires an increased awareness of whether it is in fact an exercise of shared rationality.  Elevated discernment is required precisely when the broadest-ranging speech from below seems to control.

Interesting.  Bookmarking.  Possibly in reaction to the 'third entity' shifts in rhetoric there of late.

I'd quibble with one of the fundamental premises of the argument -- the US constitutional order certainly notes differences in rights between foreigners and citizens, citizens of different states, members of traditionally disfavored minority ethnic groups, etc. The difference is that these distinctions weren't equiprimordial with the establishment of the Federal Constitution -- they arose afterwards, even if the distinctions were present at the beginning.  And actual adjudications of individual rights, even in the voting and constitutional context, have very little to do with whether these categories are equiprimordial with the constitutional order, or certain protections and rights arose afterwards.  Questions of race and ethnicity and voting rights are very much an active area of American constitutional jurisprudence.

I've often thought a sort of electoral college model, with the electors having a free hand to bargain with each other, might be a means of reconciling the present arrangement with the ECHR ruling. The electors could individually pledge to uphold the ethnic balances that would violate the ECHR holding, were they to be imposed as conditions on the election itself, and the people could ratify that arrangement by their votes, vel non.

Caveat: I know absolutely nothing about this.  Genuinely clueless.  Just keeping an eye on the local legal ontology. 

https://radiosarajevo.ba/metromahala/ja-mislim/prijevod-kao-politika-daytonski-ustav-i-politicka-blokada/645363

https://radiosarajevo.ba/metromahala/ja-mislim/dr-sejo-susic-zasto-konstitutivni-narodi-nemaju-osnove-u-daytonu/645266 

Again, utterly disinterested.  I'm just looking for a place to drink coffee and read Henry James while exploring this part of the world.  Though, full disclosure, I've been on to Ford Maddox Ford instead recently.

 Our knowledge of the world around us comes from two sources -- conceptual knowledge and necessity.  Within the circle of daily existence, we develop the necessary knowledge of how things are by encountering things.  Beyond this, the notion of how things are comes from conceptual knowledge.

With prosperity, it's easy to make a life within a certain circumscribed area of action, which we come to know very well, both from practical knowledge, and intellectual knowledge; we develop the latter inferentially from actual sensory intuition and our own physical reactions.

So within prosperity, there can be quite a large number of people just doing their thing, and their notions of the world beyond the sphere of actual experience come not from valid inference from the local circumstance, but largely from cultural knowledge -- exogenous suggestion.

And then, as with the invention of the second actor in the Greek tragedy, a messenger appears from afar.  

At this point, Hegel might say that we are only that which we are thought to be by the messenger, and vice versa.  And that's at least true for the interaction, and the person that each is thought to be, and accorded the right to be, in the conversation.  

Perhaps this is the point at which the abstract ideas of honesty, truth and virtue that the person in the circumscribed, or prosperous, existence was able to do without, as they had a direct mastery of the empirical actions necessary for survival -- perhaps at this point they become necessary.  They existed before the point of encounter as sort of placeholders for the arguments for the universality of experience that each of the two strangers would attempt to make.  

And if one of the two has consciously disregarded truth, virtue, or honesty as false notions, they will have no claim when meeting the messenger, or the local citizen, or perhaps the distant kingdom from which the messenger has come, or the sovereign which the citizen serves. 

 In a digital broadcast environment, it might be  good idea to broadcast one feed with just audio from the hall.  No matter how good the music, I'm not going to be able to endure a summer of announcer enthusiasm.

 Proms season starting up.  American programming prominent in the first night.  The German orchestras also seem to have been doing a fair amount of Gershwin recently.  

I'm still trying to fathom how American music seems to Europeans.  I was walking through a Christmas fair in Transylvania a year or two ago, and all of the carols playing over the loudspeakers were in English.  Beyond the notion that St. Nick (relics at the trading center of Bari) might have been overwhelmed by Jolly Ol' Nick of the U.S.A., there's also the distance between my hearing of the carols and their hearing.  What is it to hear a song from America at Christmastime?  Or a jazz-classical piece by Gershwin?  And what are the outer limits of that idea -- when does it begin to ring false for them?  It rings false for us because of over-familiarity and easy sentiment.  Perhaps the outer boundary for American music is different overseas; perhaps it rings false when they suspect that it might be some distance from the thing itself.  

 

 Dewey was quite taken with Emerson's thought of the long logic of a life.  That sense made of things only within the long duration.  Perhaps: βιοσ not ζοε.  

I would categorize my two levels of struggle as being beneath that long logic.  There's the struggle to survive the present and the near term, and separately, the disjoint between degrees and experience and the prospects at hand.  Both of these, though, have an endogenous logic to them, and the long logic of the life supervenes both.  As to what it means for a single life that these things have happened within it, I think I have yet to understand, as perhaps is appropriate, and perhaps even fortunate.  Not in the sense of not yet realizing something, but in not presuming to understand something before its hour.

 

 This looks very Regie.  Would still go, though, to hear it in Paris.  If I had my druthers, the post-Barenboim one at an der Linden that was on Arte a year or two ago really struck me.  Sometimes you get the feeling that you're watching the story of your own life on the stage, which of course is a trick, much like a docent at an art gallery trying to strike any chord in their audience's life in order to establish some connection with the painting.

But the discipline of art that requires and rewards attention might yet prove very useful against the instant-access sensibility of television news (and, for that matter, Broadway shows).

 

Approaching a fortnight in these Humble Quarters.  Still negotiating the transition, of course.  Lower entropy to higher entropy, and considerable difficulty to the lack of actual, present physical danger and exertion.  Biblical difficulty, survived by the same means.  Gave half of the 24 to sleep for the first week, and now am arcing back to the proper five or six.  

Hopefully, will be back at full power and function in order to listen in on the Bayreuth opening cycle at month's end with a bit of vino and the local soft cheese.  And the mountains are just sitting there, waiting to be walked up.

In one of Neal Stephenson's novels, a ship leaving port is sunk -- unsurprising, as entering and leaving port were the two most perilous times in old sea journeys.  But the reason was that it was carrying a cargo of mercury, and the boxes were of a certain length, which caused the periodicity of the waves in the individual crates to break up the ship.

Many's the slip from cup to lip.  In addition to keeping an eye on everything, keep an eye on each individual thing.  Onward. 

 

I'm fairly sure that I didn't set out to be an academic.  I went to conservatory with the plan of making theatre from then on, and then when 'then on' didn't last nearly as long as I expected, I went to law school with the plan of practicing law from then on.

I suppose I made the first tentative steps in that direction when I sensed that I was not of a type with the tyro lawyers taking as few classes as they could and networking furiously (in the Midwest, in midwestern ways, in New York, in the ways of that place), and when I came to understand how far things had drifted from meritocracy.  (That's not a controversial claim.  It's quite openly discussed.  Jobs are for the connected folks.)  But I set out to find a place afterward, and came up empty, even after several years.  (During which I was frequently reading and briefing every circuit slip opinion in the country).

Then I tried for a research doctorate in the field in which I had worked professionally for many years.  Took as many courses across the university as I could, passed a peculiarly grueling week-long set of qualifying exams, and wrote a full dissertation shaped to the interests of the committee, all the while grading up to 4,000 undergraduate papers and projects a year -- and they refused to schedule a defense.

So.  I'm left with what I'm able to do -- Now my credentials/charms are overthrown/ And what strength I have's my own...  And after all these years of study, I've picked up a few things.  Learning things has always made the world more complicated for me, not less.  I'll start in a certain area, whether it's Pynchon at his most wide-ranging, or a certain line of modern philosophy, and just pugnaciously plow through the reading, and I find that after a while, sometimes after a long while, I have access to the thoughts, and the world is more complicated.  One example -- several years ago, I saw a review in the NYT of a contemporary philosopher's book on Hegel.  Went to the main room at NYPL and plowed through pugnaciously.  I'm not sure what I thought I took from it, but I certainly didn't have access to the thoughts.  Then, over the next several years, I made it a point to read that author's work and listen to his talks and seminars, and now I think I have access to his work, and it's useful.  

Arguably the most important thing about life is that it's an ascending series.  The box you're in tomorrow needs to be bigger than the box you're in today.  Because if you start going in the other direction, everything will start to diminish.  And with it, you.

Seek.  Strive.  Find.  Don't yield. 

 Not the first time I've booked a site specifically for the mountain/sea air and been confronted with upwind second-world construction practices (smells of burning trash, etc.)  Minor inconvenience.  And a great incentive to get back to the predawn, to have the coffee in the clean air.  

I can't fault them -- laws in some of these countries limit construction to the tourist off-season, so they're likely racing the clock.   

 Gently down the stream.

When one comes back from the front, one doesn't just re-tune the cacophony. That way madness lies.  One allows things to come to rest, to settle into the center of the frame.  Which often reveals quite a few more rifts in the lute than one had supposed.  The danger at this point is that the folding-in takes on a momentum, so the exercises from the center need to keep the immaterial but substantial, unified, and perceptive soul alive.  Yoga, not running or lifting.  Kant, not Hegel.  

Then, outward again. 

 Philosophy, and this is where the academy might get it wrong in the interests of keeping the game going, isn't about gaining status, or learning a sequence of strategies as if you were studying chess, or even gaining facility with a language game that you could play as if you played no other.  It is about attunement to the present, in repairing the lines of code inside you that get in the way of experience and learning.  Evey iota of thought works to clarify the basic relation to the world.  

W said that he was merely trying to help the fly out of the bottle.  So there is this sense that the way that the others think might have some problems to it.  Conversely, there is also a care for all of the ideas of the past in a sort of pastoral sense.  The second human philosopher was probably motivated, at least in part out of care for the fellow who had been wandering through the marketplace a few days ago shouting that everything was made of water.

The danger is that one can make a profession of this pastoral care for the souls and ideas of the past.  The souls of the past were attempting to repair their present minds.  To clarify their present relation to all things.  As should we. 

 Always a bit of a discovery that mental and spiritual focus is necessary in places of rest and recovery as they are in the place of the struggle.  The abyss is still there -- it's just not making itself present to you in the same manner.

You and the universe are still basically in the same relation, no matter what part of the world you happen to be in, and how it seems to be with that part of the world.  It's going to take focus and work.

Part of the reason that I can't ever recall going on vacation.  We can't vacate the place we are in, in the larger sense. And the sense in marking out a certain duration within which we will deliberately not care about the most important things eludes me.  Even the weekend rest is the rest into the center of things, hence the habit of church.

 Gently down the stream. 

With care, which is to say attention, which is to say interest.

 

 Also, one of the first things that Russell noticed about him was that he had private money, and that offered him some assurance that W was capable of being an academic.

Even at the state universities in the US, this ethic still lingers.  Conference funding is usually only a fraction of the cost.  I still recall observing a leading historian inquire eagerly whether a "De" in the name of some mentor of his interlocutor was an aristocratic particle.

Well, with industrialization, we shall eat cake while they browse the Almanac de Gotha.  And of course, with industrialization, another dangerous social set pops up, and they're a bit more difficult to handle.  Despite the fact that they're occasionally obsessed with owning the cherry orchard of their childhood.

Gently down the stream.  Free-minded, like all of us Americans should be. The long months reading Dewey had an effect, I think.