A first acquaintance with Blaga's philosophy -- I had only read secondary sources before, but apparently the research collections here are stronger on Blaga in English than the Cluj research library, which is peculiar.  I encountered this phenomenon often in Balkan wanderings -- in Skopje, for example, you find an abundance of works in English (including entire bookstores), but you will not find a single Macedonian work translated into English (unless you're better at that sort of thing than I am.)

At any rate Blaga seems, unfortunately, to have come under the spell of Spengler, and writes with a similar freedom.  That said, there are some very interesting ideas.  The notion of negative knowledge, called "Luciferian knowledge" after the conceit of the angel, together with the "abyssal categories" that define it (reasoned from a deduction?  what are they?); the notion of characteristic style, presumably after Schopenhauer (who I'm almost completely unfamiliar with); and of course, the section on mioritic space, which he's most famous for and possibly the most resonant of his ideas.  (Possibly, in the notion of fictional space, we are going back to the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience, and re-making a world in which, contrary to the present one, it is possible to live.)

There are etexts of the trilogies, and I suppose it would be the work of a moment to AI translate them and then go through them, but I can't handle that now.  After a few hours, my best understanding of him is as a sort of correlative to Ivo Andric -- both, retired diplomats, one a sober novelist with perhaps a few keys hidden in the stories, and the other a cultural philosopher of Spenglerian freedom (whose work I likely don't yet understand), and in this, in their styles and metiers, they reflect something essential about the two countries which they represented to the world. 

---------------------

Thinking about the apartment in Zemun that I rented after a month across from St. Mark's during the big protests.  That was an excellent place to write -- bells of the Franciscan church and the small chapels in the park, the distant flashing lights on top of the Usce mall, and the city beyond.  My one disappointment during that time was the injury that kept me from running, as the quay is excellent for that.

----------------

In sum, I'm presently dividing the day between trying to ameliorate my condition (cranking out CV's, applying to content writing gigs that I'm vastly overqualified for), and doing the actual work, on the assumption that I will never get past the locked doors, and will have to reach my own understandings and make my own work.  A bit like the Shaker precept of Mother Anne -- live each day as if you were to live a thousand years, and as if it would be your last.  The second type of work is the last-day scenario, only the essential philosophy, art, literature.  While still trying to land a gig, or a career, preferably one that can get me to a country in which I can do some real work.  Not being able to change my condition, and not being able to finish some real work is not a thought I'd like to have.

-----

Interesting, a Western-leaning news portal in a Western-leaning Islamic country runs a piece on an important night of Ramadan, the battle of Bed'r (?).  Oddly, though, the Quran was revealed on the same night of (a different year), and that's how the night is usually marked -- including at this portal in past years, if memory serves.  The present Persian campaign has likely made a lot of people very angry, and I still haven't seen the justification for it.  And the Ides of March upcoming.

Some of the things one notices when attempting to slog out the winter in a northern city under very difficult circumstances.  Onward.

 Another reason I am looking to the Eastern sections of southern Europe is the difficulties I've encountered in my own country due to ethic origin, tbh.  Being a large fellow of Slavic ancestry, I'm conscious of the fact that some folks, and folks from some ethnic groups, treat me a bit differently.  (A few anecdotes there.)  There is no cognitive dissonance for them in thinking that a large Pole should be facing the sort of difficulties I've been facing, regardless of the degrees, experience, and work ethic.  

Not a proximate cause, but certainly a but/for cause.  

The ideal would of course be a Jeffersonian democracy blind to ethnicity, but as that doesn't yet exist (despite my best, usually unconscious and ingenuous efforts), when I steer my ship, I should steer it to familiar nations.

It is a sign of an overly circumscribed life to pine for the familiar.  And yet.  To generally hope to be in a better place doesn't get you much when lost in the woods.  Best to set out for the known bivouac, and places where you could work -- hence, I set my face to countries of tall mountains, woodsy violin sections in the orchestras, generally accessible coffee and theatre, and Cyrillic grocery receipts.

The difficulty last time was the books, mostly.  But I'm shifting everything to ebooks now, and I'm going to compel myself to like it.  Getting sufficient vegetarian protein might have been more of an issue than I thought -- will have to budget a bit extra for eggs and nuts.  Smoking is another difficulty.  I/m sure half of Sarajevo thinks me a rude and uncultivated person for getting up and moving away whenever someone lights up, or worse, puts a vape to their mouth.  

But these are minor difficulties, and I am facing major difficulties here, so... 

The trick, of course, even with the degrees and experience, is to find a way of paying for the worldly goods.  Which is frustrating, as many of the folks who studied law with me, and who unlike me, went along with everything placed before them, are making millions of dollars per year after this many years out of school.  And even those at the immense, corrupt and mediocre state university who went along with things are likely almost reaching the six-figure mark.  

Money is the dung of the Devil, as a recent pope observed.  Which means, among other things, that it's occasionally very rare and difficult to find.

 After reading the LRB piece on Romanian politics, I had a run at Cioran -- luminous threads, and I am back in Sibiu and Cluj in my mind, and alive, if only for a minute or two.  On the day I took the bus to the resort and walked back through the mountains, the path ended at Rasinari (resin, from the lumber industry), from which there was a long walk back to my humble quarters in Sibiu (which were actually quite nice on that visit, a garret 1BR in a very old 18th/19th c. building -- I was the first rental, and the monthly rental is now well above what it was -- and I was there during the big theatre festival, to boot).  Cioran's father was on the faculty at the Orthodox seminary in Sibiu, which is right across from the cathedral, ran past it many mornings.  Long commute from their home in Rasinari (I think) especially in the early 20th c.  And then his stories about the paralyzing fear he felt from the Hungarian policemen.  The SJ church in Sibiu is quite remarkable -- the Jesuits and Franciscans left a considerable amount of infrastructure in this part of the world.  One curiosity in Sibiu: the number-puzzles in the inscriptions, in which some letters that double as Roman numerals are slightly larger than the rest of the lettering, and can be summed or taken severally to give meaningful dates or numbers.  I never managed to solve any of them, but I think you would have to know a lot about the place to so.

"a drowning man clinging to the idea of shipwreck"  (Cioran)

Today, New Gods, the title essay of which is a sort of distilled Bogomilism -- praise of the demiurge, as a perfect God could never have made such a world.  Whenever you visit a place and St. Michael is very prominent in the ritual or the imagery, you can be assured that there are a few folks thereabouts who have some profound reservations about the essential goodness of the world.  He's quite prominent in Transylvania.

Hm.  Okay, I'll trust that at this point the universe is aware that I'd much rather be back in the world of six months ago, reliably nomading through the Balkans.  And, not to overdo the Touchstone-in-the-forest soliloquy, it was clearly a mistake to think that I could simply crash back into the city and slog out the winter when the academic publishing house reduced my freelancing daily bread-source.  

But, as there really wasn't any other choice, it's more of a mistaken belief without an effect in the world than anything else.  (Even in my travails, I argue against philosophical pragmatism.)

The classic doctrine holds that in tragedy, everyone needs to be acting sive necessitatis, according to their beliefs and in such a way that they could do no other.  And neither side is right or wrong.  If Antigone is the hero and Creon is simply a blockhead, you're watching a bad production of the play.  The point of tragedy is that when people do the right thing by their own lights, bad things are inevitable.  This is why poverty was (pre Arthur Miller) generally held not to be a tragic condition, as it could easily be ameliorated.  The depth of commitment to the necessity of the situation on both (all) sides needs to be strong.  

So if this is tragedy, it's not because the winter has been an amazingly difficult, death-defying slog, buoyed by memories of Bulgarian mountains, Balkan coffees, and Transylvanian theatre.  It's because this slog was made inevitable by my past difficulties in the academy.  And it's very important to realize that the other side of things had a claim of right, one rooted not in moral right, but in pragmatic right, despite the corrupt practices.  And part of the reason that I'm spending so much time working on Dewey et al. (other than the Rorty/Brandom recommendation) is that this pragmatic claim of right against the claims of morality is actually a deeply running stream in the American mind.

One afternoon at Illinois, I wandered over to the law school to hear a talk by one of the long-time advocates at the SG's office in DC.  Afterwards, in the Q&A, I asked him what the biggest mistake novice advocates usually made was.  His answer: not taking their opponents' arguments seriously enough.  It would be easy, in the current difficulties just to, in the manner of a G&S captain, "d-mme all" and say that everyone else was simply a blockhead.  But then your difficulties and pain are simply meaningless.  The point is that the blockheads had a point -- and part of my present work is about beginning to argue against it.

 "Only thorns bloom in God."

(Cioran)

Also:

Van Gogh is like El Greco without God, nothing tending upwards, just the diffusion across the canvas.

Irony as the slow diminution of the self, ending in the tragedy.

----

Cioran is important, one of the few modern writers who can go to the depths of Beckett without the characters on the page being erased.

 

The present need to get back to nomading through southern Europe is as strong and urgent as anything I've ever felt--perhaps it's because it was the last scenario of basic sufficiency before the recent setbacks, perhaps because there is a certain spiritual need there--and the inability to put something into place is both frustrating and perplexing.  

There are societies in which someone with a doctorate in law from a top-tier school with strong grades, and a decade of experience in the arts with a degree from a globally ranked conservatory is able to find a position or livelihood in one of these professions, or at least a stopgap minimally sufficient job in a field requiring a basic competency in something or other.

But things states-side appear to be a bit more free-form than that.  

Ergo: a very, very difficult winter in a northern city.  

Once you realize the difficulties with the prevailing ways of thinking, those who live forcefully according to those ways of thinking become very difficult to be around.

I suppose this is what drove folks in the past to climb pillars or run off into the desert.

It's a bit difficult to surmount, particularly when the society is making a claim of right for it.  In the past, kings and minor aristocrats were proud not to think as the common person thinks.  Judaica me, Domine... It also became a way of thinking about God ("As far as the heavens are above the earth...").

But in this culture, the conversational median carries the claim of right -- ostensibly because in a pragmatic sense, it allows people to honestly communicate while the sub-linguistic logics of encounter work to make a prosperous society.  The American via negativa.  Omnis determinatio est negatio, so leave as much as possible undetermined.

And while the industrial prosperity is undeniable (though how much of it is from continental resources and how much from the social order is an open question), the people are sometimes very, very difficult to be around.

Qed, perhaps.

Sorely tempted to simply fly over to southern Europe, and just make it as far as I can on the present bank-book and figure out an answer when the means run out.  Oddly, I think that's what Dewey might have done.  Unless he could find a wealthy spinster Yankee aunt.

But the rule is firm: even though it's the only way to a minimally sufficient existence in the near term, I won't leave the homeland without sufficient means for normal living and safe return.  

It's a bit like a fellow condemned to hang in a corrupt oil town who has the file and the rope ready for the escape, but holds off until an advisory opinion from his home (& honest) county, or perhaps the federal court, quashes the sentence.  Injustice is no cause for intemperance.  Socrates was wrong to stay, but not wrong to make the decision deliberately.  

Gently down the stream.

Stopped in downstairs for a quick peek at the recent Weekly Readers.  Perplexing piece in the LRB on the Romanian election fiasco that I tried manfully to avoid wisearcing about when I was in Bucharest/Sibiu/Cluj last year.  Utterly frustrating reading.  It doesn't suss out what the locals were actually thinking, and it doesn't offer any insight into the event from a dispassionate outsider -- not to be too much of an anti/fink type, but it just seemed as if the author was trying to seem to be urbane enough to be capable of actual commentary, but without offering any actual understanding.  Macarons with the LSE types in Sector 2, and coffee with a Roma single parent from Sector 4/5, and let the comfortable readers savor the atmosphere.

Name-day.  My favorite name-day was one year, seeing the Stratford Festival Lear at Lincoln Center, after reading the Mabinogion at Sbux.  The city seemed made of gold in the afternoon light.  

--------------------

In the year or so since I wrote this at a kitchen table in Albania, the nomadry continued until the work dropped off precipitously, and without notice.  I had sufficient funds to get back to the city from the mountains of Bulgaria (having at least that much in reserve has always been a firm rule), but that was about it, so the winter has been very, very difficult.

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/02/15/a-discreet-word/

Perhaps I'm the only one struck by the incongruity of my degrees and experience and the way in which I seem to have been completely excluded from work (and even a basic, sufficient existence).  The family has their own intrigues and derangements, most of which seem to arise from their long years of confidential government work.  After several years of not being able to find work in the theatre, that social connection fell away, and as for law and the academic world, in both instances, I was met by some very corrupt folks at the door, and never really managed to get past them.

So, without being too melodramatic, after over a decade of this, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to last.  But being able to work, write and think is more important than anything else.  I was able to have a basic existence in the digital nomad context -- both as to physical things and the work of writing and reading.  In recent years, I've developed about as strong a competence as one can have in certain areas of philosophy without a formal degree.  But the winter nights are life-threatening, and the long stretch of experience is life threatening.  My only task is to preserve the life of the life being threatened, I think.  Onward.

Increasingly confident that the sea change I picked up last week wasn't an accident of subjectivity after the second blizzard. The marihuana-smoking greed machines filling the sidewalks and the cafes in the evening are much more vivacious than before (if idiotically so).  Very far from the world of Strether's penny chairs on the boulevards of late 19th c Paris.  Surely this wasn't the point of general prosperity. 

The Turks have the notion of three shocks of springtime: land, water and air (or perhaps the reverse).  Perhaps the first one happened here in the warming after the storm.  I first encountered the notion in Sarajevo.  Sarajevo is the flower of the stem that rises up through Albania and formerly Bulgaria (one historical trace: the green in the tricouleur), twisting past Skoder Lake and southern (non-wreath/wraith) Montenegro.  The stem is rooted in Turkey, of course, and like the Turks and the Muslim Bebers of the southern Mediterranean (who survived Sebastian), they look to distant Arabia for their classicism as the Romans might have looked to Athens, or someone in a corrugated tin shack in rural Wisconsin might look to Sheboygan.  The charms of Christminster's dreaming spires in the distance. 

It is pleasant to wander among the flowers of the garden, and so it is pleasant to walk though Sarajevo, which after the last war began a slow process of moving to a city under the domination of the dominant ethnicity of the state.  "We got Sarajevo" was the phrase heard in the hotel corridors of Dayton, if the academic journals I went through at the library of the old Muslim foundation are to be believed.  And yet, when I first visited the city and knew even less about it that I do now, one of the first things that I noticed was a massive foundation being laid for a building overlooking the city from the north, from the ground of the adjoining ethnic entity.  (Within which a toxic dump sometimes burns, sending a fog over the city, and endangering innocent foreigners out for a quick dawn run.)  Claim a victory within history, and the hourglass simply rotates.

As much as I enjoyed Sarajevo, I began to weaken a bit from distance from my own language and books and philosophies.  I purchased a one-month subscription to the London theatre tapes service, and listened to an RSC Shakespeare every night, just to keep the λεγειν alive -- the residuum of thought in language, which is the dasein of geist.

So another Persian potentate falls, from a smooth stone of the wadi cast over the waters.  I have reservations about these foreign entanglements.  And celebrating the death of a cleric, even one who was filled with hatred for my country, seems a bit much.  And something that might have to be explained someday at the foot of the throne of the God of Abraham.  The hatred that religions feel for each other is understandable, and perhaps even useful, in that they preserve specific virtues against the others.  Perhaps one day these virtues, preserved through time in the manner of bloody time, will come together.  But for the nonce, it is a demonstration of Girard's principle that conflict and hatred come from (semantic) proximity and similarity, not difference and distance.  

When I was in Bosnia -- Mostar and Sarajevo -- I thought of the charmed lives folks were leading in small towns in the American South and Midwest.  I understood why some of the Balkan locals wanted a life like that, in countries they likely couldn't even get a travel visa for.  Pumpkin spice lattes in the autumn in SUV's driven through forest highways, to grassy lawns and prosperous towns.  Material prosperity can be persuasive.  And then you imagine, in the manner of the bull in springtime wondering at the distant lowing over the hill, that there might be folks you could relate to and know.  But the truth of it is that the children of the prosperity, given the distortions of the religions, and worse, the general notion that religion is inherently wrong, have become something less than paragons of Rousseau's innocent nature.  Hume, who saw us as tragically susceptible to the world's shocks, wept when he met Rousseau, who comforted him with a friendly embrace.  We must remember the possibility of being good -- actual good, not the idea of good.  Righteousness, which the Gospels so often praise, is from δικαι, the power of right judgement.  The shocks of the world are not to be the final word.

I'm conscious of being a bit reduced after the last three months (though not physically, given the daily weightlifting that I had been away from during the last couple years of travel).  But those outside the charm of the place, those most different from the place, even if it is their home, will most feel the wind and the rain, which is in a way a good thing, though it certainly doesn't seem so at the time.  One belief of mine us that at every moment of our lives, no matter how inauspicious the situation, at another moment of our lives, we might be thinking of the present, difficult time and envying it.  Bloom looks at Stephen's daily adversities with some nostalgia (they are two shadows of the selfsame man).  So internal lines of force begin to develop within a life, and the life begins to grow more strong as it becomes conscious of these lines of force.

Discovering Fichte a few years ago was a bit of a revelation.  When we think of ourselves, we tend to think of a finished portrait.  But what we are is in action -- if a portrait, then the painting of the portrait.  When the LDS temple across from Lincoln Center opened, there was a visitation period in which the public could visit even the holiest rooms.  The initiative for the NYC temple apparently came from the Broadway plays that had been a bit critical of the LDS.  (I liked the plays, came down from Mount Holyoke on Hawthorne's enchanted railroad one afternoon with some friends and acquaintances from sumerstock and saw one of them in its original run.  But I was a bit naive about their role socially.)  I was a young seeker in the city, then a bit obsessed with the Shakers, and I made sure to sign up for a visit.  The rooms were very interesting.  The whole experience had a somewhat masonic flavor, understandably so given the origins of the faith.  I remember sitting in the holiest room, everything was white, and the guide was speaking, but I noticed in a back corner that an older gentleman connected with the church had slipped into the room and was standing peacefully and quietly in front of of one of the full-length mirrors in the room, simply examining his reflection.  Perhaps happenstance, perhaps a demonstration of the mysteries.  But an action.  Even in the holiest of the rooms.

What's to come is still unsure, both in the world, and with me, the one not worth the proverbial hill of beans in the scheme of things.  But there is to be a final word spoken, and after all this, I'm relatively certain that we, and I, haven't a clue as to what it is to be.

"They did not despair of the Republic."  (Epitaph of Roman generals.)

But they were generals.  And if one is completely powerless in the scheme of things, and has been surrounded for a very, very long time by questionable people doing questionable things, the question of saving the Republic or finding a Walden in which to read and think and write takes on a different aspect.  The generation after Jason and Medea, or perhaps Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, should feel no compunction in seeking out pastures new. Else, you know, things get a bit Oresteia, and the Eumenides show up.

I am increasingly sensing that I should head back abroad to neutral countries--if at all possible, rather quickly.  But I'm not going to leave without sufficient funds for the proper stay and return.  As demonstrated in the Odyssey, just running after the departing ships makes for the gate to the underworld.

Gently down the stream.  

But I recognize that things are very bad, and that there's no good way to secure a place and a sufficiency here, so I'm looking for a way to get to a place where I can try to do some proper work, and I'm determined to find it.

 "Why does God need a starship?"

("Capt. James T. Kirk," Star Trek V)

 I haven't seen all of the films that claim to be Star Wars films, and I don't really have a clear recollection of any of them other than the three actual Star Wars films, but one moment from one of the others comes to my mind.  The "young Obi-Wan" is in the middle of a pitched battle, when suddenly a door, or at any rate, a glass barrier between chambers, descends.  "Young Obi-Wan" looks around, ascertains the situation, and then drops to one knee and bows his head, calming his spirit and waiting for the interposition to be lifted.  A fiction attempting to convinced us of its own verisimilitude might show an element of frustration, so we would believe he is actually a fighter in a battle, but either the film declines to demonstrate this, or it seeks to demonstrate that he is a different type of fighter.  When I first saw this, as I recall, I was very much in the sword training dojo, so I took that lesson to heart.

---

The uncanny feeling of the sea change that set in a couple of days ago, perhaps partially a phenomenon of my own consciousness after the difficulties of the last blizzard, does invite a certain ease of comportment.  This morning, though, I had a very different sense.  For some reason, one of the national churches that I encountered on the recent travels was very present to me when I awakened.  I recalled the holy places that I had visited, and seemed to have a peculiar access to the memories in my own mind.

A small springtime in the local weather today, almost 50 degrees.

When the slog grows long, and the mind perhaps begins to play tricks (or is being buoyed along by things that have nothing to do with you as an individual), life becomes like a recurrent walk through a village, a task that can seem either easy or difficult -- but we forget that access to the things of the village (the church, the tavern, the scholars' library) is the point, and then the day, even for those working at their utmost, becomes simply a long tread through the place without seeking access to the things of the place themselves.  

During a period of adversity perhaps ten years ago, I made a point to walk, every morning, past a shop with a front window filled with bags and barrels of spices.  There are two elements here: the continued force of the journey, and the desire to have access to the thing itself.  If I had simply continued to walk to the window each morning as a point of discipline, I would have lost.  At any rate, this sense of access, that which I had rather powerfully tis morning in another context, is very, very important.  Particularly in reading and writing.  Else the eyes just glide over the page, or we file the abstract arguments of the text away in our mind.  For things to be worthwhile, for the game to be worth the candle, even the most abtruse philosophy must have a real relevance to the living questions that you have always felt, even before and beneath language.  

A final danger: this last sensibility of essence can also be a powerful means of deception.  But the mental discipline of scholarship exists to guard against such things.  It is not just that there is always a duality -- the second reality is there to guard and protect you against the first, immanent sensibility by ensuring its validity.

One example.  Rights, in the American tradition, are said to be self-evident.  What might this mean?  Well, if you look at the things the Framers were reading, specifically Locke's second Treatise, you'll see that truths are divided between self-evident truths and essential truths, and that the second type of truth is thought to be very dangerous, as it is easily the tool of the tyrant, urging his people to believe in the things that elude rational understanding.

We value things, and we know things.  And valuing things and knowing things have to do with each other, and are essential to each other.

-----------------------

"Gently down the stream."  (Star Trek V) 

Bit of peculiar brain-cloud today.  (The good thing about constant drudge work is that one can use it to gauge the health of the mechanism at a given point.)

 One frustration is that, if you keep doing the right thing, and grounding your work in genuinely legitimate thought, the folks who ground their experience in the pragmatic game will always dismiss you out of hand -- this is why there always needs to be a bit of the "know thyself" command in the writing.  You must always be gently reminding the others that their understanding might be a bit less grounded than they think.

Nietzsche coined the term 'amor fati,' I think.  Appropriate, as he was among the first to see where the collective project of thought was heading in Western civilization.  If you understand the event, you can come to understand as well that your position within it, however inauspicious, is a necessary one.

A country that considers itself intellectually superior to a faith in an omnipotent God will invariably be caught up in the cycle of enchantments, which is to say, history, as it falls under the spell of specific subordinate principalities and powers.

Agamben's piece on the evolution of spiritual hierarchy is interesting -- it mirrored the church hierarchy of the time.  If you look at the medieval cults, the angel cults are usually from the East, outside the local national church, and even the Roman offices and orders.  The inherent paradox of an ordered hierarchy of the numinous, perhaps.  Perhaps it is primarily an indication that there are always distinctions to be made, even in things completely outside the context of our experience.

Very peculiar, a sea change in my surroundings over the last two days.  If there weren't discrete indicia, I would think that the second blizzard had altered my perceptions of things.  

At the discount gym, for example, the sketchy NYC characters usually populating the floor have been replaced by folks clearly of a higher tax bracket.  My guess is that they did a membership discount on a more upscale website or mailing list.  Overnight change, though.  Very stark.  And they're actually cleaning out the locker rooms and the showers, which does make for a much more pleasant early morning.

Absolutely exhausted, to a depth I can't remember ever feeling, even given the extraordinary times of the last decade or so.  

I think it's safe to say that I have barely survived the recent events, specifically, the abortive crash back into the city from the Balkans three months ago.  I look forward to describing recent times in that manner for many years to come.  

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate.  No point in going half-measures vis a vis the speranza, you know.  Must grasp the golden, nettled fleece and do what you can.

Incidentally, from a random Romanian scholar: fleece was used for panning for gold in mountain streams.

The fleecing of America: where sheep can safely graze, perhaps.

 At the same time, I do recall doing a lot of reading in the roof cafe of the grocery store in Sarajevo across from the parliament,  Philosophy can be read with either kefir or coffee.  Arguably some health benefits to the former.

Serbia presently the focus of my mind.  Not necessarily because of the nature of the place, though it's a very noble (yes) and hospitable country.  I just know that I can get away from precisely these shadows and difficulties by going there, as I've done so twice now.  Though the fact of the strong local orthodox church is also very much in my mind.

But there's nothing political in this pining.  Prometheus is just eyeing the cave a bit further down the mountain, where, assuming he can get free of the chains and the bird, he might be able to find a decent place, do a bit of reading and writing, morning runs, and perhaps some $2 coffees and $6 theatre.

Hope springs eternal.

 

 

 

 And the planes departing overhead, over the river at night.  To Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia...  

The Chums of Chance (hear the icthyian reading of the first term) from Pynchon's ATD are a good model for recent times.  In the novel, they appear to stand for the pre-disillusionment hale and hearty fellows on the bounding main, serving unknown, or at least undescribed, masters with alacrity, cheer and bonhomie.  Then, some buildings fall and everything gets a bit dark, signal-carrying light is split, &c, &c.

But, you know, that's me.  I've never really wandered to the dark side of things, I've been too busy reading. (Condor: "I just read books.")  And even the colossal and inexplicable adversities occasionally elicit an utterly ingenuous "oh heck" or "gosh darnit".  

One can take these things too far, but when the adversities keep getting bigger and bigger and I keep reading Henry James and going to morning Mass, it does seem a bit like a 1950s superhero serial whose ratings are so bad that the writers have decided to just let the fellow have it with both bores every week.

 Internal clock apparently running a bit slow after a few days of cancellations and late openings.  The wobble after sticking the landing, perhaps.  No simple highway.

The objective for today was, of course, to return to the possibility of thought, after the two days of blizzard.  This is a very real thing, and I have to think that folks in the Siberian camps faced this as well, since bearing with extraordinary physical and social difficulty makes it hard to hold the Fourth Paralogism of Kant in the mind long enough to figure out how things stand with respect to it.

Thinking with unconcealed envy of all those months I had in southern Europe in which once the mind-numbing work of the day was done, I had a place to work and write and think, and possibly even head out to the theatre or a coffeehouse.  Not having been able to do proper writing then was the big mistake.  I wasn't yet ruthless enough.

To be absolutely clear: my claim is that this existence, which has gone on for many years, is the physical equivalent of the gulag, and the causation for it is my politics (or lack thereof) and religion (but/for cause) and my refusal to go along with corrupt things (proximate cause).

Dostoevsky apparently wept when he read Hegel's opinion that he, being in Siberia, was outside of history.  While I do consider myself a Hegelian, I don't consider effective history to be an effective notion anymore.  There are simply many people telling stories.  The machines they are using to tell stories have a peculiar hold over the mind.  History, as a description of present events,  has become the means of placing its listeners outside history.   It is much more important to focus the mind, and 19 c. books and private thought will suffice for that.  In the days to come, history will vindicate its own deprecation.

You have to get free of them -- and for this, one of their early slogans will suffice: 

Cultivate your own garden.

Following up on the earlier thought on historical commemoration: Another theory that would make this the 250th of the nation might be that the present national sovereignty resided in the several states at independence.

Also untenable, though, as the 'people in the states' ratified the Federal Constitution.

The point isn't to go on crusades or jeremiads against evil and corruption.  We pray to be liberated from evil, not to triumph over it in glorious battle.  We have work to do.

So if simply doing the right thing over and over again leaves you hostis humani generis, you know that you're in a bad place, and the primary struggle becomes finding a way to escape to a more neutral place, which can be rather difficult in some civilizational contexts.

 One of the things that incompetence in high places can botch up is historical commemoration.  This is the 250th anniversary of independence.  Then came the articles of confederation.  Then came the constitution, and with its ratification by the people in the states, the present republic began.  A nation can be defined by ethnicity or political structure, depending on when the term was first used; clearly in this case, we look to the latter, and so the nation began with the ratification and the republic.  (Else, we're using "nation" to describe an ethnically heterogeneous population in a certain place, irrespective of political structure.)

(I think the Chief Justice might have been obliquely saying as much in his discussion of the Declaration with respect to the organic documents in last year's year-end message.) 

 Another storm, another dawn chorus.

So very odd to have decided on the spur of the moment to try for evensong on Sunday afternoon -- and then the deluge.  I made a similar visit on the afternoon of the "superstorm" in the mid-Aughts.  I remember, almost no one was there.  There was a temporary sacramental altar raised on some theatrical platforms at the crossing, and the security guards were sitting around it on folding chairs, having a loud conversation, seasoned with the customary proportion of expletives, as the storm blew against the clerestory windows.  Afterwards, I went back the apartment in Inwood by means of the wooded trail.  Without exaggeration, there were trees crashing down around me.  But this is the nature of the earth.

The practical and pragmatic (only in Kantian philosophy, et seq., are these terms almost opposites) difficulties were the most significant difficulties in the present storm.  As I'm operating in significantly reduced circumstances, not having access to the usual common resources made things difficult, and more importantly, made the time less purposive, though I did manage to do a bit of serious reading and almost finish a (very) minor Henry James novel.

In my country, it can be surprisingly difficult to find a place to read sometimes.  I remember one afternoon on a holiday when I was studying at Illinois -- a small town, everything closed. There was simply nowhere to go.  Increasingly, the society forces people back to their private property, reducing the commons, perhaps because of the types that it attracts.  Property exerts a force against the unpropertied.  There was a fascinating historical sign (university town) in that town detailing the spirited public debate at the turn of the last century (or perhaps slightly before) on the question of putting in a public drinking fountain.  Contrast the tradition in the east of trusts and foundations making it a point of honor to build fountains in front of mosques and in the towns.  Munificence.  Andric's Bridge Over the Drina. At the foot of the mountains in Bulgaria that I visited recently, there was a fountain of groundwater constantly running, and I noticed a constant stream of locals driving over to fill up their gallon bottles and flasks.  I never did trust the tap water in the Balkans, and most of the locals apparently felt the same way.  The Bulgarian mountain was the exception, though.   The grocery shopping was a weekly trip into town, so porting water back wasn't feasible.  I never did taste the groundwater directly, though, as local habits might not always change with the changes in the water quality. 

The stoup of sacred water at the church door looks odd to me now.  Of course, a longstanding practice -- the Renaissance courtiers occasionally rushing to the font to grab a handful of water to offer to an object of their affections.  But after you see the fountains in front of the mosques, the thought arises that the touch of water might not always accomplish the work of water.  Hence the tendencies to full immersions in protestant movements like the Baptists and the Baptist, perhaps.

I'm extremely fatigued, and not just after the last two days and the storm.  The ability to simply survive things does breed a certain lack of focus, a sort of infantry reflex in which plodding, bleary-eyed seems to be sufficient to accomplish the task.  To preserve the energy of the soul, which is to say, the geist of the transcendent.

Excelsior.  

(A strange device.)  

 Early Henry James is amusing.  You can almost see the storyteller in his study, so wrapped up in the telling of the tale that he doesn't realize how artless the exercise has become.

But I only sense this because of the later work.  Success makes a fool of our youth.

Universe: "Survive the catastrophic crash into the city with no resources, and remain productive and upbeat."

Intrepid Hero:  "Done."

Universe: "Now blizzard-force wind, over a foot of snow, and absolutely everything shut down."

(Pause)

Universe: "An incredulous stare is not an argument."

 Tolstoyan wandering through the night quite enjoyable. Park idyllic. Second watch of the night a bit of a slog, given the winds.  Ante faciam frigorem...

And now everything's closed, my guess says the decision-makers are the 5% who drive, and the television machines have filled the populace with fear.  So another day as the Wanderer.  Must find a staff and inscribe it with the laws of the world.

With the adversity, a strong desire to return to Serbia for some reason.  Odd.  

Next year in a holier land.

Looks like some weather is moving into town; will have to 'press pause' on purposeful existence, as the libraries, coffeehouses and gyms will be closed for a bit.  Shifting to Tolstoyan wanderer mode for a bit, then, until civilization returns to normal service.   After Mass, stopped in at the grocery cafe for a bit of lunch, then walked north, up through the park, hoping that evensong at the Episcopal cathedral was still on (as the Anglican evening apparently begins at 4PM, perhaps something to do with sherry/gin rules), but no such luck.  It was good to revisit the building, though -- one of my favorite places in the world.  Went to the St. Ambrose chapel in the back, which was built by Italian artisans, and appears to have a tabernacle and vigil light, prayed the psalter for an hour or two, working my way through the hours of the day, according to the old (1911, I think) breviary. 

I'm not being disingenuous about this distinction between purposeful and non-purposeful existence.  Many people might think it a mistake to attempt a purposeful life when the focus arguably should be on simple survival, but as Kant says, existence is not a valid predicate.  In that we are, we should be something.  So when I crashed into the city from the Balkans a couple of months ago, I knew that very difficult times were in store, and that there was no way of avoiding that.  But there were also things here that could be of use to me.  So I've done what I could, both for the general situation, and for the specific projects that have been the fabric of my life and thought for the last couple of months.

One muddles on somehow.  Eventually something comes of it.

 Also this: the church is a mechanism designed to carry the sacrament forward in time.  You must scrutinize it, attempt to understand, and take what you can.  Deep in the recesses of the conquistadores' ship, find the candle and the sacrament. 

 Perhaps: If truth is thought to be in the shared life and in the social mechanisim, this might account for the peculiar modern tendency to limit the doing good to systemic and programmatic approaches.

For philosophy to be useful, it needs to reveal both our thoughts and the things we aren't thinking about.  Cf. De Stael: "He will not believe anything false, but he will never believe many true things."

.......

At mass, the peculiar scent of wine in the back of the cathedral after communion.  Undoubtedly someone with a flask, but also a reminder: the bread is the material substance, the wine the geist, the history, the event.

.........

Just to work this into the stream of thoughts: in the apartment over the Romanian city, the muse spoke most clearly, and told me to write.  But it seemed the only people who would ever read it would be my family and their associates, who have at times seemed like an unreachable wall between myself and the world.  So--don't fault the muse.  And, after the recent (and present) adversities, those concerns have been overcome.

........

I'm not exaggerating the danger in the nature of the present American society, conceptually speaking.  Industrial prosperity excuses all, but the mechanism-- -- from the colleges for security guards (almost invariably of a certain demographic) to the immense wealth and power held outside the structures of public policy and democracy ---seems to suggest that fascism is conceptually complete, if not actually in evidence, at.least in this city.

+

Current situ: Slogging on through cold, blizzards, etc.  Attempting to generate more revenue, at least to basic sufficiency, and, secondly to keep progressing in work and thought, which in all probability means a return to nomadry or some internal-exile bolt-hole in the upper Midwest.   But even with the credentials, skills and experience, nothing seems be at hand.  The current culture of prosperity means it's all one rather large party, and you invite your friends, rather than those who did best on the tests.  As a diligent fellow who has always kept to himself (for some reasons that might not immediately be apparent), and as someone who generally detests parties, the going is rough.

 Pointing out that it's all rather a sham is no solution to the problems at hand... but quod scripsit, scripsit.

And therein lies the greatest evil of the time: the claim of right.  That going along with things is morally preferred to having ideas about things.   This is deeply rooted in American thought, and if the tide of prosperity from the postwar mechanisms of industrial prosperity ever goes out, this specific thought with a specific provenance might eventually be thought the fatal error of the republic.

So, to sum, trying as hard as I can to return to southern Europe, which offers civilizational context, affordable culture, and the means of basic sufficiency vis a vis feeding, sleeping, etc.  But that would be in service of working, reading and thinking, and the local situation, as difficult as the gulag is, does offer a way of study and thought, given the research libraries.  (And then survive the nights as best you can.)   

Hic Rhodus, hic salta.

Interesting thinkpiece in the Times on Chagos.  I hadn't yet heard the 'thousand atoll' theory vis a vis Mauritius.  For all its evils, the current television-powered populism does seem to be forcing more of the political calculus into the public debate.  At least internationally.  Perhaps the reverse domestically.

 Interesting, the Amazon confirmation email for the delivery of the replacement boots arrived precisely as a troupe of dragon dancers was entering the mall.  And the bananas picked up at the same time came to $0.88.  So, apparently I have Chinese good luck.  Or perhaps good Chinese luck.

Which is good news, as I'm operating on impulse power (Star Trek, not psychological), as my innards seem powerfully askew in a very peculiar manner.  Took an extra 4 hours of sleep after the workout, so I'm functional, but it's close.  Rare -- haven't had an issue with illness in a very, very long time.

Interesting constitutional times over the water.  Like it or not, this will likely be the defining event of the Carolingian reign, and it seems that the ruling house is back-pedaling more quickly than the long view might suggest wise.  

Parliament can, of course remove someone from the line of succession, or for that matter, have them killed, but that doesn't necessarily mean the house should be rooting it on.  Interestingly, only two points of the golden triangle have weighed in, at least by press time of today's Times.  Perhaps Buck house is counting on some considered intransigence from Whitehall -- there's been some turnover in that area recently, I think.

#notexpert    #justwiseacring  #anothercountryentirely 

--

Also: apparently the reason for the custodial arrest was apparently to effect a search on the grounds, which is interesting -- the stronger, vague privilege conquered by the more clearly defined one, perhaps.

 Rather stark choice, as the hour struck: coffeehouse, or psalter by the pillars of the church.  Coffee being, after all, you know, warm.  But the mind can't be let to slip in times such as these.  If you live in this country, ground your understanding in the fact of its unequal prosperity; depending on which side of it you fall (and, incidentally, it's not remotely a meritocracy at the moment), you will either need to clear your mind and spirit from the ease you enjoy, or not take the first respite, because the first respite is of a piece with the world you are fighting.  We rise into those silos, tired and wounded, and then, all is lost.

Also: a scientific approach to the body, knowing when it needs warmth and coffee, and when it's just a matter of attempting to cheer the hour a bit.

One can pray too much, but one needs to pray more than one might think.  It's a balance.  And the hour of being too late arrives too soon.  Time for amendment of life.  Turning the ship in the day.

It's my understanding there are two dangers vis a vis the mens sana in conditions such as these -- first, the initial shock of adversity, which I agree is much stronger than those who haven't known adversity might expect.  The second is the hardening, and this is where it gets tricky.  When things have been going badly for a rather long while, you get the (perhaps correct) sense that all bets are off, and with this, you lose some ballast from the mind.  But ships do pump out their bilge from time to time (qed, perhaps), and there's a reason for this.  When you see the necessity of hardening, this tests not the strength of the soul but its wisdom.  Those without wisdom end up in catastrophe (not tragedy, tragedy is distinguished by everyone in the encounter having a valid point of view).  The others see prevailing over the adversity as something they had been heading towards the whole time (and I think it's not impossible that we always have some numinous sense of our lives in their totality), and ascend into the noble form, like a large bird roused from its slumber. 

 

 

Life and fiction.  #tarkovsky #strugatsky #fenimorecooper 

From a report on the current European war: 

The accused is a 27-year-old Russian named -------------------, call sign ‘Stalker.’ A stalker is the name given to people who venture into abandoned or dangerous locations, explore them and serve as guides to other people who want to cross these restricted areas.

 I go mad, I go mad, I shall wear my trousers plaid...

 I'm not sure why my mind keeps returning to the everyday neighborhoods of Skopje that I walked though, had coffee in, stopped for groceries, etc.  

Perhaps it was that it was my last context with civilization as among the civilized, as after that was a remote apartment in the mountains of Bulgaria (off-season resort), and then the crash into the city and the resumption of the struggle to survive in the urban gulag on very difficult terms.

But what I'm savoring isn't the coffee or the groceries, but the fact that every encounter, every transaction, every cup of coffee was within a civilizational context.  It wasn't simply the market and franchise employees in their uniforms, but people transacting according to a way of life they thought right, and prepared to act against injustice when it appeared. (And there's certainly been no shortage of corruption in some of those areas.)  

It's very difficult to describe, but it did give hope that a place like that might exist, and some work might be done there.  

But then to the mountains, which were essential almost holy, but nothing to do with the civilization or the culture, and then to the city of the power of evil, my home of many, many years -- and the present impasse.

 I've mooted this before, but I think I'm certainly swearing off any more lobby Jumbotron concerts at the Philharmonic.  They are free, concededly, and everyone's very nice, and making an effort as part of the broader initiative to open LC up to the surrounding neighborhoods.  But they turn the lights out completely, there's hubbub from cafe in the room, the music volume is very low, and the blase and loud UWS retiree demographic in the room is a group I'm growing increasingly weary of.  

I've blogged about a few concerts, and it was useful for prompting a bit of writing about music in real time, but in this city, art can be a trap set by the wealthy for the unwary.   It's a bit peculiar -- all they had to do was pipe sound into the lobby and let people listen, but instead they built a movie theatre, presumably because they're dry-running for streaming to digital cinema eventually.

Look elsewhere for the music, even in considerable difficulty.  There might be something useful in the actual room, but avoid the shadowy, airless lower floors.