In retrospect, the park next to the library was not the best place to work vis-a-vis the ongoing goal of avoiding the marihuana-smoking over-entitled greed machines. Bit woozy, and a bit mad about that.
Genuinely the worst people on earth, precisely because of their position in the civilization. I'll leave this city (hopefully before the thunderbolt) with absolutely no regrets.
There is a world elsewhere. Next year in a holy country.
So, explain how the rhinoceros thing is even remotely plausible.
Okay, think of it this way. If someone says that there is not a rhinoceros in the room, you might look around the room, ascertain the lack of an immense horned beast, and then agree. This is verification, and it's what you consider to be truth itself.
Steady on.
Well, okay, in fairness, if someone said that, in the larger sense of the term, there is no rhinoceros in the room, you might think about the ways in which this might be true, but you'd likely feel a duty towards your habit of verification, and these would be only slight forays into that other territory, and you'd likely say that, when it comes down to brass tacks, and given the obvious reality of things, it would be more logical to conclude that the room was rhinoceros-free.
But how is it false to say that there is not a rhinoceros in the room?
It's not false, it's simply nonsense. First, there was never any possibility of a rhinoceros being in the room, so in a Hegelian sense, there is no specific lack of a rhinoceros.
But it suggests an absence, not a thing lacking.
Precisely. It only suggests an absence in a situation where there was never a possibility of a presence. It's like saying that time isn't running backwards, or that a giraffe isn't π. The statement cannot be agreed to because it's simply nonsense, despite the fact that this one offers a foothold of attempted verification. I might similarly say that running off the edge of the Grand Canyon doesn't cause the river below to turn into the Napoleonic Code, but the person who tried to verify it would be a fool, and if they tried to verify it conceptually, they'd have nothing to grab onto. The possibility of verification doesn't mean that the claim makes sense.
But its not theoretically impossible for there to be a rhinoceros in the room.
Well, that depends on the kind of theories that you have.
I mean, some undergraduates could have, as a prank, gone to the zoo, brought a small one back and tossed it in the window.
Legitimate, but the question is if that's enough to create the genuine possibility of the event. Genuine doubt is as difficult as genuine belief, as Peirce said to dispel the Cartesian demon. And so the expression in language at best might reduce to the claim that the situation that no rational person would think to be the case is in fact not the case. Which for W, might be precisely the same as the stronger form.
So we can never know if there is a rhinoceros in the room?
No, we just can't make the claim that there isn't one coherently, if there was never a possibility of the event. It's about how we think and talk, not what's going on in the world outside. Knowledge is understanding that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad.
Bit trite.
Indeed. And perhaps entirely wrong. Just wiseacring and procrastinating.
#notexpert #dontrely
Interesting. When W first knocked on R's door at Cantab, he refused to speak German, and his English was so bad that R lost the 45 minutes that he needed to prepare for his lecture.
--
Also -- a key early debate twixt the two -- whether the statement that "there is no rhinoceros in the room" is true. Ionesco, prhps? He was reading obscure philosophy at the time. Perhaps a motif.
Bloomsday yesterday. Riverran. I had other tasks to attend to until about 5PM, so I couldn't follow the chronology of the day, but thanks to perhaps the finest codex form of the text available (the clear-as rain first edition from Bodley Head), I was able to get to Gertie and Cissy by the time the library closed, and I was clock-synchronous by 9PM. Things fell off shortly afterwards, and I abandoned the trek near the end of the medieval hospital episode. The first few hours in the library, partly due to the pace, were simply exhilirating. I must read it in Dublin some year. Not necessarily on the trek, but just there.
As I picked up the reading on the e-reader outside, I happened to sit down next to some women who perhaps roughly corresponded to those two in desires and unsophistication, and it was a fascinating, and very depressing study in contrasts. We are somehow incapable of sensing the poetry and meaning in life. There was blaring background music, of course (modern equivalent of the fireworks), and I suppose, around the corner at St. Agnes, there might have been a similar Vespers (though they've moved the Extraordinary Form Mass to a much more depressing location in the Garment District these days), but everyone was wrought to such a high pitch of nervous tension, a high frequency, perhaps, that speech, thought and action seemed unnaturally overwrought and inexpressive. Not to mention the usual indolent emptiness and malice, and covetousness, and what have you.
O tempora, O mores...
One odd event in the reading. It was a fine old edition, and in reasonably good shape, and perhaps the actual text Joyce might have looked at if he had ever visited the main library collections here, but someone had creased a few pages, and dogeared them, and there were a few tears at the bottom. As I read, one of the heavily-creased dog-ears separated, and suddenly, the nature of the event changed. As Prospero's book had instantly been drowned in the realities of the world. I carefully placed the tiny corner back inside the book, and showed the dog-earing and creases to the librarian when I returned it, but the reading after that point changed. The angels with flaming swords stood at the gates of the garden, and meaning had to be achieved by work, and focus.
So, reader, I worked.
This winter in the gym dojo has done wonders for my bench press numbers. Not free bar, though, hammer-strength supine, so there's no telling what the actual numbers are. Likely a sign I need to shift dojos at the midsummer -- back to running in July, I think.
My readiness is not an imitation of anyone, and it doesn't come from being caught up in the energies of the world. I exist to do the work at hand. My encounter with the world is in the work, which is perhaps the reverse of the usual pattern of being caught up the world and then finding an escape and a singularity in the specific task at hand.
To paraphrase a bit of stagehand doggerel verse popular on the interwebs in the 90's and the Aughts, I have accomplished so much with so little for so long that I am now qualified to do absolutely anything with almost nothing.
Without exception, every ethnic group, in way of self-definition, is partially constituted by dislike for the ethnic groups with which they have recently been at war. This is very clear when you travel through the Balkans. And it's one of the nostrums of American municipal political science -- Irish politicians did so well in the elections, because unlike the immigrant communities from central Europe and elsewhere, they had very few inherent enemies. This is still a living dynamic, and I would have done well to have learned it and to have thought of it a bit more carefully before moving here.
Big fight night at the White House, and the city swarming with wealthy tourists whom I now know to be utterly unrepresentative of the cultures from which they have come. It is the hour of those for whom the world is enough. Ora et labora. A bit like the opening moments of a Bond film, perhaps.
For some reason, my university summerstock days have been coming back to my mind recently. Especially the season at a tent theatre at one of the Seven Sisters, with the tent pitched adjacent to one of the old dorms above a lake. It was one of the very few summers I didn't spend in the trial-of-the-soul boot camp that was outdoor historical drama, and it was perhaps as close as I came to the civilized and cultured places of the northeast in my university days. Pace Hegel, no nation is inherently one thing--it is a concatenation of enclaves, and some of them are quite amiable. But, with Hegel, this assemblage does have a basic nature. Ora et labora.
The difficulty with surviving spectacular difficulties with vim and aplomb is that there's no squeaky wheel, as it were. The others are able to think that the normal frame of mind is sufficient to the event. Which, of course, it isn't. But that realization needs to be reserved privately, as you go among them. Perhaps this allows for a certain deliberation in the explanation.
Oxbridge evensong. Odd how different the Oxon and Cantab versions are--though the difference is entirely indescribable, to steal a word from early Russell. Still, though, if the genius of Sidney Sussex had dinner in the rooms of the genius of Merton, I think I have a general sense of how the evening would play out.
One oddity of the reading rooms here is that they're mostly filled with folks cadging the free internet and tablespace, rather than using the collections. People doing things on a computer are engaged in a different action than folks who are reading and thinking. Perhaps they want these tapping sounds and other general signs of presence to reach out to each other, offer some comfort against the impersonal machine. Someone reading and thinking is engaged in a fundamentally different action.
There is some general mental fatigue. The last six or seven months or so have been nothing less than an attempt to erase or eliminate me, although it's almost certain that the agents and authors of it were simply incorporeal fates, spirits, what you will, or, more likely, simply chance.
But having emerged from the dark forest of an extraordinarily difficult season, the first concern is not necessarily tracing the lines of accountability. The dark forest (which is the northern city in winter) as dark forest exerts a more palpable influence on one's being than the dark forest considered as the tool of forces, fates or folks who wish us ill. The experience governs.
There are rifts in the mental focus, some soreness in the limbs, and an odd physical thing or two. But, more importantly, there is an abyss now, at least in my mind between the indolent, easygoing folks and those who try to be more deliberate about things. Walking among some of these folks, I find it hard to see much virtue in what they are, absent their empirical abilities. And our empirical tasks will end someday, and the more general disposition will be dispositive. But I'm not here to judge them, except to prevent myself from imitating their ways.
It seems odd that the first impulse after a season of extraordinary difficulty is to run off to the desert or climb to the top of a pillar, but it does have this effect. One wonders why the common things are so evil.
Apparently a big fight to be staged at the White House tonight, and some small riots in midtown after the basketball game yesterday.
It's that point in the journey, perhaps, when you look around the ship, wondering if there's a capable navigator aboard.
I suspect that if a sufficiently advanced AI were to go through these many years of posts and compare them to the events in the news, it might notice a time or two when things got unheimlich. Perhaps everyone since Pepys who has rambled on has found that their words occasionally prefigured an event or two. And from time to time, I'll encounter an odd phase either in my writing or my reading, and then encounter precisely the same phrase later that day, either in reading or listening to something online. The sort of thing that might drive one a bit mad, except for the fact that it happens in relation to texts composed a hundred years ago--so if something afoot, it's afoot in the heavens, and those sorts of things can be seen with a clear, calm eye. More things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
When, after many years, you come to some understanding, you know that things are much worse than can be imagined, for just the reason that our imagination (anciently, a form of intuition and perception) arises precisely to hide the difficult things. The mind wishes to protect itself. The mimetic fury of the shared life, which people are conditioned to in modern socialization, relies on imagination and desire to obscure thought and understanding.
Live as deliberately as you can. The energies that attempt to carry you through experience exist to carry you past experience.
In short, homo, fuge!
With every day, it grows more clear: the city is a thieves' paradise. And if you aren't rich enough, the slaves will drive you from the gates.
Find the useful things. Avoid the broad and heavily frequented paths.
Live against the grain, and find what you can.
In short, live nobly, despite the nature of the time.
"Whatever there is of hope, solace, and beauty in the world is discovered through the eyes of the vanquished, while the victors are blind, they shake and burn, and they have nothing other than their wild, fiery joy, which leaves only ash in its wake."
Ivo Andric, translated and quoted in a contemporary novel from Bosnia
I am acutely aware that I am more fighting a changing storm than trying to traverse the distance to safety from the corruption of this society. Avenues that allowed me to work and think in the past will likely close themselves off -- I probably couldn't return to Romania, for example, as the rental prices have risen with the influx of capital. Which is disappointing, given the culture, the theatre and the music that I had begun to make the acquaintance of. But completely cut off from the basic ability to live and earn a living stateside, I have to find ways of both surviving, and making a worthwhile contribution to things with my life. And that would seem to be through writing, as theatre is notoriously collaborative, and I'm not a musician.
So I must write, if I am to exist.
It is very important to keep the upstream truths foregrounded: inside the industrial prosperity, there is a lot of corruption, and those who have fallen afoul of the powerful networks find it very difficult to survive -- not in the sense of having a normal life, but in the sense of actually preserving the life of the organism, together with the activity of the mind. I'm clearly not the only person this has happened to; frankly, I think this reality has conditioned the experience of everyone in the culture, and they'll likely talk about it, if prompted. The oddity in my case is that I stayed in the large city (as there was no other home), and stayed in the mix of things, intellectually, as well as in my specific fields.
But I'm surrounded by very craven people, part of the healthy preponderance who live comfortable lives in what the democracy became inside the space of a single generation.
I reach to older notions of truth, because I know the nature of the present time.
Onward.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
The habitual reading of this, at least in every homily I've heard, seems to veer wide of the sense, but in an interesting way. The original is "head of the corner", or the topmost piece at the angle, so it's unsurprising that a stone that wasn't used in the earlier construction is used for this late, critical purpose. (And it would be rather difficult to add a cornerstone at the end.) The usual reading, though, can be reduced to Homer Simpson shaking his head and muttering "Stupid builders." And there's a genealogy to that thought.
But the point is that the stone that wasn't built into the structure of things connects the angles at the top, uniting the two directions, and inner and outer. The Vulgate's lapis angularis captures some of this, perhaps suggesting the keystone of an arch, which plays a function in a vertical plane that the head of the corner plays in a horizontal plane. The Old English (Thanks, Alfred) version of wealstone, the big flat thing that provides most of the wall, would appear to have taken the error and magnified it.
The builders are building something. It's not necessarily a good thing. They use strong, flat rocks for the base, and as it ascends, rocks of lesser structural integrity can be worked into the mix. But then they reach a point that has little to do with sustaining vertical pressure. Another dimension of necessary integrity has arisen. And there's this rock off to the side that they hadn't wanted to build into the mass of the structure.
#notexpert #justwiseacring
Things are off-the-charts bad. As they have been for many years.
I don't know if this is generally the lot in this culture of an honest man, an artist and a scholar, who tries to live and work deliberately and honestly, but I do know that it is the lot that fell to me in this culture along these lines. The folks in charge seem a bit craven, but the prosperity of the industrial mechanism seems to wipe away all sin in that regard.
So, you know, let's see where it leads.
Everything seems very thriving and prosperous, but what percentage of the population is necessary for, which is to say, involved in, the mechanism? And, contrary to the (fair) presumption, it's not remotely a meritocracy, or if it is at base meritocratic, the informal alliances and syndicates are apparently given carte blanche to mess with folks inside the mechanism.
Useful phrases which have come to mind:
prosperity for the healthy preponderance
minds idle and indolent, and open to malice at the drop of a hat
the social forms-- re-energized in the springtime
the hatred of the poor, or at least those poor who dare to walk among them. jeering, vigilantes.
absence of civilizational context in everyday encounters
attunement to the flesh-- everything is about copulation, it characterizes every encounter
ritual refusal of traditional ethics and morality--the demonstration
---
Sage advice in every age: beware the winning side of the last big war.
---
Against all this: the discipline, the study, the focus.
In the same revelatory discourse she can tell him how much he still has to suffer in his own house but: "Endure every disgrace in silence and do not resist the violence of your foes." The sufferings are ordered and laid upon him; their source is not enquired into, for in Homer they come from that depth which is the inextricable combination of the will of Zeus and Moira, but it is important only that the goddess knows the sufferings and permits them and thus cooperates in their ordering.
(Von Balthasar)
It does appear that, much like last year, and for the same reasons, the theatre festival in Transylvania will be out of reach. And, as with last year, my greatest regret is missing the travelling Noh troupe. There are, of course, many theatre festivals in Europe, but when one moves north in Europe, the prices increase with each minute of latitude. The reason I spent all that time in the Balkans was precisely that it was part of Europe, culturally. The Humble Quarters in nations further south were much cheaper, but I am an post-Enlightenment Westerner, and must think post-Enlightenment, Western thoughts...
----
These sorts of dis-astres do divide the world, not between those who drew the short straw and those frolicking in the haystack, but, across another meridian entirely, between the time before, when the general view of things was believed, and then afterwards, when you discover that the world has to be taken and understood piece by piece, and that the larger logic was a fairy-tale of childhood.
Intense workout this AM, perhaps consequently a bit unfocused and behind the clock this afternoon. Off to do some specific reading/annotation.
Things generally at the point when Odysseus glimpses Ithaca, and then is blown back out to sea, the forces bedeviling him apparently wanting even to possess his sense of escape from adversity, and even his return.
Gently down the stream. (And, separately, no running off of roofs, chasing the departing ships.)
A salutary example from literature: the fellow who ran off the roof after the ships departing from Circe's island. Even when in extremity, in the city of the power of evil, an orderly and prudent retreat saves, and, perhaps more importantly, makes it possible to leave. Statistically speaking, ships tended to founder when entering and leaving port.
I need to keep my assertion clear. My vindication is in the mind, and the art. Incidental perfections (muscle training to strengthen for the winter, etc.) can distract as well as fortify. The dull-eyed folks in suits who have cast their lot with the social forms have their own vindication. (Cf. "And so they will be your judges.")
As for me and my house...
A beautiful springtime day in the city of the power of evil. I continue to attempt to survive the circumstance.
After many years of this, I hope I have managed to preserve (the uncarved block, DT Suzuki's pail of water before the door), rather than be determined by the adversity. I really have only one determination that might be said to be consequent from it, namely, not ever to serve any person or organization who could have caused it -- and to survive their reaction to that.
Reading John Crowley again. Basically the same reason I real Bulgakov: the possibility of representation. If you are not able to summon the reality of the scent of the pungent orange drink on a summer's afternoon at Patriarch Ponds, the rest is nonsense, and you also will not be able to summon the reality of the religious scenes that follow. The possibility of representation is what the sacraments lead us to, but also the thing that the everyday, mimetic church, in preserving the sacraments, sometimes tends to erase.
Yesterday: v1 of von Balthasar's Aesthetics, skimming most of the second half due to time. At first, I thought Kant, a transcendental aesthetics laying the foundation for the logic to come, basically establishing the possibility of intuition, but Kant to Wolff is not Von B to the deposit of faith. He isn't narrowing the field, but broadening it, sometimes frustratingly. (If you dwell for so long on the romantics and the storm and noise folks, you really do need to contextualize them in relation to the rational Enlightenment against which they were reacting, especially when talking about the possibility of intuition of forms.) But nonetheless, a rewarding read.
When I used to read Crowley, I identified with the characters. Not so much anymore. Actually what prompted the shift was reading the contemporary Russians, esp. Sorokin. To understand the representation, you can't be drawn into it. You must be strong enough to stand above the characters, as opposed to drooling on cue like the experimental dogs in Gravity's Rainbow.
Hm, apparently, there is an interlibrary way to reach into the NYU stacks, perhaps two. Hopefully, I won't have time, and the Holy Spirit will get the necessary texts to me wherever I find Humble Quarters, but I'll play it as it lies.
My facility with etexts and interlibrary arrangements has grown much since the first (forced) acquaintance during the plague years. Generally, before then, I just used the libraries where I was, and shaped my interests to their collections. The nature of the place. And it's still difficult to absorb a text by PDF. But I should have improved that skillset faster. A few years in which I had only a small fraction of the books that would have been useful. (The big step was ordering the e-reader, which I was able to do b/c of discounts and a friendly Montenegrin import/export policy.)
We peripatetic exiles can't choose the means by which the word reaches us. Or, for that matter, the word that reaches us.
New York. Where people bring their dogs into cafes and grocery stores, and (contemporaneous event elided, in the interest of not developing a habit of reporting annoying things directly to the internet). They call it a "power move." It has to do with will, yes, and ascendancy, but more -- a belief that breaking the rules is the rule. It would never occur to them to make new rules, or fashion a civilized basis of encounter that accommodates all of these anarchic impulses. It therefore relies on a set of rules to be defied on the basis of the personal will to power. A demonstration.
One of my more unorthodox beliefs is my strict aversion to organ transplantation. The literature on market-based organ donation is genuinely frightening, and the stories about hastened death and forgone attempts to revive are clearly more than apocryphal. Add to that its frequent use by authoritarian regimes, and a categorical bar seems wise.
At any rate, "as for me and my house," I would certainly never agree to it for myself, either as to giving or receiving. Let the mechanism go as far as it can, and then bury it entire.
To be plain: under no circumstances would I permit my organs to be donated, revoking any other indications to the contrary (drivers licenses signed in youth, etc.).
/s
6/1/2026
#blogofrecord
Don't equivocate as to whether the sense of a clear injustice might be illusory. The time-frame of such perceptions is like the last moments of Priestley's An Inspector Calls. These are present events, and your present action or inaction is the only question presented. If you choose inaction, choose it according to your present understanding, rather than trying to shape an understanding to accommodate your present inaction.
What it comes down to, I think, is that there's a sort of churning froth that keeps the 'animal spirits of the marketplace' going, and provides prosperity for a healthy preponderance. Which is a much better ratio than in the past, but I suspect the resources of the continent are capable of far more.
The difficulty is that this nature of things lives in the minds of the people, and it creates a certain way of dealing with people, and a certain way of going through life. Formal philosophy has recognized this with the pragmatic turn, but one doesn't have to have any philosophy to recognize that the people don't have faith in a larger picture, and that people who stand or think outside of the commercial mechanism get dealt with fairly strongly. It's not just the spectacular cases, though. It's in the mind generally, and the most quotidian interactions of the most average people are entirely determined by it.
Now, if you're one of the 60-70% (by no means meritocratically selected) and the only thing you want from the shared life is material possessions, you'll probably live in safety and have backyard barbeques and a large "entertainment center" with the customary Orwellian viewscreen. Quite likely in Ohio.
If the mechanism was entirely self-concerned, and the philosophers and artists could do their thing untroubled by it, that would be one thing. But the ubiquitous monoculture of the industrial mechanisms of prosperity actively seeks out those who aren't on-board with the notion, and treats them rather roughly. They're all in this together, you see.
So, material prosperity for the healthy preponderance, but without faith, and without the transcendental perspective that faith affords, however comprehensible it might have been as a social objective, makes for a very problematic world within which many suffer greatly, and all lose their fundamental birthright as humans -- the transcendent understanding.
I'd very much like to read the English translation of von Balthasar's Theo-Dramatics, but it doesn't seem to be available in any of the research libraries linked to my network (NYPL, Harvard, Columbia, etc.). WorldCat says the only university in the city that has it is NYU, which, frankly, is like saying the Mayflower colonists are the only ones with the most recent copy of the Roman Catechism. The wealth of the trade routes.
To be clear, we've been off the charts now for several years. Which is to say, all bets have been off, and it's anyone's game, to fling a few more idioms into the trope.
The closest analogy might be a space probe continuing to return data long after any theory of matter, space and time would seem to allow it to do so. The control room, remaining calm, but necessarily at some distance from the usual discourse of their fellows, has merely been attempting to parse the data and respond appropriately, while keeping the pizza budget at a minimum, going teetotal, and putting in an industrial-strength coffee machine.
Another danger, I suppose is that a solution will appear through the diffractive lens of the residuum of kin and extended kin. (See below for the difficulties there, which are actually a bit extraordinary.) As difficult as life is presently, there's precisely zero possibility of going back into the world of those folks, or taking their views as veridical as to my experience and work. They had their work, and the fact of a family presented certain difficulties for that, and so their relationship with their family was conditioned by certain outside factors. (Something they might do well to think about for a bit, and orient themselves in relation to that work. Even in memory, long afterwards, it might be spiritually useful, and even essential.) But that time is past, and one can't (and shouldn't ever want to) go home again. The answer is in the future, which is to say, the present.
I am forcing myself to be very vigilant, despite the exhaustion. Having survived the headwinds of the winter, and not knowing exactly their source, I am acutely conscious of the fact that there are a great number of people in this culture with the means at their disposal of doing a great number of things to other people.
The way ineluctably seems that of Thoreau -- Walden it must be.
(The memory recurs of a production of Much Ado in conservatory--I was Dogberry, and during one rehearsal, I switched a malapropism a bit, and "Be Vigitant" became "Be Viagrant" (this was 1999). The director, one of the grand old men of American regional theatre, with a bit of awkward stammering, kindly suggested that I not do that. Much of doing classical comedy consists of knowing when there's sufficient freedom to do things like that. The opposite extreme was in Cincinnati one Sunday matinee, when some of the cast members (I conspicuously absented myself from the game) began swapping in names of social diseases for different character names. As it turned out, one of the handful of people who had shown up to watch the fledgling classical company that Sunday afternoon was a Shakespeare professor at a local college. That said, I have indulged in the odd game of "pass the penny" in outdoor drama (best defense: midarm handshakes) to while away the long summer evenings while playing the angry Indian.)
In the past, like most folks, I think I was mirroring people a bit when I talked about the need to get away from worldly thinking. The experiences of the last six months or so have wrought a bit of a change in that (and, perhaps conclusively disproved the notion that language is merely a game that one could play as if one played no other).
The people caught up in the world are drawn into the energy of the social form, and have their being by fulfilling the purposes of the social form. It is possible to be in the place where they are, surrounded by the things that they are surrounded by, and not be caught up in these social forms. It is possible to have a consciousness that is sized precisely to the dimensions of a single person. (Cf. Epictetus?)
The visitors from the East have sensed this, I think. Hence the emphasis to American students on dispassion and freedom from desire. "Be here now," etc.
We speak of what we know, and testify of what we believe.
Slowly and deliberately advancing towards the prospects of a stable place to work and a living culture to draw forth the work. I'm not the one to save the Republic. Frankly, I might be the only one who has noticed the difficulty, given the general prosperity for the comfortable preponderance, and the power of television culture. But I doubt I'll be able to do much here in the length of a normal human lifetime.
A stable place to work and a living culture to draw forth the work.
I actually doubted it myself, when I first started writing about it at the beginning of the springtime. But it has proved to be true -- with the heat, the social forms arise, and there's something in the general mind here that is simply an attack on those thought poor or vulnerable. Wealth is vindication, and a sign of favor from the divinity that is no longer thought to exist. Add the corruption at the top, and it needs no Solomon to realize that Joseph would be better off in Egypt, given the mimetic fury of the elder brothers.
I must get back to modern philosophy. I've been reading Dewey's stuff, and he's careful not to challenge the mind too much, and that has its downside. If I'm not thinking as hard as I can, the day is wasted. Dewey had the comforts of office and reputation (not to mention income) -- the fellow in the road outside has only his purchase on the world.
If you try to fashion a post-Enlightenment society without a care for knowing what it is that things are, and how it is with things (or, to use the older vocabulary, truth sub specie aeternitatis), the world goes on, some suffer, some are are rich, everyone is born, and everyone dies, but everything is veiled by appearances. Which makes the tasks of the darksome folks considerably easier.
With each day I become more certain of this: the general condition of thought here is clouded, and the fabric of life is simply being buoyed along by the fruits of industrial prosperity.
If you have true work, focus on that work. Then make connections carefully, based on perceiving a correlative attentiveness in the other person. Don't encounter by anticipative imitation.
There are certainly people who can master the easygoing, craven sensibility -- I think they're in charge now, and their ethical sense is, for the most part, none too strong.
For graces received, cont'd:
For the last few rainy and cloudy days, when there seemed to be a generally evil vibe in the city, I've been surrounded by very peculiar and threatening persons. The absurd extreme was at the philharmonic lobby jumbotron when some genuinely frightening characters sidled up and stood over my chair as I looked through the program annotations. But also elsewhere.
And now, today, the sun breaks through, and as I try the patience of the baristas by plugging away at the the piecework that flew in through the transom on the holiday, I realize the fellow next to me is speaking Serbian, and is a film director of some kind, and he's speaking to an amiable LA film type in for a visit. And then two French women in town for a vacance raise the civilization level of the nearby tables a few notches. All with the sunlight. Deo gratias.
Perhaps I should have cornered the very nice LA film type and pitched something, but I haven't yet figured out the dramatic angle on Hegel's Logic or Dewey's complete works. And I'm in no place to be making friendships. Eyes on the tabernacle, writing in the notebook.
This city is evil -- but the nature of the time will change with the sunlight.
I do need to keep mentioning this: I'm not pining for Belgrade or Sarajevo or Cluj, or Pirin, or aywhere else on political grounds. In Belgrade, I know that I can get a cheap balcony ticket to the JDP and then head back to a small studio somewhere and write a long critical piece. In Sarajevo, I know that I can go for a morning run to the Yellow Fortress (again from humble digs), and then sit on the cafe on top of the good supermarket with some kefir for a couple of hours and work through some philosophy. Etc. etc.
Over this last winter, a very difficult time,. I've come to understand the present nature of my country, and why precisely it is that there's no room for me to do my work here. Being one of hundreds of millions, saving the Republic isn't within my power. It is within my power to do the work that I'm trying to do, and for that, I'm going to need some space from these folks.
We are responsible to the work that we are supposed to accomplish.
So, how is this dialectical? If we just use the medieval notion of dialectics, which reduces to the way that different ideas change with context, and the introduction of other ideas, then the interplay of the individual's will and the prompting of the spirit constitutes a small battle of ideas. (This is probably it, given the mess that follows.)
In the Hegelian context (my reading of the moment, not an expert, or even good at it), what is sublated out is perhaps the individual's notions of their own will and the notion of what the holy event would be. These two things, in the negation (which is done by the individual) then suggest a larger world of the possible actions that might result. I think that I might (1) buy chocolate ice cream, or I might (2) get some healthy fruit, and these two impulses illuminate the larger class of things I could get to eat. The second is further sublated into the notion of action transformed into more beneficial action. So I now have a world of possible things to get for dinner, and, further, a world in which the things that are better for me prevail. And this is the sphere of the spirit's action: the foreseeable events, and the ways in which they could go well rather than badly.
By willing the collaboration with grace, the individual is negating their own impulse, while holding onto these spheres (c-classes) of possible actions of a certain kind. And they are then open to something else happening within these spheres. But the negation of their particular impulse (chocs, fruit) is valuable in that it brings these worlds of possible experience into their consciousness. They are negated only because it was the individual that thought of them, so perhaps it's the individual that is sublated out as the one who acts well, past the particularities of their initial impulses. The spirit is not the eventual action, but just the movement from that initial particularity, to the universal, and then the realm of possible alternate particularities. The spirit is not in that realm of possible actions, but the fact of the movement away from my initial particularity to that expanded realm. The movement, not the substance. Which perhaps brings it much closer to the things that I can will, and prompt by my actions.
Frankly, I'm no dialectician. Which, seen dialectically, is much less of a fault.