One thing I've learned in the context of being many kinds of outsider to the local sensibility -- beware the springtime, and the warm days. The social energies increase. The Christian Passion and the old mysteries are both springtime phenomena. Peculiarly dangerous times for the son of man.
Walking through Hell's Kitchen, I caught the word "spatchcock" from a passing conversation. And checking my YT feed, I see Phish is playing the Garden tonight. There is a logic to things.
fwiw, I think the usage comes from the UWS chicken rotisserie places that were a bit more plentiful on the UWS in the early aughts. Distinctly remember the signs.
A month and a fortnight, while winter arrived in the northern city. Not an easy slog, but buoyed along by graces visible and in, it has been possible. Of course, winter has a duration as well as an arrival, but sufficient is, and ever shall be, the day.
Non-project reading shifting to neo-Kantian ways -- I took out Cassirer's Kant book to tide me over when the libraries closed over Christmas, and now working through some of his other stuff. The project work continues apace.
When you find yourself outside the charm of a certain society, for some reason, the intuitive response is to lessen the powers of observation and propensity for contact; as you're no longer serving the purposes of these social forms, the logic that kept you engaged with those social forms now dictates that you slacken your energies so as not to interfere with things. But there are other sources of energy. In addition to the various brands of instant coffee dissolved in the water bottle. (The Indian uses his plants, the wartime German his chemical factories, and I use my everyday consumer goods. The point is to wisely use the things around you.)
In grad school, I picked up a useful phrase from a musician travelling through the theatre where I was training: "Take it easy, but take it."
After a few days of intense trial, when the weather warms and the mist rises from the ground, the animal nature relaxes into the small springtime, but the human spirit, perceiving this, correctly redoubles his discipline.
Take it easy, but take it.
When you get through a few things generally thought to be impossible, the world, of necessity, changes. The world, and by deduction, my experience, couldn't have been what it had been thought to be.
--
I'm not sure what prompts my unconscious to bring specific locations back to my mind from time to time, but it's amiably unheimlich to find oneself at Mass in the back of St. Pat's when the ikonostasis of an old orthodox church in Belgrade or an old Baroque SJ church in Transylvania comes to mind.
"...and rays of light you cannot see / Are flashing through eternity." (Poe)
Difficult evening. Ante faciam frigorum eius, quis sustainabit?
Perhaps related -- although the usual dawn workout went fine, when I returned to the books, higher thought proved elusive. Like a fog staring into a cloud. αρτον εχουσιον not on the menu. Will have to redouble the scholarly focus, now that I seem to have the ability to survive some of the the other things, by the grace of something or other.
Which poses a unique difficulty, as it's not a quality that folks usually possess or work to possess, and there's nothing in my present social role that would indicate that I'm capable of it, or should be wasting my time with it. I alone understand the necessity of it. I would do nothing else, if I could.
Even the most brutal authoritarian governments provide a place of internal exile for the dissident and the dissentient. The market-based society simply closes the door and waits for them to vanish from the threshold, one way or another.
Given present difficulties, frequently, a specific place from the travels will come to mind. Different countries at different hours of the day. This creates some difficulty, as I have no claim on these places, no right or adventitious chance that would land me on those shores. Before, I thought of them as unapproachable distant nations -- now, the place summons itself to mind as the idea of an impossible home.
Bit on the upswing after the solemnity. Mulling the possibility that it was the stage dimming before the Grail descended -- after all, the background context of this holiday is winter night. John of the Cross -- the armies... descended.
--
One does make acquaintance with the shadows of life during those times, in addition to the difficulties of the present, and I'm coming to realize that there were a few things askew with the early life. Every unhappy family has a right to be unhappy in its own way, but when two or three secrets, both the official kind and the family-bible type, cause a house that unhappy, I do have to fault the folks who insisted that the secrets be kept. The cause of much unhappiness, and a few broken things, and now, when the secrets wouldn't matter too much -- neither help nor hurt -- it seems clear that the cost of keeping them and riding out the storm was unconscionably high. Particularly for the ones clueless at the time.
Shadows of the past. Only visible in the light of the present. Onward.
Extraordinary difficulties over last day or so. Went from having a difficult fight in hand to utter exhaustion and incapacity yesterday AM. Slogged t through, not exactly covered in glory. Debated missing the midnight mass, but walked over in plenty of time for the standby line.
Midtown packed with materialistic tourists. Goods from afar -- Nicholas of Bari (translated).
A feast scheduled adventitiously, for the darkest days, but no less authentic for that. After two thousand years, the saving force in the spirit is already named Christmastime. It is already part of what we think with.
In the depth of darkest night, A birth. And from that hour, his death was inevitable. And so a good birth.
This is a very difficult way. I must remember that. From traversing it before, I remembered the inexpensive, healthy, protein-rich food and access to a world-class research library, but the experience has other dimensions.
The "quarantine planet" episode of the new Who comes to mind.
Although I should be more circumspect, as I've not yet quite lived up to the circumstance. Still a bit like a fellow punched randomly in a civilized place, or who wandered accidentally down a difficult side street. Strong, but befuddled, and very much not of the place. It is possible to rise to the circumstance, become a monk/ninja/knight/whatever of the place, and survive that way. But this is a function of time.
Absolute discipline and teetotal, of course, but still a bit of Touchstone in the forest. Corin's shearling coat might become necessary. A function of time, conditioned by identity.
It honestly seems that any time not spent reading or thinking about philosophy is wasted. (It seems to have taken the place, over the last year or two, of necessity, of the arts on the other side of the locked door.) Nonetheless, a few hours on the legal history project today. Someone on a boat who had no idea where he needed to go could get away with wasting absolutely not one bit of force of the wind.
Odd fatigue when sitting down to work after fighting through swarms of tourists for a few hours beforehand. Correlation? Causation? Calumny?
When Strange and Difficult Times began, almost fifteen years ago, my primary focus was on finding that one jungle vine to swing out to safety on -- so I focused my energies on finding a job in my degree fields. After a long bot of that, I split my focus between the survival of the difficult spots in which I found myself and preserving the mechnism so that either independent work or employments in the fields would be possible after the difficulties had been surmounted.
Now, many years later, I've come to realize that anything I hope to achieve needs to be an active concern while the difficulties persist. So it's a triple focus, really -- the search for regular work in the fields, the surviving of the difficulties presently at hand, and the independent work that might turn out to be the central work of life.
It's taken a long time to make that turn, but I don't think I would have acted differently in the earlier times if I had been a wiser beast. There is a logic to each circumstance; the trick is to keep both the awareness of the actual present circumstance and the integrity of the logic associated with it as clear as possible.
The renaming of the Kennedy Center might be a significant mistake. It's a status thing -- he, and any other New Amsterdam corporatist would likely try to do the same at the Met Opera or the Met Museum, and the point would be that they couldn't -- the social power of the boards. So it's a personal thing, and therefore risky, but there's also a philosophical wrinkle.
When the Republic becomes corrupt, the Machiavel comes along, the uncouth individualist who reminds everyone that moving fast and breaking things is part of what it means to be human, despite the increasingly museum-like silence of the Republic. But when the Machiavel attacks the hallowed individual personalities of the Republic, they're working against their own strength. Much wiser to wage war with an army of faceless bureaucrats.
Cold has returned again. 'Tis the season, I suppose. Surviving.
Arguably a mistake to return to the homeland after the first extended absence to a city swamped with highly materialistic tourists. The spell over their minds, that makes them endlessly desire objects in a rather craven mindset, and then, more importantly, pay for them, seems almost to serve as a leveraging of the biomass for the concentration of capital. There was a different sunlight in Philadelphia some years ago, I think.
The impulse is to get back to Bosnia or Serbia, though aside from being two very spiritually powerful places, I'm not sure why those two specifically come to mind, and I'm certain that the folks in either one would look askance at the list.
Once your life transcends appearances, things get a bit complex. There is no one to give you an indication of what one should do or think, no one to read you in to the plot, the plot having been revealed to be a thin conceit of the scribbler of the otherwise worthwhile fiction. One simply goes on.
Although I continue to arc back towards the world in my work, and hence have been reading a lot of law and legal history lately, any time not spent reading or thinking about philosophy seems wasted. So I waste time in order to attempt to be of service to an increasingly alien scholarly discourse.
Good workout at the gym. As there was no weekday Mass to sprint off to at the end, did a double session. Corpore sano. "...when the water runs muddy, I wash my cloak."
Onward.
Interesting lieder rhyme: Christbaum/selig traumme.
Rain.
Life in the digital/algorithmic gulag continues. Quite convinced that with time, having to live in this manner in this prosperous of a society will seem a political condition as real as those sent to Siberian camps (with, it should be noted, houses), carrying signed and stamped paperwork from the district soviet.
I actually built the Balkan digital nomad years on a remarkably thin foothold of being paid a fraction of market rates to do mind-numbing academic work on sporadic contracts -- the only possible way to live on that within the scope of American/European civilization was in southern Europe, and I'd like to think I made something remarkable out of it, thanks to the remarkable nature of the places I found. Some decent thought, criticism and study -- not to mention all of the $5 theatre/symphony tickets and kefir in the afternoons.
As for the present -- advancing confidently in the direction of my dreams, and waiting for the next unexpected thin ledge of foothold to come along.
Another Abp. (Card) to the big wooden chair, stage right in St. Pats. Was wondering. Homily last Sunday a bit interesting at points -- wheels apparently in motion.
Even at the global center of the electronically mediated social and political world, the in-person event still retains the power to reveal.
The morning meditations here are much more difficult -- even listening to the tape-delayed liturgy of the word from the academic chapel beforehand, the mind feels as if weighed down by lead, and once or twice, I've even drifted off while writing.
Theory 1 -- The structure of the meditation provides a comparison across worlds, and since the same task is much more difficult here, there is something locally increasing the level of difficulty for tasks generally.
Theory 2 -- In that I had been habituated to the meditations in times of relative safety and sufficiency, accomplishing them now, given the current difficulties, is much more difficult.
To mull.
Always make it look easy. Sprezzatura. "Backwards, and among heels." That sort of thing.
The reason is quite simple. Most people, trusting appearances, don't know what the world is. And without knowing what the world is, noticing a fellow who is seemingly exerting extraordinary force just to survive can awaken less-than-helpful inclinations.
It's the difference between staring into the abyss, and staring down the abyss. And, given the effects, it's a bit like whistling down the wind.
Vollman's peroration proving interesting. The Romanian/Bulgarian vampiric sections seem to be an allegory for something, but I've only read his later, straight stuff, not the earlier, slanted stuff, so perhaps it's a fascination in itself. Doubtful, though. Bit like the rat wars in Pynchon's V. And the Roland Hedley-esque weeklong war correspondent's return to Sarajevo makes for good lightness of being in a city of shadows. (And ending the tale at the Yellow fortress, which is where I ended my narrative as well, is spot-on. Hopefully not ironic.)
Fighting vainly to keep conscious during mediation after Mass. In fairness, the conscious/unconscious ratio at the original Gethsemane gave long odds as well.
It occurs to me that I've spent a considerable amount of time in recent years functioning at my absolute physical and mental limit, given the circumstances. I have my doubts as to whether this is an unalloyed good. As bad as it is to be comfortable, difficulty, especially when extreme and extended in time, can transform the action.
There's been a cold spell of late here -- over the last three or four days. Given present difficulties, this has been determinative of much, but I appear to have been able to keep slogging though (albeit on impulse engines rather than warp speed), thanks to increased protein in meals and layers of clothing.
(Teetotal, of course. It's been some time since I've had sufficient hearth and economy for vino with dinner.)
There's a bit of an art to the "Like the Drifter" mode. You can't pull it off as James Bond, but the important thing is to retain the possibility of slogging through a tough bit and then shifting into James Bond mode for a few hours. The surprisingly large number of human catastrophes wandering the city counsel caution when dealing with these forces of nature. One doesn't want to turn into a national socialist or a socialist national, but the intensity common to the speculative idealist and the commissar is really the only way to get through this kind of thing. Life on the frontier wasn't characterized by American niceness and ease.
Gently down the stream -- take it easy, but take it.
Tourists literally swarming through the research libraries. Right on top of the tables, chattering. Ventilation off for some reason. Supremely unpleasant, impossible to think, let alone start the work of the day well.
I'd delay the star of work until after the tourist hours, but given the late opening, the additional hour would lose the morning.
It's not that disproportional in the scheme of things that my attention is still so strongly with theatre and the arts generally. Just after undergrad, I worked with a small theatre in Cincinnati while doing admin work during the day -- ended up working with some of the global execs at a major firm during daytime hours, contacts which would certainly have sufficed for a prosperous career in consumer products. Similarly, after the conservatory masters, I did the same type of admin work in global c-suites in NYC, and then segued into developing a website with an exec from one of the large venues in the city -- both of these, had they been what I was doing, would have allowed me to carve out a decent niche in the arts-affiliated marketing world, or the marches and fens outside of the big-money corporate world. As before, I was tempted, but there is such a thing as a coherent life, and the work of one's life, so I actually fought quite hard to keep either from being a full-time first-priority focus. In the end, although I didn't, like Blackstone, bid farewell to my muse, she was kidnapped in short order, and then began the second of the three peculiar attempts at a coherent career -- the law.
Picked up Vollman's latest and last work -- and it begins on the familiar streets Centar Municipality, Sarajevo. Brilliant. So at least one thing of the mind has some go to it at present.
Would vanish to Bosnia, Serbia, or points east in a heartbeat, if I thought I had sufficient means for the journey. Present living situation and work is at best useful, and (perhaps simultaneously) at worst, more than a bit risky, In the language of computer games (which I notoriously don't play), I'm picking up the points to be found in the scene (making the annotations on works at NYPL I'd likely not find elsewhere for things I hope to write), but as to the larger game, I don't think things are going that well, frankly.
PS, still wondering at how V placed a piece in L'Osservatore Romano. Must have an old-school-capable agent.
Watched the crowds surging past as I had a bite to eat after leaving the library. Everyone in comfortable clothes, ambling down the street. I find myself looking for some signs of nobility about them, something that suggests a claim to possess something of intangible value that suggests a power or mastery vis a vis general relation to the world, visible and invisible. But it appears that nothing in them suggests to them that this would be desirable. They are in the great city, wearing comfortable clothes, likely having paid thousands for the privilege.
More, as with many of these reservations about the ways of my country, the most troubling thing is that they likely see it as a virtue. Merely unpretentious good-hearted folks walking down a sidewalk.
Pretend, folks. Try it.
Stopped in again at the philharmonic to eavesdrop the Handel a second time. Perhaps my imagination, but some of the funereal tempos in the second half (αναστασοσ) seemed to have been tightened up. Perhaps there's a tacit understanding that guest conductors use a bit less interpretive freedom with the weekend subscriber crowd. Hadn't slept in quite some time, though, so listening to the pece while trying to keep on the right page of the Goethe biography I was finishing proved surprisingly challenging. (Not all neighborhoods in the city have book-return boxes, so there are designated "book-finishing" zones to keep the knapsack light.) Might be my last visit to the concert qua lobby -- it's a lot of bother to go through to sit in the lobby and listen to the house sound on a distant speaker. Much more of a concert event than a drop-by cafe at this point.
---
To be absolutely clear, the present visit, on a continuum between holiday jaunt and death-defying salto mortale to the edge of the swarming crowds circling the abyss of darkness -- well, all told, I'd tend to go with the latter category. Still a bit hopeful, though as exhausted as I've ever been.
--
Notion: one reason people are a bit lost -- their vocabulary. The set of words that they use to describe things in the world tends towards simple existence, rather than focusing the mind on the purposes of life. Our manner of speech is dispositive. Vocabulary is logos -- you can't express a second logos using the words of the world, because each word relates to every other word, whether that be inference or deferance [sic]. Perhaps the reason the people are wandering like lost sheep too oblivious to realize that they're lost is that their purposes have been extinguished by implication.
An idle philosophical point after reading one too many spy stories: When a part of the government that does confidential work takes some basically good people, isolates them and their children from society, and has a rather profound effect on their minds and spirits, the only opprobrium involved falls on the government agency, not the people involved. If you decide to build the unhappiness house, the souls inside will be unhappy.
Hence my present aversion to the cult of Le Carre, though I was once a devoted reader (and prayed the office for the dead, sitting in the old apartment by the transcontinental rail in Fargo, when I head that he had passed away). Popular perceptions about confidential government work changed after those BBC mini-series, and it's rather important for a democracy to have the correct idea about the nature of its government agencies. Don't idolize the shock troops, as someone said once.
No opprobrium on the souls involved. Absolvo omnes. But do try to mend the agencies.
Absolutely exhausted. I've discovered in recent weeks that I can catch a few winks at 10F, and wake up before any organ failure sets in, but humidity seems to complicate the situation. Which is odd. As if the moisture on the ground and in the air accentuated the connection. Only scattered moments of rest, and back to hurtling through the day.
Stopping in at the NY Philharmonic's lobby Jumbotron for the Messiah. Remembering last year at about this time, the performance by the Transylvanian orchestra at the centuries-old university. I had my customary seat, front-row center, which was at balcony prices, following the usual practice for classical music events, but the space was so small that the mix was perfect there, and as the evening progressed, the music surrounded me and drew me into the mystery. It wasn't hard to imagine this a 19th c. orchestra deep in the mountains of the Balkans, playing the piece that had just come in from London. Sensing these mediations, understanding the mechanism that is creating the representation, is one way to enter a work of art. This is a paradox, in that attention is being turned to the things between the work and us, but like agitating the surface of the water, of the lake, it brings your attention to the place between the worlds, and from thence to the hidden world.
Otherwise, the place between the worlds is invisible. A stick, extending halfway out of the water for some reason seems broken. And then we begin to repair the mistakes of our own mind, rather than contemplate the rift between things. We try to make our minds more accurate, rather than our vision more clear and distinct.
I saw an extraordinary rendition of the piece on tape from the Edinborough festival; I think it needs some tincture of the North to it. Otherwise, as with this Jumbotron version that I'm currently eavesdropping, it's romantic instruments sounding their timbre and colotura embroiderings. What's missing is the rough creak of the rift in the lute, the cold wind of the spirit. Even in London-town. There is a story that the soprano in Handel's original company for the Dublin performance, I think, had some rumors swirling about her, and the audience entered into the story of her redemption. These things give us a foothold in the representation. A clew.
This (again in the lobby with the Jumbotron) is a very insipid performance. And yet, somehow perfect for the overpriced luxury-goods that make up the arts in this city. They expect a luxuriant experience. And yet: "Woe to you who are comfortable." Perhaps that offers a foothold on that expression. I think the Koran teaches that on the day of judgment, molten gold will be poured into the ears of those who listen to music. Keeping in mind, of course, that the Medina Philharmonic wasn't very highly ranked at the time. The music he condemns is likely the idle marketplace music. Music as appurtenance to a comfortable life, not a mechanism of revelation.
The Transylvania Messiah actually was a very powerful experience. To encounter this piece as a Christian is to meditate on a series of specific propositions. But within the context of a message being proclaimed. I remember thinking, after one particularly strong Beethoven's Ninth at Carnegie Hall (Barenboim/Staatskapelle Berlin), that if there were justice in the world, every newspaper on the planet would, tomorrow morning, have the banner headline: "We Won."
Art requires this transformation of reality. Not the plastic deformations of the fiction, but the conviction that what it is to exist has been changed by witnessing the event. "A tune beyond ourselves, yet ourselves," as the poem has it -- a work I once found fragments of in blue spray paint on the construction paneling at the Chelsea Hotel as I walked past early one morning, long before dawn. Peregrination. The Enlightenment critic once said that seeing the sculpted torso of the idealized figure, something should arise in us that says "I must amend my life." I'm convinced that this is the same phenomenon as the transformation of reality mentioned above -- something about what it is to exist has been vouchsafed to us, and we are duty-bound to change our stance to the world a bit.
So art has the obligation to bring to us this good news, to show us that things are different now. And on some level we realize that it is our notions of things that have been enlarged, since the tune was beyond ]us at first. But then we recognize ourselves after this sublation. Things having changed somewhat.
Christianity is a religion that happens within history. Actually, our notions of history, especially those having to do with Whiggish perfection, are intimately associated with the Christian viewpoint, the notion that things are fighting to change to the good inside of each person. The value placed on the individual soul's fabric is the great change from the darkness of antiquity.
And now, on the lobby screen -- "despised and rejected." Described with langour, as if marketing a khaki luxury bag. The notion of worthlessness itself being sold in the marketplace.
The sea of faith was once full, of course, and these terms had specific meaning. Now, I'm reasonably certain that very few of the folks in this lobby take these propositions to be true, and yet, they have meaning for them. What this meaning might be, without belief, perhaps presents an interesting question. To the modern mind, the truth-value of a sentence is generally thought to be whether it is the case. The cat is on the mat = true. And yet, we are not verification machines; determining whether something is the case might not be the work given us by the universe in hearing a certain sentence. It is not for us to judge whether the holy time is in fact as quiet as a nun. In fact, the proposition is more of a command, effective words, creating a certain disposition in us towards the world, and what it is to be in the world has changed a bit after hearing it.
Now in the lobby version -- "But thou did'st not leave his soul in hell" -- there was no reversal there. The point is that there has never been someone so desolate, and then an assurance arises. If there's no reversal between these two thoughts, the second one has no meaning for us. This reading has gone from langourous to funereal.
I'm not sure that I could talk through the insights that I had in listening to the version in Transylvania last year. I do know that I took each one of these propositions to be the case. And I understood that this message was being relayed, mediated by the local ensemble, so they were giving it the meaning that came naturally to them in the mountains of Romania. Both of us, then, peering at the source of this message from distant London. It seemed infinitely logical that the soul who had suffered should govern all things. And so, by the measure of that logic, it might very well have happened. The victory was more possible, once I understood what it was thought to be. Listening to that Ninth at Carnegie Hall, I didn't go in expecting a transcendent experience, I experienced the event, and once the event had substance, it became transcendent. Approaching the question of the truth of the message after the hermeneutic is vastly different from reaching for the higher meaning after deciding whether the proposition is true. We might believe many more things if our first question was "what is this?" rather than "is this true", the latter usually standing place for "do I like this?"
Woe to the comfortable. Those who do not take the thing in hand before deciding whether or not it pleases them. The difficulty, the thing interposed between ourselves and the representation, is often what gives us the key to the work. To place the question of our own comfort, whether the thing agrees with us, or we with it, before inquiring into the nature of the thing itself, is a basic error. On one level, this can be applied to a certain performance, and on another level, to a certain proposition of faith. Whether we believe it or not is not the first question we should have on hearing it. And we might find that, having understood, we might then believe.
Eavesdropping a carol service at the Temple in London while slogging through the reading in the research library in New York.
Gadamer has the notion of θεατρον as "angle on the action" -- the specific place in the Lycurgan stone theatre that the anonymous visitor to Athens found for the festival. Where he ended up in the theatre depended on where he was coming from, his social role, and his intentions for the festival. And that place in the theatre, in relation to the angle of the σκενε, defined the experience of the play for them. (The immersive roman doubled-theatre, amphitheatre, negates precisely this directional element.)
Even if one is the most questionable drifter who has ever wandered into the city, it is still possible to find a place from which, thanks to the angle, you can see the highest things, however far in the distance. Take the time to find that place in each place you find.
--
I see the government of Bulgaria has collapsed. Nothing to do with me, was just wandering the mountains of the south for a month and a fortnight. Didn't even pick up a newspaper.
Onward.
From my limited understanding, Navalny was very much a Russian patriot. More in the political sense, perhaps than was Solzhenitsyn, who was a patriot in the cultural and religious sense. Which is why one died in prison, and the other was able to move to New England, buy a house, and write.
It is a delicate balance. At times of extreme adversity, the places in other countries come to my mind -- the cathedrals (even those I've been asked to leave so that only those of a certain ethnicity would be there for the service), the theatres (even during the long evenings), and the coffeehouses (I tend to remember the better-ventilated ones). Culturally, I am Solzhenitsyn vis-a-vis things American. But for some reason, politically, I am taken for another thing entirely. Which is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've never turned to fight that sort of thing -- just kept trying to do the work despite it.
Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have made it a point to feud with the apparatchiks. Quite the opposite.
"Work, Uncle Vanya. We must work."
No matter how cold the nights.
One misreading of the adventures of recent years would be that the recent Balkan odysseys were the salto mortale, the one great sojorun out into the world, never to be repeated. In essence, I found that it was possible (though just barely so, and not at all in a sustainable manner) to live on the amount of money I had by living in inexpensive apartments in Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, etc., and as an added bonus, theatre, opera, and symphony tickets were around $5, so it was possible to have a proper cultural life as well. Rather enjoyed it, and certainly hoping to repeat the experience, if my fortunes here continue to be as they have been.
There seems to be a fundamental duality between having access to research libraries and having a place to read books from these research libraries. Perhaps its epistemological -- it only seems like there's a lot of books because there's nowhere nearby to read them after the stacks close. Especially now that the Starbucks have followed the gyms and gone to Disneyworld hours -- no more midnight Americanos or 4AM workouts.
The reading room in New York is actually spectacular. I'm hardly a monarchist, especially when it comes to other nations, but the land was a gift of the sovereign, back when the salient bit was the enormous aboveground reservoir next door.
And one does have to take a historical view of things, if there is to be meaning in the world, as Heidegger indicated to a perplexed Arendt who noticed him genuflect in a country church. I happened to be in the south half of the room when BBC went to the national anthem after announcing the death of the sovereign. Centuries later, unnoticed, a fellow quietly stood for the anthem of the neighboring nation.
One doesn't want to be dogmatic about these things, but existence seemed to be much more pleasant a few months ago. Granted, days of mind-numbing labor rowing the academic triremes, and limited libraries, having to shift countries every several weeks, bare-bones budgeting, etc, etc. But music, theatre, stability of life, etc. As it turns out, rowing the triremes is more conducive to a productive existence than is being driven off the ship. Perhaps only at first. The beginning of Priestley's Good Companions comes to mind.
Degrees of existence -- and the important point is the order of magnitude (or perhaps the magnitude of the order) that they all inhabit. I repeat this because it is the truth governing my reality generally -- three careers torpedoed, and standard of living presently very low. Though that's not much of a change. I've always been at least proximate to the church-mouse tax bracket. Still, though -- it's not an exaggeration to call this mode of life a gulag.
I'm very scrupulous about hygiene and laundry, especially when travelling, but the fashion look is skewing a little to "Luke the Drifter" of late. They say you should dress for the job you want. I appear to aspire to the position of a Zek of the first circle.
I do need to shift the writing -- both to make more words, and to re-institute the daily reflections, now that I've landed. TK.
When the libraries are closed, slogging though a recent biography of Goethe -- saw it in the TLS a couple of weeks ago. Not really a philosophical biography, more the sort of Life one might write for a novelist. Very approachable and clear, though -- general audience, not exclusively for the scholarship. Works cited (Beiser et al.) are the things I've been working through, so I'm apparently on the right track.
Interesting, his father's library had Albertus Magnus, but not Aquinas. And then the son becomes this mage of nature and patron to the philosophers. Careful the tale you tell. Or have on the low shelves.
I've occasionally used terms like "the greed spell," and talked about how the world of The Matrix is basically a true world (and not entirely in the context of the direct application of Baudrillard). And, sort of arriving the homeland after a clarifying few years in places like Bosnia and Serbia, I am seeing the country with a stranger's eyes. The most disturbing thing is the malice freely commixed with the greed and craven nature, as if it were a necessary ingredient of the pie. Add the implication of entitlement, and you have basically the national stance after the last generation.
The most peculiar thing is that they seem to think it rational. So perhaps further discoveries await me in the shared rationality of this Bluebeard's Castle of the lost colony.
"O Scotland, Scotland..."
Civilizational context is the term that keeps coming to my mind, after a few years in lands that used to be called second world, and as I now attempt to assemble a semblance of existence back in the greed-fueled, entitled city of animal-spirits-of-the-market at the center of my own country.
It is difficult to express, but in wandering the old brutalist apartment complexes and city centers, towering buildings often unremarkable for anything other than the possibility of housing a large library of paperback philosophy in the spacious, bare rooms, along with a strong table or two, the context of the social encounter is the civilization of the country -- adopting the German division of civilization and culture, this social sense is rooted not in the primitive strength of culture, but in the trust engendered by discrete civilized encounters. The fact that you politely request a cup of coffee is interlinked with the assurance that you are among people of a certain social conscience. These are, if not academicians, at least academic citizens. Neighbors and familiars of the Platonic gardens.
The difficulty of my position, and I felt this keenly when I was there, is that some of the people in these countries are quite legitimately pining for the way of life in my own country, perhaps after a lifetime of polite requests for coffee. (Much of this likely has to do with the specific region, southern Europe, the geographical Balkans and the few countries to the north customarily included in the clique. I would likely have come away from Warsaw, Prague, or Gdansk with a different sense.) And I am at odds with a few things here.
When the funding (menial academic work compensated at rates very favorable to the employers) vanished, I did the conservative thing and left at the point beyond which I couldn't guarantee that, barring a change in circumstance, I'd be able to make it back to the country where I could go to ground if necessary without undue risk of death. (Hospitals in that part of the world don't work on the Medicare bare-minimum model.) I held out and tried to change the reckonings of the fates as long as I could, but didn't risk it all, which was wise.
And as close as I was to cultural word of all of these places, the music, theatre, opera ($5 tickets enabled me to keep certain candles lit that otherwise would have been lost for lack of fuel or excess of wind in those years) -- despite this proximity, I was unquestionably, and quite rightly, the observer -- as I had neither the languages nor the understanding of what, in its most basic sense, the culture might have been trying to do with that language. So astute criticism was the best thing that could have been hoped for.
And now I'm back in my own country, a place that might seem to folks overseas like a meritocracy, but on closer inspection and long acquaintance reveals itself to be a complicated mix of powerful networks, in which, if you offend the great and the good among them, things can get very difficult indeed.
So I do think of these concrete apartments with ample room for adequate paperback libraries of philosophy and history (though the discounted agitprop texts of the past might have made the people less enthusiastic about this, and perhaps a bit book-averse); and I think of these old theatres and music venues (though the comprehensive rejection of the longstanding acting pedagogy (some time before the political revolutions) does make for some anodyne evenings); and I do think of these coffeehouses (though the politics and the stuffy air meant I almost invariably opted for a Western-style chain).
It wasn't utopia, but it was a chance to wander among some civilized folks for a bit, and work, and think --before returning to the danger and the possibilities of the groundless abyss hereabouts. If I had my druthers at the moment, I might want to stage a Shakespeare in Sarajevo, or vanish into the cheap seats of the symphony in Belgrade with a good book and the Dvorak. Or an evening at a municipal theatre in Bucharest, puzzling out the strange play in another language. But these are impulses, not ambitions. Ambition is thought to come, via ambulare, from ancient politicians who would walk about canvassing support. Offering the people ideas, and attempting to understand the nature of the people.
One can do that sort of thing when not fighting for basic survival in the more market-driven and capricious, and sometimes corrupt, world.
But, like the Sophist teachers, I am a foreigner, and for all my knowledge, not eligible for office in the gardens of the academy. So I must only teach.
The piece I've been working on during the days is coming into a clearer focus, though why I'm working on it still remains a bit of a mystery to me.
It's said that the artists, the writers lived longest in the concentration camps of the second ww. The people who were trying to use their time on earth, such as it was, to make something, or accomplish something.
Some truth in that. There's not really anything that can safely be called bare existence, if by existence one means simply being, with nothing, as they say, going on. Existence, which becomes a critical piece of philosophical vocabulary for a very specific reason in the last century, is a conglomeration of all of the small, unnoticed glances, breaths, heartbeats, fire alarms, etc. that are the objects of our attention while we live.
So just attempting to continue, to keep having life, as we have the sense of having life, reaches for a fog, in a way. There's nothing solid to take hold of, or event to reach for. And yet, intuitively, this is the life-force, especially in a prosperous and fearful age, in which, as Canneti said, death has become the coin fo the realm. Or perhaps that should be coign ("vantage point").
Our lives, phenomenologically speaking, are simply series of specific actions and intentions. The power, or I suppose eventually the capacity, to do that is what we should perhaps paraphrase "existence" to stand for. And yet, none of these moments really reach the higher life that we normally would associate with the fight of living. There is some distention between our strong desire to live, and the quotidian things we might do if allowed a few extra minutes above the sod. Is, then, the desire to live exclusively addressing the totality? Is that the only nominatum for which the force of this desire is justifiable?
There are exceptions, I think. Someone who wanted to live long enough to do a certain thing, for example. Someone who is doing something important for others. And, perhaps, someone who is attempting to accomplish something with the time that they have, such as it is. Why might this be so?
When we are attempting to make something -- ποεισισ -- the thing that we are attempting to make gives our work a method (μετ' οδοσ) we know, in a practical sense, how to accomplish the thing that we are trying to do. And this plan is based in knowing the connections between things, how they all hang together. The making of the art and the thinking of the concept for the art both require sufficient understanding to create the thing and sufficient judgment to both set our heart on the right thing, and accomplish that thing in a way consistent with our desires. And these are not separate -- they both require us to have a certain map of the way things are, and our desires teach us the associations, and the associations lead us to desire.
So in setting out to create something, the soul, the comprehensive principle, is engaged in both defining the world around it and coping with that world, making something within it. And the point is that these two things are basically the same thing. We understand according to our desire, and desire according to our understanding, The reason that we make maps of the world around us is that we wish to go to certain places, and our maps are created by depicting the places and roads that we desire.
So, when the understanding is a factor of desire, when the world is illuminated by our seeking, it is not just that something called existence is more full. We move from existence to action, and thereby have our being in a way not given to simple observation.
Morning on admin tasks around the city, afternoon, slogging through the old texts.
--
When there seems to be some causation between unwillingness to go along with questionable practices and people in authority, and some rather stern difficulties down the road, it's very difficult not to reason that the glib and craven folks enjoying the usual upper-middle prosperity of the States made another choice when faced with precisely the same situations.
A fallacy, of course. But a very, very tempting one.
Bit of a low-key day within the larger crisis. Slogged through a text that had to be slogged through if I'm to write the thing that I'm thinking about writing. Many notes.
Peculiar heaviness and inaction descended when I sat down to the work, lasted a bit over an hour. No question of doing work, just had to allow whatever was shifting back into place in the psyche or the innards to do so.
Winter makes the situation much more difficult -- I can get through the event, walk through the cold, but then the body needs to repair itself, or at any rate it is best that it do so. Temperate evening yesterday, but the cold does descend as the night deepens. And you can plow through and survive, but the ship does need to mend itself for a bit afterwards.
What might hope be without time?
Intuitively, we define hope (Ελπισ) by describing what hopeful people do: they look to the future with some expectation. But perhaps the essence of the word is hiding, undivided, in the second part of that definition. In our disposition towards the event.
How could you have hope without time? Or is this even possible. Perhaps hope is discursive, and needs to happen within time, and each time it happens within time, each time it is fulfilled or disappointed, the phenomenon grows more clear.
In the Greek, it can be associated with the double genitive. The hope of X in Y. In both cases arising from the thing spoken of. The one hoping hopes from himself, and the thing hoped of provides not generic assurance but some assurance of itself.
So the disposition of the one who hopes is directionally attuned to the future, to the unfolding event, yes, but the whole definition of the thing is in the way that he is attuned to the future, which arises from him, and is characteristic of him. And that to which he is attuned, the unfolding event, has its own nature, and something of that nature uniquely corresponds to the sensibility with which he is looking at the event.
Perhaps this might be thought of atemporally. Hope, as a disposition, encounters things, but it doesn't have to. I can be hopeful about just the present moment, in itself. The last gift in the box of Pandora, nothing further to issue.
A simple example in language: "I hope I did the right thing." Perhaps this doesn't necessarily look to a future time of vindication, of discovering that I did the right thing. Rather, the event to which I am attuned is the present moment, and I am looking at the event with myself inside of it.
The place of vindication of atemporal hope is not the future, but in the intuition of the larger picture.
Events continue apace.
Basic situ remains: top-tier law degree with good grades, many years on the stage, good conservatory degree, and presently slogging through gulag-level existence, ships and bridges equally razed, in the heart of the first world. Had carved out a few roundabout paths back to civilization, but those seem to have come a cropper in the last few days.
So.
Gleaning the things that I need for the next project from the research library, the sorts of things I couldn't find elsewhere. In the scheme of things, I will concede that this might be illogical, but my logic has it that (1) I hope to accomplish this work; (2) I will need these materials specifically; (3) they're in walking distance.
It also allows me to fix the mind on the quest. Always useful. Any quest will do.
Radical discipline is the only way forward. In a very literal sense -- if your mind isn't focused, you will stop walking forward in the cold.
The level of text production seems to have dropped off since my return stateside, for obvious reasons. Will work to get those engines back and running. When your life seems to be governed by dark-side logics, putting as much of your own λογοσ out there as possible becomes a form of tactical response.
Vade, liber.
Part of this is that I'm ramping the mind back up to speed after a fortnight of focusing on surviving the physical circumstance within the discipline. Reading some proper modern work on Dewey today, had to get through two or three rather ugly banks of cloud and fog. There's a reason that philosophers tend to be those who are living comfortable lives. (Pace Boethius, Socrates, et al.)
"When the water is cloudy, I wash my cloak. When the water is clear, I wash my head covering."
I'm trying to keep this channel from turning into a sort of live feed from the bridge of a starship in the midst of battle, or perhaps the engineer's radio on a locomotive out of control, the tracks having ended a half-mile back. But the "ephemera/legit" content split in the website design does encourage the occasional firm protest to the universe at the general circumstance on the "ephemera" channel.
Really, given the degrees and the experience on the CV, there is no rational reason for the events of the last several years (excepting the recent brief, useful, and pleasant years of economic banishment/digital nomadry).
I can only say that I've slogged through worse than the gulags for months at a time, and continue to do so. The family, given the fractious rivalries and the deep distance from normalcy that is constantly conjoined with sensitive government work, is not a source of reality or assistance, and each line of career development I've plowed out seems to be snowed over in short order.
At this point, I don't think of my life in the usual sense of being a certain person with certain degrees and skills trying to do a certain thing in the world. After many years, those appearances, which are appearances as authentic as any other, simply don't correspond with the event. Each day, I encounter the social illusion as illusion, keep the discipline as something that transcends the social illusion, and attempt to accomplish worthwhile work given the tools at hand.
Onward.
In fairness, there's a bit of daylight between the proposition that district soviets should be erected in a wave of partisan fury against the kulaks, and the notion that there should be a social mechanism that ensures that people who object to prevalent corruption aren't perpetually barred from employment and left on the street to die. Sort of, you know, a middle way.
The fact that the society seems prosperous and the people visible within it seem content only establishes that things are well for those people in particular. It seems intuitive that industrial prosperity and hidden (or vanished) populations, large or small, have a causal relationship. As I once asked myself as I walked around an idyllic upstate vacation house for a society of priests, "who am I not seeing, and what is their relationship to this, and to me?"
I stand corrected. The Khachaturian much more soulful tonight. Very interesting.
Though the juxtaposition with the first piece on the program is still a bit like the scene in the Russian film Train Station for Two when the melon-seller asks the pianist to play something with a bit more ethnic bounce to it.
The NY Phil has been doing this for a few years -- I remember stopping by a few times before heading to southern Europe.
I'll actually take a bit of the karmic credit for the notion -- on winter nights, I would sometimes walk through LC and stop in at the Met Opera box office to watch a bit on the lobby monitors. Always listen at the doors.
Warmer evening than yesterday. Tourists swarming midtown. Getting a clearer handle on Dewey's logic at the research library. Very much looking forward to discovering why I've been doing that.
Part of me wonders if I caused this latest shipwreck by needing to get back to a research library with collections in English, an inexpensive gym, and cheap, healthy food, all three of which are a bit scarce in the Balkans.
If that is the case, and I somehow wished this on myself, I'm definitely going to need to have a firm word with myself on the matter, given the other crushing difficulties incurred.
Unrelatedly, the streets here are incensed with marihuana, especially in the afternoon and evening. Doubtlessly, small children at the intersections inhaling intoxicating amounts of the drug. Not to mention the odd querulous Jedi.
Hm. Stoppard's died. An absence that looks to go on for some time.
Always good, if slightly mystifying, to see a good artist find favor with the powers that be. Did his Artist Descending a Staircase both at university and in summerstock in Massachusetts. Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center gave me an entire political aesthetic, down to the cut of the suits.
There would have been plays from the machine in any event. But he went beyond the form, and made them creations of the thing that creates the form for itself as something to live in. And so those of us downstream, waiting in our small theatres for the hand-me-downs from the big city, got to play in some thoughtful and witty pieces that didn't already have to be so when they were made. Many thanks for that.
Chilly evening.
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Scene: A country house, brick, ~17th c. A row of pear trees line the wicket fence and gate. It is evening.
A lone FIGURE approaches the gate, unlatches it, and enters the close. CLOSE IN on the scratch of the pebbles underfoot. Disregarding the old bell-pull, he pushes a lit button next to the door frame, and the doorway lights come on automatically with the chime, heard distantly in the house. The VISITOR waits a moment or two, and then ST. PETER arrives, incongruously dressed in full biblical fig of white flowing robes. He seems neither particularly interested in the event, nor flippant about it, as if watching a wager on the table that might yet go either way. Long stare, Pause.
ST. PETER: (Staring at the visitor's knapsack and broad-brimmed hat.) Yes. Well. We have no idea how you managed to pull that off. The Scotch is in the library. We'll talk in the morning.
###
A propos of nothing, I've become fascinated with John Dewey's formal logic. Which is a bit like a Roman gladiator taking an interest in Pythagorean esoterica on his walk from the robing rooms to the amphitheatre (the theatre doubled, the lack of σκενε, the absence of angle), or Eugene Aram trying to get a hold on the decimalization of the coinage while being led to his execution. But life is what happens when other people are trying to kill us, I suppose. And there is a long arc there back to a current project of mine. I circulated a propos to a few low-key European schools, hoping to do a Ph.D. around it, but the last of those refusals came in recently.
Dewey is the great progressive and public intellectual, bridging the end of the long 19th c., and elevating the public tone to the middle of the 20th c. And he stood for what America was to the wold in those days, the naive realist with wealth and influence. But he's not writing from a blank slate.
I have this sort of New Yorker cartoon in my mind of him showing up to a meeting of the Boston philosophers of the Metaphysical Club, and profusely apologizing for the degree to which he was still under the spell of German philosophy, specifically Hegelian speculative idealism. "Oh," says one of them, perhaps Holmes, casting a quick look at the others "I don't think that will be too much of a problem..."
Among many other factors, he apparently found it very hard to publish things when writing using that vocabulary. So he shifted the words, but perhaps not the underlying sense -- the lingering deposit of faith, or perhaps it was just bred in the bone, and would not out of the flesh.
But what held him in the state of that problem? Why not fashion new Georgics, or transpose folk songs up past their Transdanubain seventh, up to... Whatever there was when there weren't other things in the way.
What story does he decide to take a position within, rather than write as if no story other than the one that he was writing at the moment held power over him? Because this is the essence of metaphysics -- not the diorama of incorporeal things, but the small arrow pointing to a certain spot within it: "You are here." The metaphysician clings to this description of the world that he is within because it gives his speech meaning and reality.
Start with Hume and Locke. They point out that rather than the world being a list of things that are, each of us receives the world through sense-impressions, and creates a sensibility while these impingements echo within us. Then Kant writes to point out that the world didn't give us the sense of what these things were -- it was our minds that understood each thing to be a certain thing. After Kant, Fichte subjectivizes this force that composes what the world is, and points out how it can be strong, and how it can be weak, Hegel points out that this thing that understands the world is doing different things in every age, with history itself being advanced by the self-realization of these souls. But then the shifting spectres of this idealism (the belief that it is the idea of the thing that gives the thing its reality) caused some people to wonder if we hadn't lost the firm grip on the mechanisms of understanding that Kant had given us. One group of the neo-Kantians set the doctrine forward as a refined epistemic; another looked to incorporate psychology, the understanding of what the human mind was, with this explanation of what it did. Meanwhile, Darwin sets the world alight with his story of evolution, and the hard sciences begin to tell the story of creation in that light.
Back in the States, Dewey begins by studying Hegel, grounding his understanding in the truth of the idea, rather than the distinct sense perception, or some great list of things that are, and why they are that way. So he has a sense that we are caught up in history, and our ideas serve history by giving it some substance, although not as a clear understanding of the moment as history. Darwin's influence was felt on these shores too, and so this Hegelian speculative idealism gains a scientific grounding. The changes in the world are proceeding according to a certain logic, although this logic is not merely veiled from us, but incomprehensible within what we think to be acts of comprehension. But there is a freeing aspect to this, because our ideas can advance this logic simply by being themselves, and not as explicit explanations of what the present moment is, sub specie aeternitatis. Our rationality can operate within history to advance history, not by undestanding its cunning, but by observing the things that conduct towards self-realization and social progress, and those that are retrograde to it. And idealism gives him that freedom, because there is no realism demanding a precise description of the mind-independent event of objective history.
Now jump back to the European debate. Kant's epigones had much trouble with the thing in itself, the inability to understand the essence of the object. We, instead, create our reality from appearances. Science and Darwinism implicitly suggests that the true description of the thing doesn't need to reach to its essence, because we receive the truth of the thing in understanding its empirical nature and its place in the story of things by scientific explanation. Jacobi had objected to the thing in itself, as without it, he could not enter the system, and with it, he could not remain in the system. But perhaps this was how Kant's propaedeutic was meant to function. It conducted us to the limits of our understanding, and kept us focused on those limits, rather than thinking that we had a more complete understanding through our "F=MA"-type reasoning.
So this learned naivete of Dewey's lands in a certain relation to this debate. The thing in itself, the essence of the object, he, like the other post-Kantians, leaves in Kant's sepulchre. Instead, he recognizes that scientific understanding can allow us to participate in this worldmaking. But we do so behind the veil of idealism, our ideas being merely chimerical forms that arise within us as the human race negotiates this undescribed and undescribable path, This, I think, is the important bit. The object has us in its power, and this has to to with the thing itself, but we, instead of straining our understanding towards that aporia, seek to become complicit with these forces. By helping along the evolution and the changes in things, we are operated upon by these things that we don't understand, and there is no obligation to do the impossible and attempt to understand them.
This resonates for me with Dewey, and with his time. But I think there might have been some important doctrines buried in that Koenigsberg sepulture, and perhaps, now that progress and the Enlightenment have shown us their dangers, perhaps it's time to go back to Kant, again.
Saprere aude, as Hamann quoted in his letter to Kant. Few know that it was the mystic of the North, romantic and student of the culture and historicism, who introduced that ancient notion to the conversation.
The month and a fortnight at the mountain in Bulgaria was consciously a sort of 'recuperation behind the lines' time, a country house with some novels in it to repair to for a bit. And then the journey back into the thick of things. I seem to have survived the transit, but the bellum omnium contra me is wearing a bit thin, especially in winter. At least in the trenches, I wouldn't have been convinced the Kaiser was gunning for me personally. (Though I'm not saying the idea wouldn't have occurred to me.)
So once again, it's a situation that shouldn't be, and the ways that things that shouldn't be happen inside the always already-understood world are interesting... in an academic sense.
When you have to head back into the abyss, something in the mind reacts very strongly against that prospect. In the event, though, precisely the same part of the soul that had risen so strongly against the prospect rises against the event itself.
Puritan non-Christmas in the great city of the age.
Honestly taken aback after a few years in less commercialized societies. The greed spell isn't a good look for humanity, spiritually speaking. When the English theatre became commercical rather than courtly in the mid 16th c., there was an abundance of wealth on display. Greed was thought to be good, largely because it offered a power structure distinct from the monarchy and the aristocracy. (In fairness, the same principle made hand-wrought lace very popular.)
Anti-Catholicism had much to do with this as well. The ideal virtue was no longer that of the the poor and austere monk. Of course, there were some complications to this as well. The global orders in the church (OP, OFM, etc.), precisely because of their global presence and connection to Rome, were more closely linked to trade than many of the national churches. I grew up thinking that the commerce of the holiday was the secular error, while the church preserved the spiritual truth, but the reality was much more complicated. St Nick was a trader form the beginning, patron to the commercial interests after the translation of the relics to Bari. Christianity is a transactional faith, or at least more transactional than many of the others. As a result, there are modern hospitals, sanitation, and electrical service more often in these Christian trading nations, and many of the others look to them with envy.
But that's the culture, and I'm considering more the microcosm of the individual souls. Listening to these people, and watching them, I see the deformation that greed causes, the same greed that fuels the engines of commerce as they desire the latest goods. But in the case of the individual, the manner of living will not serve that individual when they have their existence within eternity rather than temporal progression. And basing the whole calculus on happiness and freedom of the marketplace has made for a very craven public discourse.
Happiness must have some connection to the things that are going on. If you are happy while there are bad things going on, you've simply shifted your perspective to include good things not presently in view. So to make personal happiness the goal of public policy means that there must be something going on that is, however loosely, associated with this condition of happiness. The usual way of describing the civic order is located in these things going on. America cuts to the chase, and says happiness is the good. But the difficulty is that it is possible for bad people to be happy when doing bad things.
I waver back and forth as to whether to categorize my experiences of recent years as political or not. Physically, the reality of daily life is often the equivalent of gulag life in the stories about other countries. I don't think that I will ever be able to explain the things that have happened to me, largely because my focus is on describing the way things are. When bad things happen, they simply get in the way, and I do my best to move past them as quickly as possible, rather then using them as fodder for the thought.
Ultimately, you must try to be good. The reason for that is that, even though there is a chance that good and bad are illusory, absolutely everything else outside of good and bad is inherently capable of being described in more than one way, and we can't be sure that we are riding the right horse, as William James (I think) had it. Although the mechanisms of industrial prosperity make for an abundance of goods, there are a lot of people leaving very difficult lives, and some of them are in places where one wouldn't think a difficult life was the order of the day. So you must think that you are doing good, and you must think that you are speaking the truth, or you will never be sure that you were even attempting to do the right thing.
Eavesdropping on a concert at the NY Phil Jumbotron. Interesting juxtaposition of a very thoughtful piece with the Khachaturian piano concerto. Brings to mind a moment in the old Russian film Train Station for Two...
https://youtu.be/bUya5DBvw_g?si=fbUJlldBb_LXKim1&t=4907
In fairness, K is very useful for orchestras in the second world -- crowd-pleasing, and not requiring the band to play a tune beyond itself.
Eve of Puritan non-Christmas. Thick clouds, very rainy night last night. Usual tourist hordes. Perhaps my imagination, but the faces in the crowd seem to be much more domestic, compared to other years.
The city seems very evil today. Uptick in the number of rude and oblivious comments from visiting passerby, an old toothless hag cackled noisily at me as I walked past, that sort of thing. Tourists literally swarming the tables of the research library.
Sloughing on.
Surprisingly warm in the city. Hordes of midlanders pacing the streets aimlessly, looking to participate in the much-bruited heaven hereabouts. As it turns out, it's just another city, although the confluence of millions in this context of liberal democracy does make things interesting. But it's nothing about the place itself. The charm of this Camelot is in the ways of the people, not the magic circle Merlin traced on the ground.
One meaning of "ground" closely associated with the philosophical one is the background whiting or umbering (?) of the canvas prior to painting. The shared social life operates as a ground, not merely a background presumption, but an active, epistemic basis for saying what any given thing is. If the ground were to be different, the painted sunset would have to be different.
The ground of social interaction in this country is highly mediated. The sensibility that I hear around me couldn't govern a New England town based on regular town meetings -- it's largely constructed from television, and allows people to encounter each other within an industrial mechanism in a sufficiently voluble manner. Which is no great loss, perhaps -- except for the fact that this occasionally artificial social mind is, historically speaking, what we use to identify what it is that things are in the world. This epistemic function, perhaps consequently, has been relegated to the media of the society -- we rely on the news/entertainment discourse to tell us what things are, and how these things function together -- but the common social mind, now largely an artificial creation of the media-driven society, still operates as a check on the things that we're told. Whether or not they ring true.
The nature of this three-way interaction is important, perhaps. For me to be convinced that A is X, I no longer have to have a sort of Habermasian sphere of discourse appear in which A is X -- the cultural mediation simply announces the fact. The critical bit is that the artificial social mind, which operates as the functional check on the claims of the media, doesn't have to concur with this proposition; it simply has to not reject this proposition. So it can have no commitments that are inconsistent with A being X, which is a very different thing from collectively determining that A, by rights, is X.
Perhaps.
Interesting bit at morning Mass -- arrived from the gym at precisely the start time as usual. (A change in the gym opening time a few years back meant I had to shift to the parish, as I couldn't make it across town for the morning informal pontifical at the big house.)
Smelled something burning as I walked down the side aisle -- some gaffers tape on one of the votive candle units was smouldering. I knew they had had a similar event that resulted in much damage recently, so once I determined that there was no staff member or senior parishioner type to be advised, I tamped it down and made sure it was out before turning my attention to the Mass of the Faithful. Alerted a sacristan to it afterwards, noticed that she spoke to one of her friends, and I then observed that friend conferring with a staff type, so I went over there to make sure word had filtered down. Lines of communication at parishes can be a bit medieval at times.
Hardly the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, but probably enough to make the insurance types ornery.
I do miss eavesdropping on the UK academic chapel. Extraordinarily useful homiletics, compared to the US mine run for the daily liturgies. The point is to think about these things, not to have a thoughtful expression while listening to them in the conventional manner.
Last night, Handke's Moravian Night. (And there is something about the ending that makes reading it in the course of an evening worthwhile.) In fairness, I can't vouch that everything I read was in the text, or that I read everything in the text -- narrative tends to get a bit floaty at 3AM. Started in WSQ, them moved a bit north.
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Frankly, jumping into this adventure in winter gives new meaning to the word "exhaustion."
And, you know, there was nothing inherently wrong with that ex ante level of meaning. It was perfectly sufficient.
During the Balkan nomadry (which was actually the second trip), I was able to secure reasonable (though extremely basic) accommodations, find and prepare nutritious food, and the extremely inexpensive and available tickets for theatre, music, etc. meant that I could engage culturally a bit, which is what I do. (And there's a book of criticism now, whatever its virtues.) The thing I most valued in these places, though, was the explicit civilizational context. The social understanding is set forth much more clearly there, and much of it is centered in the universities and academic culture.
And now I'm back in the initial scheme -- rather firmly (and mysteriously) excluded from the theatremaking (conservatory masters, a decade of work), practice of law (top-tier school, good grades, two bar exams), and the academy (thousands of undergraduate papers graded, 300 pp. dissertation, faculty refuses to schedule a defense).
So, as against those claiming that "whatever you can get away with doing" is a fair means of building a culture, I have to point out that it rarely results in the survival of the worthiest, or even the most qualified. And without a civilizational context, there's not really a "base camp" to retreat to. The only option is to keep working and thinking, because that's what I do, but it increasingly looks like even the basic existence of internal exile to a place like Siberia won't be possible. Once outside the scheme of things, there is no means of survival. (Especially as the social safety net in this culture is being used for permanent structural and political support for some populations.)
And, following the structure of the thought, the missing element most needed is the present civilizational context that would allow a foothold for understanding the situation. The most that the craven discourse would offer is that I've lost some sort of a game, or gambled and lost by the simple fact of existing.
It's less rage against the dying of the light than pointing out with a sort of mute disbelief that the order of things was unconcerned with light from the beginning. And the important aspect of this is that it's thought to be an epistemic virtue -- the making of all things new.
Light, more light!
Must expand my culinary horizons past baby carrots and tofu blocks. (I made it a point to eat abundantly in the mountains, foreseeing precisely this possibility.) Fortunately the discount biscuit shops have stepped into the breach: $1.49 for five name-brand (i.e., not filler) granola protein bars. (Went back for a second box.)
Stopped into the Philharmonic jumbotron for Sibelius 2 last night. The notion seems to have progressed since i last was in these climes. Three rows of chairs, lobby mostly quiet. But the difference between European halls and US city halls is discomfiting sometimes. Less a cultural stasis for the music than an authoritarian controlled space for acting as one acts at a concert. In fairness, the toughs lurk in the shadows in both courts, ready to provide any social sanction thought necessary.
I had heard S2 many years ago here at an open rehearsal, and what the conductor (??) then brought out was just what I was missing here. These two melodies at the end, both the obvious one and the other one, have to appear like massive ships in the foggy night. Some inattention to that section in rehearsal, perhaps, as there seemed to be some rhythmic skittering underneath at those points, the quieter themes sounding more like fragments of radio transmissions in Arctic shipping than an underlying coherent logic. I'm an utter amateur, of course -- that's just the way it seemed when listening to a live feed piped into the lobby (and mixed a bit too far to the bass) underscored by the nearby cafe and the conversations of passerby.
Feast of Christ the King -- yes, he's at least that. Else, someone else might be. More and more I see these religious doctrines as attempts to identify and describe the immanent truth, no less true for that, but human words can't exhaust human experience. And yet, it us the only purchase we have on things.
I don't think it's an accident that John Dewey's work has been rather unceremoniously and ineluctably placed in front of me just at the point at which I am increasingly surrounded by evidence that the social experiment on these shores has gone wrong, perhaps incorrigibly so -- and not at all in the context of abstract propositions and evidence; the event is to be drama, not treatise.
"Where the danger is, there the saving force grows."
To the extent I learn things from social interactions (which, tbh, is not the best way of learning things), I keep coming back to a fundamental duality of imitative life versus alethic life. If you're doing whatever you're doing because it is an inherently meaningful thing for you to do, I think there might be some danger there. We populate the world of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, massgoers, coffeehouse denizens, what you will, from a sort of abstract social command. The social deontic governs. But there are also people who use these forms of social interaction to do things. Their behavior is regulated, not constituted, by the social deontic.
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Still on the thought of transubstantiation as the reversal, not the consummation, of sacrifice. In the old sacrifice, which formed a large part of the social form of religion for millennia, you began with living animals, and ended with bits of food. With the sacred meal of the Christians, we begin with the bits of food, and reverse the process.
Hm. Apparently, the good grocery, in addition to making the good, cheap 100% peanut paste, also makes a form that's only 90% peanuts, with the usual fillers of oils and sugars, and this is in a very similar jar, and is occasionally mis-shelved with the other. S'alright, perhaps I needed the sugars and the oils in the diet.
#discernmentofgroceries
My guess is that one reason things are the way that they are on these shores because people no longer believe in accountability to a final judgment on the soul. And they are right to say that they have a justified belief that the proposition as they recite it is false in the manner in which they say that it is false. But the reality of final judgment, which is only partially expressed by determination and negation in our varied understanding of the event and reduction of it to language, is nonetheless sufficiently true that they would amend their lives, if they understood.
Relatedly, there is some obligation on the fellow who actually tries the locked doors to the stairway to a better life. If most never even try, there is some obligation vis a vis the certain knowledge acquired, and more, the encouragement to keep trying the doors. Else, we're in Plato's cave sans Plato.
Becalmed day. Mass, quick meditation, walked to the research library, making a quick stop at the discount biscuit shop for a couple 10 oz bags of pitas. Novella of the AM (still meandering through late in the PM) The Return of Munchausen. Modern Russian, a bit dark, and anecdotes a bit attenuated from the originals, but still enjoyable.
And then to the work -- the mind played a trick it has sometimes played before in low-rest, high-stress times, and simply refused to engage when given access to the text. Like working through the different gears of a transmission until you find the teeth that will provide some resistance. A very low gear for much of the day.
On the upside, the books are much stronger, the food much healthier (trademark carton of tofu, young carrots, etc.), gym much better equipped, as compared to wandering the Balkans prior to last Friday. A few traditionally important creature comforts missing, but slogging through that, and if I can just get the mind to catch hold a bit more strongly, I might be able to make a good thing or two out of this odd interstitial rough landing.
Again, the nation's difficulties seem to entirely be from too much prosperity in the middle bits of the population. A far higher number is above poverty (see the second Picketty book), but this freedom from want has prompted some strange wants indeed. In any society, you really do need a comprehensive notion of what it is to be a human being, and not just someone who has managed to survive the ex-post-undescribed culture and civilization. There has to be a civilizational context -- a shared notion of being with others, and this shared notion gives the rule to smaller judgments within the social life.
On today's Gospel -- I've never thought of it, but the "okay, now slay my enemies" at the peroration might have a hermeneutic function. If those left behind when the leader went off to the foreign court to get the crown had all stayed inside with doors locked for fear of the others, perhaps they wouldn't have enough social cachet to carry off the massacre.
Odd evening last night, walked down to the park piers in the West Village just past NYU -- usually a peaceful place. But almost completely deserted, on not that chilly of an evening. Will resist the temptation to the long journey in the evening hours -- walking can use up the evening hours rather speedily. Not to mention the dragons.
Odd day. Last night was calm, wind tempered, sheep safely grazing in the 40F weather, etc. But I had to stop in for a rare Sbux, as the coat needed some stitches before the night, and the unusual influx of coffee at that hour made for some peculiarities of the digestive system. (In fairness, three venti cups at the end of the night might have been pushing it.)
Then gym, Mass, meditation (keeping it under a quarter-hour, this is no time to start deepening the practice), laundry. Then a quick couple hours of dozing in the park under a tree (civilized -- the rule of thumb is that a 19th c. British fiction character might reasonably have been described as doing so), with a strange dream about computer record-keeping systems and the last country I stayed in over in the Balkans.
National dreams seem to have a peculiar force with me. Perhaps I'm a Hegelian. In the utmost extremity of a past winter, I recall coming to consciousness (from cumulative lack of sleep, presumably) as I paced the streets, earnestly seeking the depot of the national rail system, in one case French British, in another, German. Not quite at that level of intensity quite yet, although O Sacred Head Surrounded was on autoplay in my head as I walked to the research library after the nap.
Perhaps I'll wake to find that I'm actually an acting teacher in LA, and this was all a dream conjured by an alien species to give me some sense of their culture, and time to practice the flute. In which case, these "humans," as they're called, are a real piece of of work.
In terms of how badly crashing hard out of the Balkans could have gone last Friday, I should be grateful.
I am grateful.
Bitterly cold evening in the city. He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but those of us with a coat or two are thought to be capable of rising to the occasion. Which was eventually the case. But it took some time before the shift from 'wow, this is difficult' to 'I will prevail, come what may.'
"If the river has to be crossed, it doesn't matter if the water is warm or cold." (Teilhard du Chardin, SJ)
At morning Mass -- καιροσ -- I'm sure it's occurred to everyone else in the Christian world, and I'm just late to the table, but the sacrifice of material food that becomes a living form precisely reverses the act of sacrifice that takes a living form and changes it to material food. A response to sacrifice itself -- closing the door.
Yesterday, the pontifical, as usual when I'm in the city, and then evening Mass at the west side parish, which has a fair national profile as a progressive church. I realized with some dismay as the services progressed that neither faction of the church has retained a vocabulary that opens the Grail. And they're in utter conflict politically. Colossal new murals in the cathedral of local police, ambulance staff, and firefighters, commingling with angels. In scale, outpaces not merely any other decoration, but also runs rampant over the architecture. I remember a few rectors ago, there was a reaction against the (quite good) slightly abstract bas-reliefs of E.A. Seton and one other figure, which were removed, and the rector put in a porcelain Italian-bespoke liturgical realism bas-relief which (fortunately) vanished soon later. That was the same push that replaced the booklets with missals (the one now used), but didn't calculate the depth of the missal brackets on the pews. "Which one of you would attempt to conquer a kingdom without sitting down to count the cost..."
Difficult slog. Focusing on focusing the mind to work level despite all the whatnot.
Another dietary dilemma -- enormous can of artificially flavored crisps for 0.87 clearance. Purchased. In wartime, one feeds the troops with what's at hand and not explicitly prohibited. And one hopes that a lifetime of generally speaking nutrition-focused choices will allow for the occasional spells of living off the land. (The land in this case being the industrial wasteland of the processed food industry, and their food products that I'd usually just walk past in the aisle, even on clearance.)
Moral dilemma of the morning. At the discount biscuit shop (the days when a truckload of McVities Digestives arrived are still written in golden memory), it was either the usual flour and water only pitas, or an Indian Ritz-type cracker. But the latter was twice the weight and many more calories. I'm not sure if this was a rational decision or mandamus from the muscle tissues after a hard hour of lifting, but, reader, the crackers were chosen.
In a city I rather like, at a coffee chain I rather like. Sufficient is the day.
I finally figured out that the prompting, almost like a voice, asking me if I was happy was in fact sort of raising the proposition, so that I could consider it. Shades of Faust, concededly -- "stay, thou art so..." and one step further than Kantian pure disinterest, perhaps, but it's a good suggestion. My life is constant work to create the possibility of worthwhile work, but it is good to be happy when even that first kind of work goes well. Despite the wolf at the door under a big sign that says "Danger: Wolf at Door" rented from Wolf, Inc. on strict terms, with full arbitration waiver granting that all claims are to be settled by a wolf.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone at the door.
To create and sustain a platform for the free and productive functioning of its own mind. This is the biological task of the flesh, and it is also the task of the fleshy organism in the world.
"When the water is muddy, I wash my cloak. When the water is clean, I wash my head covering."
The notion of a secular monastic outpost and menial work in the upper Midwest with access to research libraries seems to be the wisest course. Steering for it. though there will be some roundabout routes taken, and the journey might be long.
Had I more time and better boots, I would have been in the mountains here every day. As it was, the weight bench and the table with a laptop were the usual course of the day.
Up until 3AM going over proofs and final editing for the latest manuscript, another compilation piece. The move to wordpress was precisely with this end in mind.
Have sent it off, hopefully it will make it through Napoleon's lines in time for the Christmas book fairs.
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