When you come to understand the nature of a place, you need to amend your life to reflect that understanding.  

It is important to be antifascist, and also to be conscious of the authoritarian dangers of an overly socialist mindset -- while at the same time, one does need to be as ruthless as a commissar or a private-sector-military type.  In a broad sense, my country has deployed one sensibility against one, and another against another, but the dangers of not thinking at all have no inherent adversary.  Indeed, there are many who seem very much in favor of it as a collective strategy (e.g., perhaps, the dope-the-ghetto clouds of marihuana vapors on the streetcorners).  

The differences between right Hegelianism and left Hegelianism were finally settled, as Rorty was fond of saying, at a six month long academic seminar entitled the Battle of Stalingrad.  Society has a right to guard itself against the dangers of collective beliefs.  But the guards against collective belief should not necessarily give the rule in matters of private understanding.

To enter into the errors of ether side would indeed be error.  But you must become conscious of your own existence (classically, that presence which is not quiddity: freedom), and its meaning, and its morality -- or it will be taken from you, and then done away with.

It's not just that films like The Matrix (Baudrillard/hyperreality) reveal aspects of present-day life in this society -- it's that they are a more clear way of understanding the actual event than the normative, intuitive, unexamined view that most people generally think with.

There's much more going on around you than your general mindset might indicate, and the things that you're caught up in likely mostly serve to generate revenue for someone else.  Every Eastern tradition in contact with the West has the same message for Westerners: dispassion and mental clarity.

And as for the locals, as absurd as the precepts of Scientology might be, the general notion that the highest good is the clarity of the mind is admirable.  But to reach this, people first have to try to be good, and second, have to try to be good in the right way, and I don't think the culture generally is even to first base on that one anymore. 

Things are seldom what they seem
Skim milk masquerades as cream... 

A minimally sufficient life in a place of real culture.  This has been my aim when means were sufficient, and when they have been insufficient.  Witness the Wittgensteinian camp bed, table and chair, with the addition of stacks of books.  And a kitchen and WC, of course.  (Dining in college not being an option.)

W never visited Oxford during the war.  Enemy alien, perhaps.  And, more dangerously, one who stood outside the world of appearances.

 I should make clear that there is no logical reason for me to have been fighting for my life, and fighting to do real work, on the streets are of my country all of these years.   I have no bad habits, lead a very clean life, keep in intellectual, physical and spiritual shape.  No mendicancy ever, strict daily disciplune.  My degrees were strong (first tier) and my experience in theatre significant and wide ranging.  And yet, decades of fighting to survive in impossible situations, almost invisible.

Perhaps it has so something to do with my family's work (not mine) or perhaps I stepped on the toes of some soi-disant  master if the universe.  

There's been a string of these notes in the blog with springtime--the mind thaws.  But I do need to make this clear -- there is no logic or reason to the excruciatingly difficult position I've been in.  See the note attached to my online CV for details on the slog.

I entered the Temple of St. Sava reverently.  It had been a long journey.  Some months ago, I had found myself in rural Virginia, near my undergraduate university, almost tapped out, as I had been unable to find an apartment using the last of the Covid savings, and I realized that I could last longer abroad.  I then checked the airline prices and the rental costs, and with a day, I was flying to Belgrade, in order to spend the days looking for work online.  Of course, since the standing room tickets to the national theatre were less than $5, I was frequently there.  And I spent many hours walking around the city and reading in the park.  I found a job, but it required a Windows machine, and I only had a Chromebook, so I pressed "pause" on that, and kept looking.  I was living in a rental in an old outdoor mall from the days of the Republic -- Kumecivo Sochache (sp?), inside one of the stores that had been converted to tourist rental.  I kept to myself, drank coffee, baked bread, read Henry James in the park, and looked for work.

Finally, I found a position in India as an Assistant Dean and professor, teaching American constitutional law and international public law.  I had extended the stay by a few weeks, as I had been unable to bring myself to abandon the quest before I found something.  Unfortunately, Turkish Air and I didn't see eye to eye on the rebooking, which cost me the price of a new ticket, hastily rebooked after being turned away at the airport on the day of departure and then booking an extra night at the rental and a second ticket.  

The rental was actually my second place there.  I had initially found a place in New Belgrade, right across from a small university, apparently rented by a local government official, perhaps now retired.  A 24-hour chain bakery two blocks away.  Michael, the government official, was a bit more savvy than he let on.  We were using Google Translate to communicate, passing the laptop back and forth -- on the first pass, he made a befuddled face and punched some keys apparently at random, bringing up my entire (innocuous) search history.  It had been difficult to find him at the airport -- I think he might have had second thoughts when I showed up in an old winter coat and with a BW knapsack, as opposed to the usual American attire and rumble suitcase.  We talked a bit on the drive over; I mentioned that I had wandered through the temple during renovations on an earlier visit in 2002.  I was with a theatre troupe, and we had an excellent Italian dinner with our hosts on King Michael street, just across from the JDP.  They indicated the structure on the hill, and I mentally decided to explore it later on.  Luckily, the gate was open, as the small chapel and gift shop was open.   I wandered into the main church, finding a few candlelit icons on the back wall.  The floor was dirt, and the stones around me were rough-hewn ("when building a great dome, one does not use finished stone" Hegel, I think).  I purchased an icon and kept it with me for some time.  When I described my visit during the renovations to Michael on the drive in, he gave me a bit of inquiring side-eye, as the temple had been under construction, not renovation, something that had escaped my perception, being considerably more intrepid than knowlegable.

At any rate, the van to the airport departed from the traffic circle at the bottom of the hill.  I asked the driver to wait a moment, got out, and had a brief colloquy with the distant Temple, mentally resolving to return to that particular place.

After the confusion with the airlines, I had lost my deposit on the planned rental in Cleveland, and the indolent fellow from whom I had rented before refused to proceed without it.  I put out a call to a fellow who I knew rented inexpensive rooms near the university in Illinois, and he agreed to rent me one for a few months, so that I could prepare the courses for India.  India proved to be chimerical.  They sent the wrong paperwork twice, and the third batch was mysteriously held up for over a week with the courier, arriving the day after I would have had to file it in Chicago.  Now inarguably completely tapped out, I returned to NYC for what proved to be a difficult winter, which broke in spring when I returned to the Balkans, first heading to Bucharest, and then Sibiu.  But now I was back in the temple where I had been for the previous year's easter night liturgy, and many Sundays reading the psalter after Catholic Mass at the tiny cathedral near the Parliament.  

A guard approached and told me that I would have to leave, as there was a liturgy with the Patriarch about to start, and only Serbians were allowed to be within the building.  I was taken aback, but reasoned that a church without walls would have a hard time building a ceiling, so it would be best to go quietly.  (The walls and ceiling, incidentally are covered with brilliant mosaics and pietra dura paid for by Gazprom.)  I asked if I could stand outside the doors on the porch and look in, and he agreed, but later came back to say that this was to be prohibited as well, and asked me to stand some distance off on the grass.  I obeyed, peering at the small bit of the inside I could see, until the Patriarch and his party arrived on the porch, and then I headed off to Starbucks.  

It had been a bit jarring, but also inspiring.  The Christian place of worship was meaningful enough to them that they felt they had to defend it against all other peoples (Americans understandably not being high on the list).   It was a rare inhospitable moment in a country famous for its strict rules of hospitality, and that made it even more meaningful.  I felt a bit like a missionary playing pickup baseball with a remote tribe who suddenly find the game so meaningful that they keep all the equipment for themselves, and make it a part of the tribe's life.  I don't think I've ever seen a more clear demonstration of the conquering power of Christ.

I returned to the city some months later, as part of the extended Balkans travels.  First, a tiny studio across the street from St. Mark's, the parish church near the Parliament built in the 1940's, and I visited it a few times, but I respected the discipline of the church, and kept away from both the temple and the patriarchal cathedral closer to the old city.  I had a peculiar dream one night connected with an angel -- he cast salt in my face for some reason, and I shifted into lawyer mode, demanding to know who was in charge there.  Shrugging, he pointed to some small figures far below, clearly prelates of the national church.  The angel had an immense face.

Although I visited the parish a few times, that stay much more often found me at the Starbucks across from the Parliament ($2 Americanos) and the JDP and the national theatre down the street, tickets at both well under $10, as culture is thought a necessity there, rather than a luxury good.  I had a small wooden table in the rental, which was good for reading, and the strong hotplate made for some savory dinners.  (When I am forced back to the city for these difficult winters, the coffeehouses and the dinners abroad tend to come into sharp relief in memory.)  One night at the Starbucks, I listened to the live broadcast of Rheingold from the season opening at Bayreuth -- at the end of the evening, the parliament building was brilliantly lit across the street, filing the windows, just as Valhalla is revealed.  (An uneasy cultural synthesis, of course, as the Germanic horde and Belgrade aren't on the easiest of terms historically.)  

After the month or so across from St. Mark's, I decamped to Zemun, to a apartment rented from a local musician and scholar -- the bombed out air defense building was visible from the window, and on the other side, there was the distant strobe of Usce Mall, which had been an excellent place for necessities until I figured out the markets.  I spent my time there writing, gratefully.  Walking into the city from time to time, across Brankov Most for a bit of theatre or some coffee, and then the long walk back at night.  And the full kitchen and the nearby Lidls made for many healthy repasts.  I was able to see theatre, read, think, and write.  Belgrade has offered this to me on occasion, and it has come to stand for the proposition of a safe station on the road, where I can stop off and write or explore for a month.  

But it is one of two countries in the world whose constitutions begin by declaring it the home of the dominant ethnic group, and those others who live with them.  

It has its mystery, and its discretion.  But when I've occasionally visited for a bit of respite from an inexplicably difficult life in my own country, I've been grateful even for its reticence and defensiveness.  Such things are real, and indicate realities.

 Anniversary of the birth of Ovid, who figures in the Balkan consciousness thanks to exile in Varna.  Just discovered Andric had an early collectiuon if poetry/prose based on the letters.  (If it is in English, nypl doesn't have it.)

Have considered learning Serbo-Croat for the sole purpose of reading the Andric sign in front of JDP.  A quest.

 In sum, a rather difficult winter.  Blog notes such as 'bit of a nip in the air' were more bread crumb than unmediated description.

I'm of two minds in the alleged Saxe+Coburg motto 'Never cuomplain, never explain.' On one hand, it works out rather well for the sovereign if everyone does it. On the other hand, it does help keep mental focus.  At munimum, it's good to note when to mend.

At the heart of it, perhaps the key claim is that a minimally sufficient life should be attainable without signing on with the CIA, or playing along with various Midwestern con artists.

These examples have not been selected at random.

 Surrounded by the sorts of things one would expect in a place like this, I continue to work determinedly to return to a place of basic sufficiency, living culture, and discovery.  Belgrade.  Sarajevo.  Cluj.  Mostar.  Bucharest.  Sibiu.  Pirin mountains.  Bar.    

And yet, to get to the place where I could work, and be incapable of work, would get me nothing.  So I focus on what work I can do here, knowing that I'll be reaching to the same sources in the distant, more neutral countries.  God willin' and the crick don't rise.

 Despising, for you, this city...

There is a world elsewhere.

Finally realizing that nothing within the world of appearances within your culture and civilization will ever be of use to you, or even sufficient to preserve your existence, is oddly quite liberating.  

To the hidden, which is to say (in the full meaning of the term), the actual world.

 This can be a difficult place, not least because of the clouds of marihuana fumes and the surprisingly large percentage of folks who seem interested on copulating with a fellow (and the corresponding number who seem to think that a fellow wants to copulate with them).  These and other troubles will likely increase with springtime in the coming weeks, the difficulty and trial shifting from phusis to geist. 

Historically, a difficult time for a son of man.

To will to stand before God is an ontic resolution.

To be against the erasure is an ontological axiom.

To resist the corruption is a pragmatic (Kant) determination.

The world of appearances is the confluence of these levels.  Be wary of those who appear powerful. What seems simple requires differences and distinctions.

 Twice now, the Alleluia has been unseasonably intoned at the cathedral at morning mass, without recognition or apology.  As if it were unimportamt. Not exactly a minor See.  Interesting.  

 Hm, okay -- it's not the tourist swarm that causes the loss of energy.  Apparently, it's sitting down in a firm chair in a climate-controlled room after the evening and morning.  Understandable.  Just need to catch it on the swoop downward, do some breathing, and caffeinate a bit at the right moment. #science

 I appear to have taken on Peirce's fortunes, at least as to the financial aspect.  We share a simple befuddlement at not being able to get on when doing important things that you're supposed to be doing, and that you trained a rather long time to do.  His relationship with Wm. James (and possibly Henry) must have been interesting -- the famous prolific philosopher, a Bostonian of private means, patrician son of a Swedebourgian industrialist, who never claimed much depth academically, in contrast to the ever-swotting, completely unrecognized, penniless, greatest American philosopher of the time, who was completely blacklisted from the academy generally, and more importantly, Harvard.  

(And who, in fairness, also had an unwise love affair and risked a grand gesture of purchasing certain real estate.)   

 Bit of a nip in the air last night.

I'm not making the argument that those who resist corruption in my society are hived off from the rest, given a hard time and perhaps even done away with, as that would invite a very broad debate touching very large social questions.  Frankly, my society doesn't have the social mechanism for addressing these types of concerns.  At most, they would be addressed as a claim by an individual, and so my energies are best devoted to surviving the situation, whatever the larger social resonance, and however many others might be in the same position.  

Things do look a bit dark at present, and these sorts of notes are the kind of thing I would want to have said, were the time of saying things to come to a close.  I'm certain that, at minimum, it will be mined for sentence structure and word choice by some AI bots trawling the web and perhaps used to build a bot to sell cosmetics or luxury time-shares on a website, so, you know, at least some good came of it.

 Still mystified by the peculiarities of starting the day in the libraries.  After the workout, Mass, breakfast, and about an hour of reading, I go through the security search, get into the building, find a place, and then a swarm of tourists descends for a little over an hour.  In the middle of which, almost invariably, all of the energy vanishes from my body rather quickly.  Still can't fathom that.  

I could delay the library for an hour, but then finding a place would be difficult.  I could go to the other side of the room, but they apparently have the vents on double there (and nil on the better side, which leads to some thin air late in the afternoons) which makes for a drafty day.  

And to top it all off, they're staging some incredibly misconceived immersive theatre performance twice a day when a lounge singer comes in and belts out "People who need people..." twice a day for twenty minutes apiece.  I abscond for the duration, but can still hear it in the distance.

The collections are really the only useful thing about the city for me at present, but getting to them is starting to drive me a bit mad.  Onward -- steady as she goes.

Interesting time getting to Mass -- finally found out that it was in the Lady Chapel, and managed to get through the security for the patrocina grand event.  This is a complicated city; I've recorded many of the complications in this blog.  But the church manages to still provide a window, a windowed monad, perhaps, on the reality of the faith.  The difficulty is that almost everyone is caught up in rhythms of habituation, imitation. and competition -- the thing itself is obscured, and it would take some doing to point out that there is grail there to be uncovered, let alone the disposition and work involved in bringing the inner truth of the event to light in the present time.  Never let the world teach you about unworldly things.  At most, it provides a window.  

The church is a ladder supply warehouse, not a ladder machine.  I prefer this metaphor to the analogy of a  hospital (apparently one with a peculiarly ineffective psych ward).

---

Standard daily paean to southern Europe -- the desire to return to a minimally sufficient existence, interesting cultures and art, and the dignity of civilizational context.  I'm remaining calm and carrying on, but this departure and return really does need to happen rather soon.  

Was doing some private devotions on the walk from the gym to the cathedral, and encountered a father talking to his very young son in what I suppose he thought to be a normal voice, but one which any sufficiently well-grounded observer could tell was primarily an instrument used to attack a hostile world.  

Contrary to the received view in the New World (Prospero: "Tis new to thee...")  civilization can also preserve innocence.

Eventually, all of the notions that you projected onto the City wear away.  This takes time -- decades, sometimes.  Then you see its actual nature.  And you vow never to return.

Really, the only reason I moved here many years ago was to work in the theatre -- that was why I kept to midtown and the west side, when the east side was clearly the better part.  Now that all of those doors are not only closed, but obstructed by vegetation that's grown in the interval, I look at the place in considerable disbelief.  Midtown has become what was, even a couple decades ago, only found in the raciest parts of Chelsea and the East Village.  And the old bohemian areas are simply wealth-extraction points via the rent.  Between the enthusiastic young epicures and the money-raking owners, there's not really a place for a serious artist, writer or thinker to stand.  

Homo, fuge!

Dangerous times, with the Machiavel with certain distinct foreign entanglements leading the armies into battle.  But the democracy is usually right -- and its (highly mediated) judgment was that the dangers of the corrupt Republic were greater than the dangers of the mercurial Machiavel.  

Frankly, I'm just attempting to survive and understand things.  (At times, I'm not sure which is more difficult, or necessary.)

My writing about the corruption I've encountered is not merely reflexive or purposeless.  At the Berlin Wall, the guards were convinced to fire on their fellow citizens by being told that the folks trying to get out of the country were stealing the value of their education from the socialist republic.  In that there are potential countervailing claims of right, I do need to be absolutely clear about the corruption that I've encountered, and the dispositive effects of these incidences of corruption.  

'nuff said, perhaps.

 Still very struck by the fact that what seemed a difficult exile, scratch  level existence in a distant country, now seems an unapproachable ideal. Dispassion. Dispassion. Dispassion.

 "Walk around the city, examine its ramparts..."   The right to roam is one of the things I admire about the UK, though, to my understanding, it has been a bit curtailed in recent years.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/royal-family/article/king-charles-england-coast-path-dqwmvxp2j

 There is a recent Russian film. I can't recall the title, set in a small town by an industrial port.  One of the workers has come there with the secret plan of swimming to one of the American freighters and defecting.  He befriends a local youth, and there's some Bildung -- the space race is on, and there's the cult of the astronaut -- while the fellow is relentlessly training in the gym, planning his bid for freedom.  Long story short, he misses the timing, and swims after the departing freighter, presumably perishing in the attempt, and the young boy finds himself in Moscow, randomly face to face with an astronaut at a victory parade, and hands him a bouquet of flowers.

There is more space than one might think between nations, and it's easy to be lost in the space between.  From this, in a pragmatic sense, I take the lesson that I need to be a bit more tenacious if I manage to make it back across to the more neutral European countries. Heretofore, I had thought of it as a bit of a temporary refuge while nomading, and was grateful for the minimally sufficient life and culture that I was able to secure.  And I tried to return the gift by writing as much cultural criticism as I could.  But life is more serious than one might think at first, and given the inexplicable, extraordinary difficulties that I am facing in my own country, I need to become more interested in the other lands that I visit.  There is only one life to be had, and I need to be alert to every possible path to an existence that could support worthwhile work, whether in the arts, or the law, or just writing and reading.  

I've taken up the habit of the occasional predawn psaltery of the liturgy of the hours.  An old form -- the text is hard to find for free in Latin in the right format.  Originally, I was using a 16th c. version, but the source website shifted to an early 20th c. version, so I followed along.  It is valuable, in that it clears the channel.  When one awakens in the city, one doesn't necessarily awaken in one's true capacities.  Like good animals. we learn what comportment to have in order to survive, and we default to that.  But the true capacities of the human, including the sheer effrontery of addressing heaven before sunrise, isn't necessarily in the urban worker's skillset.  People have been pointing this out at least since Plato, but the city has a distorting effect on us political animals.  I think industrialization has deepened the problem in two dimensions.  First, the worst of the grotesques, and there are many of them, seem to be barely human.  Second, proximity to the center of the civilization doesn't seem to have a humanizing effect.  The wealthy, as far as I can tell from occasional conversations and reading their sorts of news sources, seem completely lost in a more genteel fashion.  In the early 20th c.  many of the anti-soviet cultures had, perhaps in response to the humanism at the center of socialist revolutionary thought, a cult of the ideal human.  You see this in the art in the figures of steely determination -- not the carefully rendered musculature of Bernini's monumental Roman sculpture or its inspirations in the sketeches of the renaissance, but looming, iron figures of human-scale strength.  I noticed this phenomenon clearly in the Croatian churches of Bosnia.  

Perhaps to blunt these twin dangers of the idealized human, modern industrial civilization in the West seems increasingly to encourage a sort of blurry incapacity in its citizens.  The focus is on personal contentment in a more Epicurean sense.  The political and economic calculus is explicitly based on happiness, and while the absence of pain is a good thing, once this metric moves into a more positivist scale, the search for happiness can become a bit manipulable and meretricious.

My country does have its own spiritual resources, as far as they might be from the culture of the present, and I've sought them out.  There is a distinctly American way of hearing the different drummer, and one can use this cultural space to set up a Walden of one's own in which to live as deliberately as possible.  But again, this is very far from the present state of the culture collectively, so even though this path is distinctly American in provenance, those taking the path become hostem humanes generis in the hyper-real corporatist culture of the age.  

As a consequence, one does need to imagine oneself into a place of sufficient freedom -- but what distinguishes this from madness, or swimming out to sea in blind faith, is that the imagined space becomes a place in which it is possible to exercise the powers of reason in freedom.  That is both the desideratum and the place of finding it -- the capacity of thinking, the possibility of thinking, and the place of the possibility of thinking are, in a pragmatic sense, the same.  The dancer, the dance, the music and the stage are a mereological unity, a single phenomenon of capacity of expression and its proper place in the world.

 Hm.  Given the special military operation, the yearly day of protest, the half-marathon in the city, and the ides of March, if I had a country house, I'd likely be weekending there.  As it is, I'll plod on in the streets with no names alongside the proles and hope for the best.

 rip. J. Habermas.  One of the last minds with the golden thread of post WW2 philosophy.

 Perhaps it comes down to this: there are people who understand the things themselves, and those who only know things as part of a larger game.  The latter attack and destroy the distracted former as part of their game.

Even so, the only objective error is the claim of right, the thought that the notion of the things themselves is the great error to be solved by the game.

 No matter the care and generosity of previous generations, never underestimate the ability of folks from my country to make any given place a thoroughly unpleasant place to read a book.

Thinking of one apartment I had in Bucharest -- located off of the oldest street in the city, broad, tree-lined, many businesses, few tourists (like Belgrade's King Alexander as opposed to Mihail).  Easy walk to both the opera house and the mall, plenty of bakeries in a short walk, famous municipal theatre around the corner near the embassy district towards Piata Romana -- I saw an interesting and authentic Measure there -- among the more expensive tickets of the peregrination, almost $20.  Large German grocery easily walkable.  In sum, convenient and interesting.  The name of the national 19th c. poet was written autograph-style across the electrical feeder box in front.  Obviously not by him, but one of his descendants was a minor poet under the regime, and on investigation, I found that he had lived not far away.  I broke my rule of keeping low key around the neighbors of the short-term rental, and asked a few folks in front about it, who professed no knowledge, and considerable doubt as to the minor-poet-theory.

But the fact that it was there opened my eyes to the neighborhood, one of the more prestigious areas under the regime, interesting modernist architecture now gone slightly to seed.  A bit like the two old socialist shopping centers that I lived nearby at various times in Belgrade, (Kumikevo Sochache?) and a very large concrete arcade in New Belgrade.  Especially to a Westerner, it's odd to see these high-status places from socialist times.  The general notion here was that it was all Brutalism and true puritan believers in the road to socialism --  and the dissentients, who were relegated to poverty.  Apparently not the case -- the times had their proper grandeur, no matter the economic/social system.

From time, I wonder if I might have been more able to work under societies like those.  Times and places with a stronger civilizational context, as opposed to people getting away with whatever they could, and as much money as they could (e.g., our current Leader).  Even now, I would jump in a heartbeat at the chance for some Brutalist concrete rooms that I could fill with philosophy paperbacks, a camp bed, and a table and chair.  And a kitchen.  From time to time, I've been able to have that, and it has been productive.

Hope springs eternal.  (Even among folks with a few graduate degrees and decades of experience -- in the free-for-all fairground money-grab of present times.)

Hm.  CPAC is meeting in Budapest next week.  Perhaps I can cobble together a wobbly aggrieved-and-entitled angry manifesto on social media and sneak into the tribe, and then sneak off at the Nepliget station for points south, after a day at the Szecheny baths.  (Excellent strategy for long trips, much less than a cheap hotel room, and even if you don't doze off, you feel like you've had a good rest.)  

When I was less familiar with southern European bus routes, I once accidentally got off at the wrong Budapest station in the middle of the night, completely deserted.  Saw a map in an adjacent rail station, went over to look, and hopped on the first train in blind faith.  Turned out to be the last train of the night, went right to my destination, after a scenic trip over the river.  Magyar luck.

Hungary would be near the top of my daydream list, were it not for the firm social divisions.  Centuries ago, a cool tribe from Asia took a walk west, and found a great place at a bend in the Danube, and stayed there -- in the middle of people of completely different genetic ethnicities and languages.  (Most linguistic borders in that part of the world are slightly blurry -- not that one.)  But to keep their identity, they've had very firm social rules -- e.g., the balcony at the opera house.  So, a very likeable people, and Catholic as well, but I think I'd always be a Slavic/American stranger.   

Perhaps not -- apparently there has been a split between the Buda gardens sensibility and the Cafe New York folks dating to the early 20th c.  I've only stayed there for several weeks, given the rental costs.  (Sort of my respite from the stranger countries to the south.)  So, hardly an expert.

I remember performing in the Molnar festival there as an undergraduate -- my first taste of freedom from the bonds of home.  And the literature -- I discovered Kraznahorkai many years ago by keeping an eye on the window of a good bookshop, frequently when walking around in the middle of the night -- and now, the Nobel, as well as an upcoming tribute at Lincoln Center for Bela Tarr.  If you keep on keeping on, folks will come to you in search of the better mousetrap.  

Especially the New Yorkers -- the greatest concentration of actors and artists on the planet, but everything (correctly) thought worthwhile comes from the outside.  So keep an eye on the display windows.

 

In business, when someone says that they'll make a decision critical for the future of the business based on their own instinct and the 'feelings in my bones', it usually means that they're taking advice/direction from outside the company.

 This week was a bit of a muddle, tbh.  Bright side: not yet mad, which might have been the chief achievement of the week.  

Tried to focus on a certain philosopher, but for some reason found his stuff absolutely impenetrable on the first read, and simple/straightforward on the second.  Every day.  Odd.  The reading isn't a detour\frolic--ramping up to the philosophy readings for the current project. Cranking out CVs daily.

Oddly, recently, I had two contacts for law jobs, asking for interview availability times, and then never heard back.  I have some guesses.

Resupply run -- had to swap out the knapsack, as the straps had worn to threads.  Found good deals on Amaxon, and was able to resupply $300 of kit (msrp) for about $100.  Mixed feelings areas tempted to plow through with rags and threads and get on a plane sooner.

Sorry to decommission the old knap -- BW, nylon, saw me safely back & forth across the Balkans for a few years.  If I had storage space, certainly would have kept it for sentiment/spare parts. 

Milocsz once described the sense of relief that commuters on a highway feel, spying a family of ducks waddling to their lake alongside the road.  I have much the same feeling reading the email blasts from Romanian Starbucks.  There is a decaf Americano elsewhere.

 Recognizing that the problems of one person in a world like this don't amount to half of a hill of beans, there are enough strange things about my misadventures of the last few decades to warrant a bit of a general hullabaloo along the lines of mores, tempore, etc.  Or perhaps these sorts of things are less rare than I think.

If my family had been farmers in Nebraska, I'd have a fairly good idea of how to play things.  But, things being as they are, it's a little like escaping from a hypnotist and then being mugged seriatum by three roving gangs of psychologists.  The framing of the event becomes a bit wobbly.

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Increasing thoughts of Orthodox spirituality as a path that might offer a bit of space from the usual suspects while still heading the right direction up the mountain.  Probably a wiser course than jumping to another Abrahamic channel entirely.

 

 "I must make some money every day."  (Peirce)

 While I've never been remotely tempted to mendicancy (there was actually one stretch several years ago in which I could only do laundry because I kept my eyes on the path at night and would find spare change presumably fallen from bicyclists), I have of course thought about the conventional forms of funding via websites.  But someone in the midst of social divisions shouldn't post online asking for donations or investment (e.g., funding to write books), not least because it would implicate the donors in the conflict at hand (e.g., the waves of prosecutions in Russia over website donations).  

I've made a principled stand from time to time, almost always because of things I've been asked to do, or things that have been done to me, but it puts too much weight on the Kantian dictum that I must be able to will the moral law I follow to be a universal one to assume that everyone on my email list would support such a move, or should be asked to.  I evidently have my own struggle, and I'll struggle through it.

"You don't ask for mercy while you're still on the stand."  (Leonard Cohen)

This is a fairly normal blog, with a fairly normal tone.  Given the events against which the discourse is unfolding, I count that a remarkable achievement.

A cunning plan: I shall read Ivo Andric so intently that I either find myself magically transported to Belgrade, or go mad and think myself to have been magically transported to Belgrade.  (If the latter, I would actually save money on airfare, rent, $6 theatre tickets, $2 coffees, etc.)

Likely not Sarajevo, as he's not that popular there these days, at least gauging from the condition of his books in the (foundation) library, and the amount of pigeon commentary on the statue.  Puzzling, as Tito seems to still be quite popular, cult of Walter, etc.  But the elephant himself appears to have angered the beys.

 

Over a decade ago, when these extraordinary and inexplicable troubles began, I imagined that it was an interlude or caesura in the narrative in which a bit of heroism would be required, and I did try to rise to the event in the manner of an intrepid hero.  At least to my own mind, I pulled it off rather well -- despite sometimes going 4-5 days without sleep, ill-fitting shoes, thin nutrition, etc.

Now, after all of these years, it's clear that the event is not an interlude or a caesura.  I've kept to the heroism -- no vices, no mendicancy, firm physical, spiritual, and mental discipline.  But it's clear that the original narrative, the one in which I grew up and received my education, and made a solid go at three professions, is no longer the story.  

It must be a new story, then, or nothing at all.  I've set the task of getting back to southern Europe, and I will make that happen, despite the fact that circumstances seem to be conspiring to keep me just shy of the resources required to do it responsibly.  The event becomes the story, and the narrative was a simply a dream of childhood.  Onward.

 It's a bit like being a prisoner in a Russian gulag of a little over a century ago, but thanks to some VIPs in the local Party, the gulag has an astounding library with every title he could possibly need.  Nonetheless, he plots his escape, all the while trying to figure out how to continue the work outside of the gulag, and without the providential library.

--

 Train Station for Two is a very good film, not least because it enunciates a complex political reality within the framework of a popular film.  The protagonist is a concert pianist from Moscow, and it's an open question as to whether he or his television weather reporter wife was behind the wheel when they struck someone on the road, so he's been sent off to the work camp prison in the north.  Long story short, he meets a waitress in a railroad station restaurant, and the happenstance encounter works well for both.

Translation: elitist, obscurantist artist enduring a purgatory, one that that he can't quite understand, or know whether it is justified, in the people's state on its path to socialism.  Some explicit contrasts to more Katchatourian-like music favored by the ethnic types and melon sellers.  In fairness, Katchatourian is a lifesaver for second-world orchestras on hard times.  Jaunty.

 Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cluj, Bucharest, Sibiu, Skopje, Mostar, Bar, Razlog, Bansko, Sofia, Budapest...

And yet -- the command, the superscription, or perhaps just the benign deception of the place, so that no more days will be lost: 

HIC RHODUS -- HIC SALTA.

These three or four preternaturally warm days arrived just in time.  The wind tempered.  For graces received.  It was beginning to be a bit difficult to stand up and walk.  #draw...your...sword #princessbride

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At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that I must decamp abroad soon, or else.  Not the hysteria of a moment -- I've been dealing with this level of inexplicable adversity for more than a decade now, and I'm inclined to trust my judgment in distinguishing trade winds from the edges of a distant storm. 

Not really a discretionary calculus; income has been highly attenuated for several years now, and being able to have, for extended periods of time, a life that isn't inherently destructive of body and mind becomes increasingly important over the long haul.

Among the frothy lives of the prosperous middle class here, individuals' situations such as mine don't even register, except as a salutary warning not to challenge the prevailing corruption.  But if there is a way to find a minimally sufficient life that will allow me to do the honest work of the mind and implicitly testify against such things, it is incumbent on me to find it.  Being attacked by robbers in the road doesn't release the crusader from his vow.

Most people would describe the situation as a bit desperate, and would be at their wits end, willing to make any deal  necessary to extricate themselves from being the focus of such things.  But I'm sort of taking the very long view, and merely cabling  objective descriptions of the situation back to the Home Office, keeping to the Officers Mess, and occasionally whistling "Men of Harlech" as I scan the horizon for puffs of smoke.

In short, "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it."

 tl;dr:

Many (20+) years of adversity, encountering corruption in large institutions when trying for three careers: theatre, law, and the academy.  Everything documented, and a brief overview linked to online CV.  Degrees and experience in hand, and the work continuing as an independent scholar.  Barely surviving the present situation (not exaggeration), and trying to get back to digital nomading in the Balkans, which offers the double attraction of a minimally sufficient life and cultural encounters and development in my fields (see my latest, a self-published compendium of reviews, available on Amazon).

And... what's to come is still unsure.  But we are definitely at the stage in which marbles are being played for keeps (and perhaps occasionally lost).  

So, tune in next time, when you'll hear our hero say...

 Springtime.  Historically, an inauspicious time for the son of man.

Two lessons from the experience:

-- Never think that the present condition is inherently a derogation of the necessary things.  You have to work wherever and however you find yourself.  I had thought the nomading uncongenial for the work, as it was an exile of sorts, going from one Humble Quarters to another, and keeping a very close watch on the discretionary spending, even in the least developed areas of the Second World.  When the sustaining factors unexpectedly vanished, and I was launched into the present existence, the ability to function in the world immediately previous suddenly became plain.  Always the case, I suppose.  The grass is always greener in memory.

-- Be ruthless about rooting out any quiet pining for some times in the past.  In Macedonia, I might have mused about the research libraries, cheap gyms, and relatively inexpensive high-protein foods in the city, and although I was careful to add the caveat that having such things at present would also likely involve immense hardship, I can't be absolutely sure that the spirit catches all of our caveats.  Fleshpots of Egypt.  Nostalgie de la boue.

 I understand now why Shakespeare named the fellow in Measure and from the Inns "Master Froth" -- surrounded by this bubbling, unfocused energy upon which the culture has come to rely.  

A teacher of mine (although never formally so), a Czech scenographer and director, staged a piece one in which each death (and there were several) was depicted by the popping of a balloon (thin, like a bubble) and tossing a bit of dust in the air -- each happening as the character left stage, so, just out of the audience's view.  Similarly, I remember a bit of law school banter in the Midwest, a fellow talking about his grandfather from Indiana, whose request was that there be a popcorn machine at the service, and that the guests partake.  

Froth is the small bubbles.  The abortive rises.  The point is the longer, deeper lines of force and expansion.  Where a culture insists on the former, doubt the culture.

A very warm day in the city, it has the feeling of a holiday.  Had to check the interwebs to see which holiday it was that I had missed remembering.  Everyone seems filled with an energy, although it all feels just a bit off.  Most concretely in some of the rough sleepers wandering the streets shouting insane things.  Saw two between the cathedral and the breakfast cafe.  The Greek is εκρασια, and if memory serves, it comes from the sound of the ice in the rivers breaking in springtime.

Gently down the stream.  And to foreign shores, as quickly as God will allow.

As the reading has been interrupted for a moment, a few quick thoughts:

The ability to get to southern Europe in the next few months for an extended nomad trek is shaping up to be an existential objective, as they say.  Given where I stand after past events, I can’t hold this position.  The adversities are likely pushing me towards a simple throwing the hands up, dropping all work, and seeking animal survival in the city, but that simply won’t happen.  It would no longer recognizably be me, and the obligation to preserve the self is higher than the obligation to play the option with the highest percentage of animal survival.

Running through the events of the last three months, I can honestly say that only a handful of the people I’ve ever met could have survived that sequence of days, while continuing to work and think.  This is a very different country when you’re placed outside the charm of things.  And it has been over ten years since that reality began in force.  Iron discipline, of course.  Teetotal as always when I don't have a place of my own.  Daily physical and spiritual exercise.  Never mendicancy.  Respect all laws.  Christmas chocs allowed when 75% off in January.  (Seriously, chocolate is a survival food, not a luxury.  It is good fuel.)  

So, I must get there.  And I will be able to work there, and provide a minimally sufficient life.  And there will be time enough, and pocket-change enough for theatre, music, and coffee. And I will continue to discover the place, whichever one of the likely half -dozen it turns out to be.

The critical point is that although the primary motive in selecting that region is that, even in these circumstances, I can have a minimally sufficient material existence, material sustenance and housing are not the highest ideals. 

The work must continue, because that is what I am, and if I were to surrender it, the thing that would surrender it would no longer recognizably be me.   The Samurai must survive as Samurai.  The thinker must survive as thinker.