#bookmarking
https://www.ejiltalk.org/is-israels-use-of-force-against-iran-justified-by-self-defence/
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/select-ihl--arising-israel-iran-conflict/
https://www.justsecurity.org/114641/israel-iran-un-charter-jus-ad-bellum/
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/israels-operation-rising-lion-right-of-self-defense/
https://legal.un.org/repertory/art2/english/rep_supp10_vol1_art2_4.pdf
https://legal.un.org/repertory/art2/english/rep_supp9_vol1_art2_4.pdf
Kefir ($1.85) and a biography of Christian Wolff on the rooftop cafe of the grocery, before buying the week's potatoes, rice, etc. Having a notion of what Kant had to work with at the beginning is proving very useful in understanding the directions things took. Not annotating -- the annotation pace has slowed so much that I'm going to just read a few to get back up to speed.
The thing that I shall miss the most about being circumstanced out of the theatre festival in Transylvania this year is the Noh troupe. Extraordinarily worthwhile.
The attraction to Japanese ritual and contemplative forms might be historically and culturally inflected. In the late 19th c. many Slavic immigrants had just come over to the Midwest, and Japan had prevailed in a stunning triumph over Russe. So there was a fascination among the eastern elites (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt) with Japanese culture, and this perhaps became a cultural force, perhaps displacing or preempting the Eastern forms that had reached the US by going west, instead of east. Just a notion, but the outlines of the facts seem to correspond. Far and few are the ikonostases and Holy Doors in the Midwest. In fairness, even the Roman church was explicitly equated with the Hindu pantheon in the correspondence of the Framers. A protestant nation at founding, but a permissive one (hence Baltimore).
But for whatever reason, the eastern forms do stand in my mind for the necessary focus and mediation that keeps a traveller on his path in summer heat and winter cold.
I'm beginning to realize that the most dangerous misreading of the present American politics might be that the obvious difficulties are somehow an exception existing only at the top. The nature of the shining city on the hill is that its characteristic nature is evident to every passerby. And whether from admiration or from scapegoating, the present difficulties in leadership seem to point to some characteristic sins.
Minor Verdi (Attila) at the city's national theatre. ($5, deep balcony) Excellent programming choice, apparently the full symphony orchestra in the pit, capable soli, large chorus. The sort of country-house stand-and-deliver Verdi that you might have heard at the beginning of the last century in a regional Italian house in a city of decent size, which is to say, a far more worthwhile evening than you'd probably have at one of the international houses with everything over-designed and planned. The essence of Verdi. Much like Shakespeare, it is the psycho-physical condition of the singers, demonstrating the revolutionary practice of freedom. Some clear local meanings in the staging, to be developed at too much length in a proper reflection TK.
Modalisms and modernity. Perhaps not unconnected, the point of the latter being that there are deeper currents of being made accessible by simply going along with what seems to be important at the time. As opposed to living within the already-understood. Being cool, not all doctrinal, which is to say living within experience, and not experience as divided and structured by words.
And yet, acting according to the spontaneous prompting of the mind and what seems good to the others--there are some obvious dangers to this. There are many things that can make us think things.
The local church is war-weary. Perhaps the same war-weariness is also in the Orthodox and Muslim places of prayer. At the Sanctus at the English Mass, the entire congregation stared silently, and it seemed, sullenly, at the violinist intoning the melody. Eventually a few voices murmured something corresponding to the text.
I'm not a fan of the English Masses in this part of the world generally. Functionally, it's useful as a sort of lingua franca Mass, but a traveller shouldn't expect a Mass in their own language; a (novus ordo/modern) Latin rite would do just as well for diplomats, travellers, and foreign workers. Perhaps the reason why the Masses were Latin in the first place. If you know the liturgy well enough, and have the readings, the only longeurs are in the homily, and studying the decorations of the church can easily substitute for listening to the meditations.
The point is the spiritual exercise, the focusing of the mind, the meditation, and the meaningful act. And it seems no one's doing any of these things anymore. In American suburbia, they're worshipping their lawns, in the cities, they're playing to the televisions, and abroad, most seem just to be looking to participate in a social event. Omnis homo mendax. But one honors the obligation. Harrumph, etc.
Oddly soul-less Beethoven's Ninth from Warsaw to close the season. Like a waterfall of flower petals rather than water itself. Beethoven without the political danger. Speed, when it finally came, without passion or fear. Perhaps deliberately created as a consumer good of comfort.
Still, though, the ability to just eavesdrop upon a major ensemble playing the Ninth as a matter of course is a good thing. There must be a better way to get all of the remarkable things going on in the world at any given moment to the attention of more people. So much of the present media mindset was created by bursts of transmission over the air at set times to those in reach of the transmission. The internet is fundamentally a different thing.
I tend not to write and think about foreign wars, as it's generally not my business, even though the hard-won doctrines of neutrality seem to have slipped away in the last few years. I doubt that there will be the equivalent of the Alabama settlement after the dust settles in Europe, for example. (Interestingly, the U.K, as a dominant naval power, always sidestepped the 19th c. neutrality conventions.) The events of the last few days or so in the Levant are troubling. Going after general command and control seems to signal an all-out war. I don't think a conflict can get more across-the-board than that. These are not proportional attacks in pursuit of declared objectives, nor are they claimed to be. Which is why I'm puzzled that the news seems to treat it as the sort of one-off strikes that happen from time to time. Hold on to your... whatever it is that you think that you should grab onto. #notexpert #justwiseacring
Back in the city of the Jedi Council. Interesting trip. En route, stopped off in the capital of the old Republic to make the pilgrimage that was blocked earlier, as the national church had been celebrating a pontifical liturgy when I arrived, and wanted only those of that nationality inside the building at the time. No matter. Some odd dreams in the interval. An interesting visit to a favorite city. But traveling by bus in summer does have its peculiar difficulties. Must find a magic carpet or something.
The rooms here are a bit pricier than the usual budget for these travels would allow. Some financial shenanigans forced me to book relatively last-minute, off the price curve. Had wanted to return to the theatre festival in Transylvania this month, but all of the places in the old Saxon capital were outside of the budget. As it turns out, with the last minute booking, what I'm paying now would have put me in range of a cheap set of rooms timely booked there, so that's a mite frustrating. But he moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Mainly arm-wrestling the invisible hand of the markets, it seems.
Hoping for a productive month. It is familiar territory. Hopefully the shadow of war in the Western Balkans will recede once all involved realize that everyone else in the world is panicking over trade routes and there's very little support for vindicating claims of ethnic right. A peculiar world. For my part, I just read philosophy and visit the theatres.
Racine's Berenice, apparently a new production at the Comedie Francaise, at the national theatre here as part of a festival/conference -- back row, top balcony, $10. Closed my eyes and listened to the Alexandrines for most of it; cast quite skillful. Interesting characters in the top balcony. At the end, I might have been the only one in the house standing to applaud, but I was right.
La Gioconda at the opera house. Upper balcony side, about as far from the plane of the plaster line as the conductor was. ($5.67 via half-price site.) Consciously summoning up memories of the visit and performance here as an undergraduate. After that visit, the theatre of this city stood for a certain thing in my mind for a very long time, and I tried, with modest success, to inhabit that idyll. I suppose you can't go unheimlich again. But a very powerful evening.
Oddly, as I stood up at the end, I realized that what had seemed to be a robust zipper on the jeans had somehow given out completely. Luckily, simply buttoning the coat solved the problem. Always wear a coat of decent length.
Interesting that it's on the feast of Barnabas ('Barnaba' is the Inquisition spy.) Possibly a noticed holiday in these parts--traditionally the midsummer day in old style dating.
Under no illusions as to the character of the environs. Though I've stumbled into a reasonably comfortable place for the several days I'm here, this is still the most commercial, class-conscious, and ruthless city on the itinerary. Sometimes you need to take the low path through the old city. Though I didn't have any choice in making the interstitial jaunt, I'm hoping to make the best of it. It does bring some shadows into the mind, but the dawn runs are easier here than in sleepy Transylvania, and much more than the other place before but one.
The immediate environs are the biosphere of the Euro-jaunters, which I find a bit frightening, tbh. But on the periphery, the familiar chain coffee stores where I can sit for a bit with a book. And the museums and theatres are very reasonably priced, if you're willing to take the most distant seats in the house. Which has been my course for lo these many years. A habitual resident of the heavens.
Interesting aside in one of the Frederick Forsyth obits in the Times. He was struck by the women of Budapest. There is a certain vibe amongst the folks of both genders here. Perhaps centuries ago, a people from the east found good farmland and an especially defensible and auspicious bend in the great river, and decided to settle down and milk the happiness of the earth. And the culture does still seem to have the fruitful-and-multiply stance about it. At least in the capital. The outer districts are likely entirely populated by unshaven Kraznahorkian madmen living in castles of dirty, discarded styrofoam construction paneling on the windswept heath, staring listlessly at the groundhogs.
Aside from travels in university days, one of my first encounters with the place was a bobbled bus transfer -- as the stops hadn't been announced, and I didn't know that there were two stations in town, and it was the middle of the night, I got off the bus and realized my mistake as the bus pulled away. Looking around, I saw a subway station (above ground) nearby and decided that there must be a map there. I walked over, and just as I arrived, what turned out to be the last train of the evening arrived, and I got on, although I hadn't yet got to the map on the platform. As it turned out, it was going precisely where I needed to go. I stacked my bags on the seat opposite, and as I did so, a young woman with long dark hair and a long flowing skirt, seemingly the genius of the place herself, waked past and smiled.
It takes the power of decision to decide to milk what joy you can from the earth, and though I've never seen eye to eye with the Epicureans, the stance that sets itself to live in such a manner does has some faint tincture of Eden to it.
One of the difficulties in (finally being able to start to make a return to) the Jedi dojo is that folks tend to think that it is a message to them. Another consequence of the triumph of pragmatism. But disciple isn't a demonstration of virtue; it wants nothing to do with the observer. It's not a message, at least not a message from me, and if it's a message from someone else, I have nothing to do with either the sender or the recipient. The original meaning of virtue is strength. The shining city on the hill was not built, and does not function, in order to send messages by semaphore or flashing lights. What this age misses is the reality of the thing itself.
Two productions I've seen recently, the Cyrano at JDP and the Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj seem to underscore the danger of staging the Western canon according to the pop-culture view of the West. The 80's glam-rock vibe of the former, and the unfortunate cage-brawl duel at the end of the latter seem taken from television and film, rather than a consciousness of the source culture. I mean, you wouldn't stage a Noh piece with a manga vibe, or conduct a Beethoven based on the late 1990s MIDI versions on the web.
In fairness, many if most directors stateside would do the same thing. Tempore, mores, etc. But Hamlet or Cyrano being unable to speak to the folks who are perched a bit precariously between East and West (as, I suppose, technically, every spot on earth is) is a loss all around.
Also: colloquial English versions of the verse on the supertitles (text is the famously peculiar Hungarian adaptation from the 19th c., I think) are supremely disconcerting to those who know the plays. I find myself closing my eyes, so I can think through the actual structure of the text (which, in fairness is possibly not available to the actors in the adaptation).
That said, the Hamlet there is worthwhile. I saw it three times this year, taking careful notes each time. (tickets a bit pricier than the usual Balkans budget, but still under $15). Mulling a longer piece on it. Not for any audience, just to think through a few things.
I worked several times with a great Czech scenographer whose talk-back schtick was to ask people to raise their hands if they (a) liked the play, (b) disliked the play, or (c) had no opinion about the play. He would then scan the room after (c) (quite a large percentage, always), and hang his head and say, "Now that frightens me."
Perhaps the reason that I kept coming back was the discovery that the odd building I ran past before dawn every weekday in the winter a year ago had staged a Hamlet. And I became very curious about what that might be. It's a bit personal, and a full explanation of my interest (amply rewarded) will have to wait for that longer piece.
Living in a condition of life similar to that of Indiana Jones without becoming as reductionist and cliched as Indiana Jones is a bit of a challenge sometimes. Imagine Proust attempting to go around the world in eighty days. The task is Wellsian, so the story must be according to the terms of H.G.
Incidentally, those Spielberg films are parables of American spirituality. Ark and Grail, obviously, but also Eastern spirituality (Temple of Doom), esoteric faiths, and sci-fi parables in a spiritual context. Essentially, what happens when the older notions of religion play out against an American ontological context. And "Indiana" stands for the new world, the discovered place; his dislike for the name comes from the fact that the name was used in a derogatory sense against the people who lived there originally.
Perhaps.
#saturdayradio BBC adaptation of Priestley's Good Companions. Priestley is a real touchstone for me. Like Fowles, he managed to smuggle a few worthwhile things into mass-market printings. A novel is always about the experience of a single person within time, divided among the characters, and therefore analogous to the act of creating the novel. But this is only an analogy. The point of the work is to say that this is the experience of a single soul.
I try to avoid the news--entertainment of the present national politics, but in a more abstract sense, when you sense the falseness of things at the center, which is necessarily a function of ideas, perhaps there is some concern that things closer to you, which necessarily tend more to the empirical and mimetic, might similarly seem to be tending to the false, if they were to be subjected to the scrutiny of ideas.
On second thought, it's no error of the Beeb to keep close that which is their own. Probably a weakness on my part to have drawn from the public trough during the rest of the weekend. It was useful when I was in dicey circumstances (not in the constitutional sense), but there's no reason to tap into the matrix first thing on the day of rest when there's a sound cabin and library. Independency.
"An elite and highly trained US border patrol team had recently joined the search."
Arkansas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/arkansas-devil-in-the-ozarks-caught
The Saxe-Coburg Marconi machine, sub nom. BBC Radio 3/4 seems to have restructured their web access with an eye to increasing revenue. Puts the kibosh on News Quiz and In Our Time with Saturday brunch. Basically, what the OED did a few years ago -- increased departmental revenue at the cost of global influence. Speaking commercials to the nations.
New Sabbath-day brunch possible standby:
Politics stateside turning into a bit of a soap opera, which is occasionally the sign of a more general condition of things. No particular knowledge, but it's struck me on more than one occasion that the point of modern wars and policy battles is to, like the canny dons at a college meeting, maneuver the debate so that their faction leads both sides of the question.
Admin tasks until 2AM, so again no AM run. Clearly vis-a-vis the testing of voices, the impulse that I had at the February nadir to the south to hie to the simplicity of the mountains of Bulgaria was a good one. Bright side, my stubbornness brought some interesting evenings at the theatre in Belgrade and here. The task is in the books -- though watching other people do theatre can help with that.
Interesting, the FCO has put out traveller advisories across the Balkans advising travellers of stiff penalties for unauthorized substances, and noting that airports have machines of extraordinary sensitivity. I never touch the stuff, but I had an interesting experience in London a few years ago. It's a little-known fact that you can take an outside path between the two terminals, instead of the monorail. I took the meadow path, as it was a beautiful day, and I didn't want to miss the chance to walk on English soil. As it turns out, it was also the de facto break area for the airport employees, who were smoking a peace pipe or two near the path. After just walking past them, I got a dismissive sneer from the elderly lady using the electronic wand to sweep the luggage in the second terminal. But I did get a buttercup out of it, so still a win over the monorail.
Zauberflote and Marriage of Figaro (double-bill, abridged) at the conservatory. Graduation performances. Quite good. Zauberflote especially. I imagine Austrian culture was once a complex question here, given the Hungarian magnates in the area.
I'm not a freemason, but Zauberflote is a mystery piece. Always meaningful. Longstanding habit of mine never to applaud in the second act.
Day quite warm. Double-timed the 45 (25) minute walk in the first of the summer heat, so arrived as if finishing a run. Kept to the back, where there was, alas, little air. Air in the house proper much better than the other evening though. Oxygen makes for better art.
In the world as it should have been, I would still be in NYC now, doing theatre and practicing law. But in the postlapsarian dispensation, there are many interesting gardens and worthwhile things to find. It's not that the city itself was essential, but it does raise you to a certain level, at which the work is more worthwhile. As I wander the strange gardens, the fight is to keep the eyes and mind alive.
Interesting story in the news about a month ago -- the son of a couple who were involved in confidential government work was apparently a bit alienated, and travelled to the Court of Peter, Elizabeth, and Catherine, enlisted in the army in hope of citizenship, and was promptly sent into a unit with a rather high mortality rate. Salutary reminder that those alienated from the factions of Athens are also, and separately, the enemies of those outside the city.
The fault in the present politics seems abundantly clear, but perhaps no one thinks that they would get any richer from making the point. Democracy in Athens was frequently the means of tyranny; the point was that the moderating aristocracy (Aeropagus, etc.) could be bypassed, if a single person could command the demos. The mechanism of present power is the media machine, which somehow has convinced people that they personally have an instinctive, unlearned insight and power vis a vis the national politics. Because they watch television. And so the central authority predominates, and when one person commands a predominant central authority, this is, by its terms. monarchy (you can have elective, or even legislative monarchies).
Second, the king always wants to go to war. Look at UK constitutional history -- constant assembling of parliaments to get money for foreign wars, ships money, etc. Traditionally, this is counterbalanced by forms of collective authority distinct from the nation as a whole -- the Estates, the churches, the federated states, etc. The point of the latter being that it's much better to live peaceably and happily than go off to war to gratify the ego of a king. So, in this natural balance, the wars ideally were taken up only where the people in the states/Estates/churches could be convinced that it was absolutely necessary for the country. In a monarchy in the context of a centralized state, these subordinated forms of group identity within the state matter less. Each citizen stares into the center by using the glowing machines on the wall or in their hand. Ergo, war is the order of the day.
No run this AM. The conservatory performance was worthwhile, but it was still a few hours of sitting quietly in a rather crowded and under-ventilated room. The full 8 h., a great rarity with me, seemed in order. The locals are a bit like the Chicagoans in that regard, perhaps because of the winters. The comfort of the close.
2,500 years ago, it would have been possible to observe the apprentices perform their choric odes in the open stone theatre of Lycurgus, head back to the dwelling, have some vegetables, and then wake at dawn to run. But we live in airtight cubes now, for no reason that I can fathom other than the forced-air climate control requires it. (Even where the structures themselves use radiant heat instead.)
Walked down to the university conservatory for a graduation performance of Carmen. Quite impressive. As a professional actor or performer, you will perform thousands of times. But the night of the graduation performance is meaningful, and therefore more interesting to observe. I remember my conservatory repertory and showcase very well. The moment when the ideas were most full.
"At the beginning of the story, it is only in the heaven of ideas that Carmencita is any different than the other girls around her." (Adorno)
When the Pope was elected, the Sun-Times ran a photo of him, newly ordained, meeting JPII in Chicago. I thought I caught a few glimpses of it early on, but looking at the tapes from the Vatican in the news feed, I'm very struck by the similarity in bearing and demeanor. Imitation is a very useful door, even when possibly unconscious. Transmission.
One troubling thing, though, was the location of the political conference based in my country, and the explicit endorsements and promises of support from serving members of the executive. When it comes to political speech, license can swiftly become licentiousness.
Odd story in the local press here for about half a news cycle, reporting the State Department disclosure of lobbyists for the far right candidate. A consultancy based around the legacy of a former Nixon pollster, apparently quite active in the region supporting the far right. Insight: a local politician, a friend of the candidate, gave an interview to say that once the election began, he seemed to have a demon, and was saying things he'd never said before. The fellow expressed the hope that his friend would be able to speak as himself after it was all over.
I'm apolitical, as anyone in this position should be, but that does make me a bit more aware about the overreaches of others in that area. The way of the world. If your cup is full, may it be again.
The recent strike deep inside enemy territory in the European imbroglio is a lttle troubling. For all of the savageness and inhumanity of the fight, it's never been a condition of general war -- perhaps until now. The analogy might be two gangs in a brutal knife fight, and one goes around back and destorys the other side's machine guns. Combined with the recent agreement out of Berlin, very troubling. One danger of bold initiatives for peace is that they can inflame the war, if they don't work, as the equilibrium of the fight has been shaken.
Amateur musings, #notexpert, just #wiseacring.
If the Last Rather Big War should have taught us anything, it's that, in a society based on reason, the people doing bad things will have well-justified reasons for doing these things. Which is why justification isn't enough. It does come down to an ineluctable conflict between the people doing bad things and the people living in a better way, but only the prople doing bad things think that it's therefore just a conflict between equally valid subjectivities -- they think this because they realize that both types find their own thinking to be justified. But the people living in a better way generally don't ground their conduct in the justification or approval of those around them. The better person prevails not because they're more justified, or stronger, but because the only possible ground for the good is mind-independent. We use our minds to reach the good. The malefactor does what he can get away with; the good person does what he can accomplish.
I never did solve the mystery of the news about Plato's final hours, listening to (and correcting the measure) of a Thracian servant girl playing the flute. It was announced as a discovery from a carbonized scroll at Pompeii about a year ago, but as soon as I read that, I knew that I had heard the story before. Canvassing the web, I see some scattered mentions well antedating the Pompeii news, but nothing citing to source. Peculiar. I have a clear memory of talking about it in a seminar during the MFA. But every source reporting the news reports it as a discovery.
--
Update, apparently there are six classical sources for the historical life, but tracking them down doesn't look easy/possible at the moment. To be continued.
Notion for a short story -- a time when AI has become so advanced and quick that every connection to the internet is mediated, but after a certain snapshot date, the user ceases to modify remote data at all, and the mediating AI simply spins out their world in relation to the rest of the world on the basis of that snapshot date, creating a totally individual but comprehensive timeline. Eventually, every connection to the internet serves up an entirely different universe.
With scattered exceptions, mainly on entries years ago, my entire conservatory MFA class appears to have vanished from the internet. In my mind, they've found the other levels of America, those entire universes lurking between interstate highway exits, and are living out lives of mystery and accomplishment in the small towns that you might find in a John Crowley novel.
Hegel's notion of the cunning of reason in history comes to mind when realizing that the public identification of the Magna Carta at Harvard happened a fortnight or so before the folks in D.C. started asking if any knights might relieve them of this troublesome university.
"The Magna Carta of xxxxxxx" is a trope of American English, perhaps elsewhere as well, standing for the representative document (though usually not in a performative sense, like the Declaration and the Constitution) of a certain hard-won right or liberty. Though its my understanding the Charter of the Forest was the stronger medicine at John's initial concession (subsequently repudiated by Rome).
I do sense the necessity for a clear break with respect to certain communities that I've worked with on the journey. Speaking freely, as someone who came into Ph.D. work with a three-year conservatory degree in the field, a decade of work in the art and the industry in New York, and a perfect GRE Verbal, while staying deferential and respectful (I think I was known for that), I could see that mediocre scholarship was being covered by rather extraordinary corruption (I've retained sufficient documents to prove the latter, should the need arise). I could see this much more clearly than the Midwestern college students just setting forth into graduate school, and the reality is that the political corruption means that only the mediocre ones who enthusiastically go along with things are permitted to get jobs in which real work is possible. (Making the de facto condition that only those who refrain from real work, or who aren't capapble of it, secure these posts.) But it is still possible to work, apart from the academy -- the politically disfavored of two generations ago, the Jewish scholars wandering to the West, and folks like Peirce are becoming patron saints. And folks like Maximilian Kolbe (a significant scholar, though that's not really part of the cult's narrative, given the dramatic final act) and some of the German theologians.
But to set that path means a more clear break, and I'm not sure how to make that break more clear. There are certainly people in my position, especially after the last couple of years, who are still committed to the political systems governing the academy.
But as for me and my house, I'm lightin' out for the territories ahead of the rest.
This has happened to me before. Just as I think I've gone as far as I possibly could go, and lasted as long as I possibly could last, I see a decent piece of theatre that reminds me that there's still work to be done.
Polish farce, in translation at the local Hungarian state theatre. Written in the 60's, and with Bora the Tailor still fresh in my mind, I was wondering how it would have played on the JDP stage when it premiered there. Likely a very different production from this, which updated the context from the alienation on the path to socialism to the alienation on path out of decadence. Still very effective, but the dialectical logic of the script seemed out of place. "Life is synthesis!" And this sort of thing needs to be winking and nudging at the audience throughout, pointing to the real world and saying impermissible things about it. I think the term in this country used to be "lizards" -- political references that appear and vanish instantly. This production actually reminded me very much of the O'Toole film The Ruling Class. Front row, studio scale, so I was back in scene-study class watching people do their work, which was frankly the invigorating bit. I still have the keys to that work.
Very good to witness it for a bit. Reckon I'll push on.
The two law schools I attended must have had very different ideas about me. I began at Indiana, a tier-one school, and perhaps the reddest of the red schools. (This color scheme is distinct from the political one.) But after some faculty shennanigans that went beyond the pale, combined with being a stranger in a strange land in the Midwest after a decade as a professional actor in the city, I transferred to Cardozo, also tier-one then (subsequently to precipitously decline), in NYC. The latter actually under two flags, American and Israeli, a conservative Jewish university. Honestly, until I travelled a bit in Europe many years down the road, I didn't have the faintest sense why it might not have been a good idea for a Roman Catholic fellow of Slavic ethnic origin to do that.
But these considerations are valuable only insofar as they give me a vantage on the culture, and having picked the minds of the constitional and legal scholars of both schools, and especially the public international law scholars at the second, I have a rather unique vantage on things. Though, in a battle, a stranger with a good vantage on things is at times hostis humanis generis.
The real work was in the texts though, and very atypically for the usual JD, I took as many courses as I could, and briefed virtually every case in full myself. (Combined with longhand notes in fountain pen, typed up at night afterwards. Walking into the first-year contracts final with a fountain pen and some packets of ink perhaps marked me as a true colonial.) As a result, I had the knowledge, though I was past the pale of both houses, in the meadows beyond.
It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, whiel still standing outside of the social forms. The great use of my time working on the research doctorate was finding the resources left over from the last century and presently left to gather dust in the enormous library. (The correlative might be discovering the old basketball gyms at Indiana. Many a point of common law was memorized while perfecting three-pointers from the top of the key.)
It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, while still standing outside of the social forms. When I was in the academy, I made the academic pieces as academic pieces, and I'd like to think that using the vocabulary and methods of the time, I was able to do something wothwhile. But having the knowledge is a different thing. I suspect that such a path is the only honest path now (witness the precipitous decline in adacemic admissions over the last few years), and in the years to come, having the knowledge while not being governed by the social forms, which is to say the world, might be the key task.
Especially now, since the Powers that Be have algorithms at hand, be alert to apparently unrelated things going wrong at the same time. No need to suppose a vast conspiracy when there's this much consumer data to be gained. When 'sorrows come not single spies, but in battalions,' there's always a possibility that nefarious types might be using psychological conditioning on a rather large scale to increase their power in certain situations.
You'll rarely find an attorney who walks into the room and tells you what a bad day they're having. Shows the gaps in the armor.
Postprandial yesterday: Listened to a tape of an interesting talk by an OP on phenomenology. Criticism included lack of unifying doctrines and authorities. Of course, a phenomenologist might reply that Thomists face precisely the same dangers--while using the same words and citing identical authorities.
"What's Hecuba to him?"
(Cunningly constructed as an encounter in potentia, perhaps?)
Things are seldom what they seem;
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
Which is really to say that, given certain historical conditions, the craven and mediocre seem to rise quite quickly in the present world, and quite often, they run the show.
(And just wait until they really learn to use the LLMs.)
But one must gild the philosophic pill. Human knowlege, human virtue, in the single soul. And the humility to realize that the humans are, by design, never much more than incidental singers of comic songs.
Gently on.
I'm of at least two minds on the present international unilateral trade rebalancing. On the one hand, just like the immigration issue, reasonable people have been saying for some time that a disproportionate amount of the wealth of the new world was going to the powers of the old world (which, in fairness, was how the whole thing started off), but the abrupt and unilateral nature of the rebalancing doesn't inspire much faith in the concert of nations that was supposed to have been achieved after the the last great war.
On a different level of the question, I'm a bit concerned that all the nations and powers of the earth are now coming to a particular person, hat in hand. And the present executive doesn't exactly see himself as primarily being an officer of the republic. Power gained can then be used in the world, both domestically and internationally. I continue to think that the Framwers' vision for the Senate might have been a more useful counterbalance in times such as these.
In the widest possible view (at least given current notions of the possible), I continue to think that the West is generally prosperous due to the industrial structures constructed after the war, combined with the tenfold increase in global populaiton over the last 100 years. The difficulty is that this prosperity is largely unrelated to the political games and potential corruption inside that (largely idiot-proof) prosperity, and these practices can legitimate themselves by pointing to the prosperity and suggesting that we had better keep doing the things that we're doing. Surely the politics of the last half-decade or so is enoungh to establish that the general notion that everything's normal is an insufficient basis for the shared life. It is necessary to actually understand the world -- not in the manner of the sociologists, revolutionaries, or reactionaries, but in a genuine attempt by each soul to come to terms with what it is that surrounds them. Else, the first person with an answer to come along gets to build his monorail.
This is interesting. UK declaratory judgment action by homeowners against some sort of parks authority, on the question of whether the public had a right of access -- and the court says that it was error not to join the attorney general as a necessary party, as otherwise the general public wouldn't be bound by the decision. (Presumably, if it had gone the other way.)
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/why-wild-camping-is-not-prohibited-on-dartmoor-6tn7ms2wk
Occasionally, one drops a breadcrumb, devoutly hoping that it will scroll down into the timeline without leaving a ripple in real time. At times, I've been proximate to folks who did some confidental work for the government, and I've had some differences with them. But I have no anger towards them, as I can see the kind of people that they were before the more important types of folks who do confidential work for the government decided to take advantage of their lives. There's a lot of unseemly stuff going on in the world, and sometimes, the people who are a bit off-balance in life (whether from troubles or sudden good fortune) are drawn, for entirely noble motives, into a frame of living in which they're at some distance from reality. Be wary of those doors, and when they open, politely finish the lunch, thank them, and don't follow up afterwards. Live true days.
I briefly watched a folk-song group in the main piazza early on Sunaday afternoon. The municipality has (or rents) the universal girder festival stage, control booth, etc. Impressive scale. Oddly, everyone seemed at ease with this folk group surrounded by this immense tech scheme. We have perhaps become conditioned to seeing the true image in the machine. It's the usual form.
At the beginning of this peregrination, I saw a street-theatre piece in the national capital. Similarly, each performance station was equipped with a large loudpeaker and stage lights. I was conscious of a certain legitimizing effect.
You have to look for the stangeness in distant cultures these days, as we're all so far into the guitar-band and television-news world that there's an easy symbolic lingua franca, at least in the trade latitudes of the northern hemisphere. But the strangeness is still there, counterweighting things from below. The need for legitimating things is perhaps akin to the shift in the Greeks from the jolly travelling performances of the red men, to the wooden and earth theatres, and then to the stone theatres like that built at Athens by Lycurgus. This elevates the the event, so long as it's not taken for granted.
And yet, it still must conduct the people to the same mystery. The reason that there's a very large building with a large cross on top is that there's a rather small book inside that is as important as the building is large. But the largeness won't help you read it.
Peculiar changes in the geist over the last few days. Friday, as I was working, I was watching a massive storm shroud the mountain behind the city in darkness for a few hours. Odd dreams, the usual. But over the last day or so, the mind when reading has been, not distracted, precisely, but focused in different ways. Large festival in the city over the weekend, apparently coinciding with a set of commencement exercises at the centuries-old (and seriously royalist) university. Missed the big concert in the piazza this evening, as it was a small paragraph in a 30 pp. PDF schedule, starting at noon, and omitted from the website schedule, but actually a slate of national singers whose songs were so well known that I could hear the massive crowds singing them from my rooms in a completely different part of the city, the concert going well into the night. Oddness.
Given the exorbitant prices for the tall Americanos in these parts (almost $5), I've strictly limited my consumption. (Well under $3 in Belgrade.) Had the first this afternoon, after making it to Mass just in time for the closing blessing. (Technically, there is no binding church law on the amount of the Mass that must be heard in terms of the obligation, to my knowledge, though historically most confessors' manuals require the bit between the bells. But, not wishing to rest my defenses against condemnation on casuistry, stayed for a good bit of quiet meditation, including a visit to the baptistry to gawk at the medieval mural of the two swords.)
Very, very peculiar few days in terms of inner experience. The reading especially. Lightened the load today and just read a CS Lewis novel. (Incipit of the sci-fi trilogy. Rewarding if you imagine the chapters being read to the Inklings, and try to suss out what really might have been being said.)
Odd shifts in the Force. As if a considerably deeper river were crossing the stream at a certain point.
"I am not for all waters." Nor, for that matter, against any given one of them. Carefully, jovially, and gently on.
Aida at the opera house, side balcony, partial view, but good sound ($11.25). Production premiere, quite good at points. Think 1920s Egyptology vibes (Denishawn dancers, Anubis masks) with 70's Dr. Who costuming. Also some very impressive digital effects mixed in with the more traditional wing and drop. (For some reason, the hieroglyphs on the wings were filled with proper names, but the ones on the set were pure prose.) The digital image at the end was uncanny. The country's 19th c. poet/philosopher had the Romantic notion of the verdant hillside where people's lives were simple and traditional enough that they could encounter the mystery fully. (The second bit, often elided, is the important bit.) As I watched the two or three folks at the end, very much of the culture here, surrounded by the cosmic imagery, that very much came to mind. Good overlay of local mysticism with the Egyptian world. The opening visuals over the overture had the royal party slowly crossing the stage in a very, very interesting shade of green light. Aida quite strong; musical technique sometimes lifted her out of the action, though. After having seen about a dozen operas in different cities of this country, I'm convinced that the tenors have a union, and one of the rules is that preshow vocal warmups are prohibited. But by the third act, everyone was on the same page.
Walked through the city afterwards. Large music concert on the main piazza. Then back through the 400 year old university, which had an internationonal cultural/foodcart thing under strings of lights. Rather uncanny moment there, as I very consciously let slip the everyday notions of it, and tried to get at the phenomenology of all of these different manners of making foods converging under the fairy lights at the ancient university. I don't eat street food, but nonetheless, unheimlich, almost to the point of eschatological. Many thoughts on the way back. One of the things that I've been doing over the last few months is consciously returning to the manner of thinking that I had in the city, which I fell a bit away from after a few years of a rather (physically) tough slog, followed by the state university years, which were a bit sui generis. It is still possible to understand things in the old way, though. At least for now, the world has the possibility of becoming uncanny--the slightest of openings, but sufficient.
The theatre district in downtown Cleveland was built shortly after the turn of the last century, largely for touring acts and productions, much in the manner of its current functioning, although within a very different theatere economy. (Aside from the commercial tours bussed in, there's only the explicitly "experimental" house across the river, which would need to be the subject of a separate line of thought.)
My conservatory, which is apparently well regarded by people who for some reason are able to rank artistic conservatories, has relocated from its old home some distance from downtown to this cluster of theatres. But my training happened in a very different place. Two places, actually. The first was the university, still very much in the spirit of its small-college land-grant turn-of-the-century aesthetic. (The movement and dance classes were in the old gymnasium, and the theatre performances and classes were across the large street, in the college since merged with the old land-grant college, in a remodeled social hall that dated from the founding. Even this isn't there anymore, as both programs have moved across campus to new facilities.) The second was the play house (sic) itself, built at roughly the same time, in the spirit of the American regional theatre movement, and some of the early workers in that movement, now approaching their senescence, had been drafted in to launch the conservatory degree. The original structure was a small theatre built for Ibsen and Shakespeare, partially connected to the Little Theatre movement of the time. The prosperity of the beginning of the 20th century brought a much larger stage next door, taking the same aesthetic to a larger scale, and the prosperity at the end of the century brought the huge, boxy, Phillip-Johnson designed venue that served as the mainstage of the present venue, along with an array of rehearsal halls carved out of the Sears, Roebuck next door.
In a sense, these two place, and the temporal realities nested within them, were the ground of the training, not least because the people who had worked in these realities were the ones structuring the training. But that time in America, the pre-war years, is almost completely hidden from sight now. Any play from before the second world war is siply approached as a "classic," staged in a certain manner because it is right to stage things such as that in that manner, without any sense of what made working in that way so necessary at the time. Imitating the past, as the past, is at best door, and never the mansion itself.
The play house is now a parking lot for a nearby hospital (after having been given over to the local police force to use for tactical training for a few years). I'm unfamiliar with the new setup at the university, as I've not visited the program since they moved. Which is probably best. The reality that has meaning for me, that shapes both the manner of my work and the way in which I think about it, is the schematic that I've just described.
There were difficulties, of course. The Midwest is the Midwest, and it will be the Midwest. (Especially, perhaps, with respect to a large gentleman with a Polish-American last name.) But given the presence of a good number of teachers, and the facilities at hand, I was able to carve out a useful path. And it presently functions, as I suspect it did at the time (and this was possibly the source of some of the difficulties) to populate the theatre as the city understands it. Large rooms that look a certain way, with the non-union tours bussed in on commercial contracts from New York. Things used to be a bit more organic, and I choose that word carefully. An organic form arises within nature and associates multiple forms to a certain end. Where the theatre of the time is living, there is a reason that it takes a certain form. Staging theatre without a connection to that necessity merely builds a scale model of a bodily organ. And, frankly, that's what the professional theatre in America does now, and it's priced sufficiently high that the few who get to see it feel that it must be worthwhile, or they've just wasted several hundred dollars on the evening that the newspapers clearly described as excellent.
To find the present, understand the past in the present. Recollection. Else, the need to recreate the forms of the past will govern the present.
Somewhere between 'gently down the stream' and 'Invictus.' Perhaps both, simultaneously.
The trick is to find those endogenously arising elements of the long journey that keep it from becoming an extinguishment. At minimum, a concentrated effort to do so every spring. Hence, perhaps the global, common notion of the holy month of fasting and abstention in early spring.
One paradigm for the journey: Worricker, ep. 3. (From the days when I watched those sorts of things.)
Make no mistake, New Amsterdam and the herirs of the Scottish Enlightenment are very much steering things stateside now. New York is quite effective at getting things done. But the larger picture of just governance, which is to say the Republic, is in some tension with these highly effective and profitable Machiavels. Which is, no doubt, being discussed over innumerable ambassadorial lunches in DC at the moment.
All might still work for the good, imho. But the question in my mind is whether this motion is the usual pendulum between Republic and Machiavel, or if someone is fashioning notions of a novel flywheel.
Odd frame of mind, perhaps connected to the unsettled weather. As with the weather, a few moments of worthwhile things, but with the Kindle rebuild taking my attention, achieved almost nothing with the day afterwards. On some days, the ship is stilled, no matter how much canvas is there for the wind. Remarkable sunset, though. Tomorrow is, as they say, another day that is only a day away.
The more I think about the resurrection on the third day, the clearer the meaning of having an entire day between the day of death and the day of resurrection, a complete event or cycle, seems to be. Undoubtedly an idiosyncracy of my understanding; it's my entirely amateur understanding that three-day spiritual exercises were a thing in Judaism.
Some of the Protestant writers of the last century held that Christianity had as much to do with any random pagan, primitive cult as it does with Judaism. What those thinkers might have missed, inter alia, is that our notion of random pagan cult is very much informed by being in the tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. They are primitive because they don't have our liturgy, they are pagan, because they don't have our theology. It would be impossible meaningfully to imagine such a thing, because the vocabulary of our imagination belongs to our tradition. What those thinkers perhaps really intended to advance was a negation of Judaism by means of its already-conceived opposite. You can't have the inauthentic without having designated the authentic in advance. Christianity arose from every ground, not no ground in particular.
An e-ink reader capable of rendering full-size pdfs would be ideal, as the reading is obviously all online, but they're still a bit pricey. The most robust solution seems to be continuing to cycle through disposable reconditioned (< $50, usually) kindles. Not catastrophic if stolen, and it renders the text. Sufficient is the device. And for octavo texts (before the modern sizing took hold), it's close to scale.
Noticed some minor oddities in the Amazon account (marketing information in one device set to share, which I always disable; another device loading at a peculiar resolution), so I used the Amazon option to log out of all sessions -- turns out that deletes all of the devices on the account. A few hours of restoring. I've only had one apparent hack on these peregrinations (when Amazon shut things down proactively), coincidentally in this city on a prior visit. Likely coincidence, not causation.
The Kindles are annoying, but a sub $35 alarm clock/ebook access device/backup web browser proves necessary sometimes.
Contact with international interests is not precisely participation within the international order. And even then, when you have a solid notion of national identity and role within the system, you again encounter the endogenous antinomies of the international order. Ricardo had the notion that nations did certain things, collectively speaking, more or less well than others, so the exchange of goods would work to the benefit of all. (This, of course, refracts Hegel.) But perhaps there is a correlative as to consumer desire; it similarly varies, and when let loose upon the prospect of distant industrial forms of production, it exists largely to satiate those desires. At every level--individual--community--nation--world, there must be an internal balance, understanding, and sense of identity before rushing into the next. Else, your factories will just be used to fuel the old wars over ancient cities, or, you know, make cheap disposable plastic things that make wealthy people feel marginalinally more satisfied after purchaing them online at two in the morning. May all living beings come to enlightenment.
In a prosperous society the wealth of which comes from industrial structures, the danger is that thoughts, expressions, and manners of life that favor the continuance of these forms tend to be unconsciously rewarded. And, more critically, having unthinkingly carved out this central path of the shared mind, thoughts, expressions and manners of life that fall outside of the central path tend to be dismissed out of hand. But not from rational thought about them, or even from their identity with things to which rational thought has been given. They are simply aside from the path being unconsciously divined.
Interesting news bulletins from the inaccessible and costly north of the continent: to detect foreign intelligence agents, be on the lookout for people with bad hygiene. Not knowing (or wanting to know) the ways of espioneurs and espioneuses, I can't say if that's true or not, but I do know that locals often have a keen sense for the scent of a stranger, and that it's not infrequently expressed in these terms. Compare the first reactions of the 19th c. Japanese to the European visitors. Perhaps the suggestion was a pragmatic attempt to trigger that sort of awareness.
Bartlett's fodder:
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Not everything said in a reasonable tone of voice involves the use of reason.
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The problem faced by a country, no names, no pack-drill, is never that there is just one craven and greedy person doing bad things. In fact, the degree to which it is commonly thought that it involves just one bad person like that is some sign of how common the condition might be.
I haven't been following this, but just based on a few hours of eavesdropping--there's perhaps a category error in the argument's reading of history. The usual question is whether the equitable remedy existed in UK equity practice at the founding. But the question of whether a claim sounds in law or equity is distinct from this, and requires some imagination, since the two have been unified in the interval.
A claim sounding in law (or constitutional law) can have an equitable remedy, possibly binding those involved in the action; a claim sounding in equity at the time of the claim (e.g., one seeking a universal injunction, without statutory basis, as the ultimate remedy) arguably should be subject to the traditional common-law limitations on equity jurisdiction.
Extremely important argument happening in DC at the moment.
Say a cabinet member walks into a university lecture hall and strikes a left-leaning professor with a baseball bat, claiming it to be a legal act. Litigation ensues, and the federal circuit court upholds the district court's holding that such things are illegal. Then, in a different part of the country, another member of the cabinet (and also a former television commentator) does the same. The question then becomes how to enforce the rule of law without these suits proceeding seriatum.
The present tactic is a tool of equity, the general injunction. Assume that goes away, due to historical abuse, under the principle that equitable remedies are not available where there is a remedy at law. If you have a government dedicated to lawfare, willing to survive any number of lawsuits as they continue to practice their unorthodox means of governance, how to maintain the rule of law?
First, the argument that constitutionally, under Article III, judgments can only bind the parties before them. This seems to contravene the equity powers granted the courts under the findings, and further, would prevent Congress from further modifying the jurisdiction of the appellate courts.
Second, the notion that a statutory class action could solve the problem. This seems an unwieldy tool, as it would require an institutional solution to every disputed claim; individual judgments would become hard to obtain, and thought useless.
Clearly, there has to be a solution in which, when a court says what the law is, it has some effect on the practices of the government. In the baseball-bat scenario, it would be good law in that first circuit that the government couldn't do that, and subsequent actions would awaken the usual tools -- constitutional tort claims against state actors, contempt sanctions, mandamus (the elephant in the room, perhaps), etc. Outside the circuit, a plaintiff might have to file suit, and arguably that's appropriate, in order to keep the boundaries of these percolating laboratories of democracy separate. If it's different than the first holding, then certiorari can resolve. If the same, then arguably a class action becomes a good tool if the government continues to maintain its practices outside of those circuits.
Alternately, filing suit at the seat of government could address the policymaking; jurisdiction over the cabinet member in their capacity in government should resolve the agency's practice. This is a more costly proposition in terms of the courts' power -- commanding the head of a cabinet agency to do something requires power, and costs influence.
Ultimately, making individual district judges the default backstop against flagrantly unconstitutional actions of the executive bats the bottom of your lineup card against the strongest forces of the adversary. Within the districts, the orders hold, and the power is proportionally balanced. Seeking a remedy in equity to bind the entire national government is a peculiar thing to have evolved in time, in that remedies in law are available, such as individual suits that write law for the states, circuits, or boroughs; suits against the agencies at the seat of government; or class actions defined by Congress. (Even where the relief is equitable in nature, the claim sounds in law, not equity, if you mentally piece the benches back together to consider the question.)
Top of the head, while listening to the argument in the middle of the mountains of Transylvania. Not advice, don't rely.
So King Arthur had ever a custome, that at the high feast of Pentecost especially, afore al other high feasts in the yeare, he would not goe that day to meat unti lhe had heard or seene some great adventure or mervaile. And for that custom all manner of strange adventures came before King Arthur at that feast afore all other feasts'
Malory (in Chambers)
The unpleasantness of that evening at R&J about a week ago is still with me. I've enjoyed the Szecheny baths both times I've visited, and Shakespeare is very close to me. But the attempt to create an experience that blended the two made for a very unpleasant evening.
Theatre is cognate with theory. It means point of view on the action. Gadamer tells the story well. You come to the ritual at Athens from a particular place, and that determines your vantage. The Romans, with their fondness for wild beasts, sea-battles, etc., destroyed this by making the theatre immersive--they turned it into a circle. Since there was then no angle of skene, of presentation, the play and the audience no longer faced each other. (Amphitheatre literally means doubled theatre.)
And discomfort is different than being in a bad place; we're talking here about the latter. I've sat in an uncomfortable posture on the floor through an all-night Taverner concert (in the presence of the composer, who rightly had a comfortable chair); I've stood in sunlight through a long play; I've sat on benches through long outdoor dramas and stood at the back of the house through a Ring Cycle. But in all of these cases, that was my angle on the action. I had come to that place, and found that position as the only or logical vantage. To be surrounded by an unpleasant event, particularly when you care about theatre, makes the evening very long, and tends to stay with the mind. It's certainly far from the worst in terms of regietheatre, and the playing was skillful. But the event was wrong. The room was wrong. (I can't say the play was wrong, because we weren't face to face.)
I seem to be able to summon an inordinate amount of mind-numbing material through the transom when I set myself to return to the early mornings and start to lay the foundations of some deeper work in the afternoon. Putting a bit of a seal on the transom--can't be for too long, as that's also how the food gets in.
A shared world constituted by the prevailing appearances of things, and not conscious, either privately or collectively, of the falsity of the prevailing appearances of things is ultimately a false shared world. Kant proposes a conceptual realism that accepts appearances as veridical, in that they are all that we ever can have, but this is necessarily paired with an awareness that the thing itself eludes us. Take either proposition without the other, and it's simply a sanction for solipsism or authoritarianism.
One doesn't realize this until one spends some times with people and institutions and realize that they entirely consist of trying to be what they appear to be. It would be much better for both if they would try to be that which they didn't yet understand.
The corporate (brudderschaft refined?) approach now apparently greasing the mechanisms of international diplomacy courtesy of the administration from New Amsterdam can be very effective. I wonder if the recent events in Yemen and Turkey might be the fruits of gears spinning sub silento, while the domestic agenda is captive to ludicrous things like the personal gift of a (flying) palace to the president by a foreign state. This sort of governance can be effective, because effectiveness, as with the Norman pirates arriving on British soil, is the reason for the existence of these forms.
But once the specific objectives have been achieved (and the losing side in the second really-big war was quite an effective state at first, using much the same commerce-focused policymaking toolkit), one is still faced with the almost immeasurably larger questions of general governance.
Will the "Laws of the Confessor" survive?
This is sort of a sidelight for me, not one of the things I spend too much time on, but perhaps a useful fragment of popular general ontology:
Baudrillard's hyperreality (basis for the Matrix films) is a useful concept, but you do have to decide to use it. And this reaches the explanation of why the Matrix scenario might in fact presently be the case. Allons-y. We see, empirically that the the mediated hyperreality, the sense of the world through stimuli conveyed by electronic devices, is a physical reality. That sort of thing is happening. Everyone's looking at their telephones. We assume that this is an inflection of actual reality, that it highlights certain aspects of given experience [cf. Sellars]. But what if the sense of the way things are that we receive from this παιδα is constitutive, not regulative? What if it constructs the understanding that then encounters the world of unmediated sensory experience, causing that world to be grounded in the ultimate reality conveyed by the machine? As proof for that notion, consider that a young or naive person, when looking for meaning, usually looks according to the gestalt -- when trying to be meaningful, we look to the more emphasized aspects of hyperreality, and along the lines indicated the culture, usually because we've been affected by some fragment of the culture -- a book, a movie, a play. These notions are more deeply held; this is where emphasis meets affect.
So, if this is the case, we ground our experience in the day-to-day world upon the hyperreality, instead of vice versa. Sensory data fleshes out the picture that is rooted in the meaningful moments that we've received. Further, to distinguish "actual" reality, we actively mask this grounding by constantly convincing ourselves that we are in the real, unmediated world, and that our understanding is constructed according to naive experience. But we are living in the given world. And this comes into focus when we act, when we actively seek to get meaning from experience, or, to put it in the old language, when we live according to our beliefs.
I'm wondering if I should just launch into something. Rather than doing this piecemeal annotation, working through the texts. (Which, I should note, I'm doing quite a bit of.) Along the lines of the contemplated work in Murdoch's Book and the Brotherhood. Just launch into that one big thing. But it's a bit like deciding to build a rocket while travelling between cities. One does need a place, a stable manufacturing base, a decent library and some stability of life. Else, you'll just make a rather large wobbly thing that bespeaks the circumstances of its creation more than anything else.
The winter was a bit rough, and I'm basically back from that. And working in the panopticon, in which someone trying to sell me something is probably noting absolutely every text I call up on screen is a bit unnerving. I sort of prefer not to have people reading over my shoulder, even if they are just an algorithm.
Time will tell. Likely after I finish the half-dozen books in the immediate queue. When you set out on this sort of a peregrination, you sort of put the larger projects in a mental steamer trunk for safekeeping. The wobbliness of travel can put a good idea permanently off-center. Trees grow to the light, even when the sun's going in circles due to the elliptic of the travels.
Time will tell.
Perhaps I should be more discreet with these thoughts about thinking and working. When one is marooned, and manages to create some aspect of utopia on the island using the bare materials at hand, the distant courts and palaces tend to send raiding missions rather than rescue missions. Rogue Gonzalos must not remain unwatched.
Gently down the stream.
Pace Jacobi, Kant was directing our attention specifically to that which we could not perceive, and setting up a system for thinking about it, so that we wouldn't forget that we couldn't perceive it. It's a feature, not a bug. If you ever forget that you don't really understand, the time will have you.
No one seems to have made this argument, which is puzzling.
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Reading Peirce. An offhand mention: time as identical with inner experience, and space as identical with external experience. I don't know that the association has ever occurred to me as identity. But perhaps that's just another one of the thoughts out there that's well-known and new to me. Every thought has its time.
I'm not convinced that the typography on Francis' tomb was an error. For example, it's common in older buildings (~18/19 c) in Transylvania to find Roman numerals highlighted within words in texts on murals and facades of buildings. If you reassemble the numbers, or perhaps sum them, you'll get a certain year, perhaps the year it was built, or some date significant to the message. There is a name for it, and it's in Chambers Book of Days, but I can't bring it to mind. At any rate, the two widely spaced letters on the tomb inscription are A and V. Which, I'm guessing, might have something to do with Α and ω.
Definitely off the local theatres for a bit. To observe the Shakespeare last night, I had to slog through an immersive thing--fog machines leaving a haze, uncomfortable seating, actors improvising with audience, etc. This included a spritz with some scented water from a water pistol and Friar Lawrence mashing his fist against my ear rather forcefully to mime the fact that he had caught some sort of an insect that he wanted me to listen to. Noblesse oblige.
If I had travelled to Athens to observe the sacred festival, and someone had suggested that I instead go to a small smoky room to listen to some artistic chanting, I would have ignored him and proceeded to my place in the Lycurgan stone theatre. To go to the theatre, one must go to the theatre. I've performed in some street theatre, actually at a relatively high level, but I strongly suspect that this immersive thing (which, in fairness, is thought by most marketing folks to be an amazing new thing that will transform the art) is simply a commercial device designed to mask the deliberate decline of the art. Staging a play is not merely an art -- it constitutes the art. Post-dramatic is not a good thing, if you were hoping for the drama. It's like arriving for lunch when things are post-lunch.
Rather peaceful day, at least for most of it. From time to time, it occurs to me that, given the larger circumstances, phenomenologically, things could be much worse. (This is partially established by the fact that things have been much worse in the past, within the same general circumstance--I could a tale unfold.) The incongruity, though, does give me some pause. Not to imply that the bad things in life are sent upon us by some dark malevolent force that is as creative as Hegel's spirit of history when confounded, but I must be sure to stay on my toes. Things can come out of left field sometimes.
#sabbathdaymusic #dead #Cornell #581977
https://archive.org/details/gd77-05-08.sbd.hicks.4982.sbeok.shnf
R&J at one of the city's theatres. Quite good, some spot-on moments, bold concept. When you know these plays very well, and for some reason I still do--apparently they're near the center of the mind, and you're watching folks from another culture stage them, the mind divides between seeing what they excavate from their own cultural context to reveal and sensing the lines of gold and diamonds just beneath, or to the side, and wanting very much to point them out. Luckily, as an audience member, I have only one option there, and it's still quite enjoyable. Though a Love's Labours in the ex-Yu. concept has been percolating through my consciousness for some time now.
Not at all an expert, but I'm beginning to think that the last papacy set the church on course towards a post-political identity, grounded in liturgical doctrine and charity. Francis was a great pope, but he didn't use the office to press for major changes in doctrine or practice, or to advance the interests of a certain side in geopolitics. The ground of the church was the church.
One danger might be that the powers that be in the national churches, who are very much invested in the political questions aired in church forums and the NYT, might begin to understand that the papacy is shifting to a different ground, and they might not like that. (The newly chosen successor of Peter was brought to Rome and raised to the highest rank in the College of Cardinals and the curia by Francis, so I would expect things to continue on the same course.) Witness the odd coolness from some on the left given the new fellow's (entirely doctrinally correct and charitable) statements about civil unions and such.
Add to that the as-a-given uneasiness of the other half of the NYT-reading Catholic leadership, the wealthy and socially conservative types.
The question might be whether the office is stronger than the political machinations supporting it. Given the office that we're talking about, I think (again, wiseacring non-expert) it might have a fighting chance.
Interesting day. It's the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which seems at first glance to be a devotion of Italian origin centered on some healing miracles, and placed roughly opposite in the calendar to the rosary feast instituted after Lepanto. But there's a much older feast as well, one that I encountered when looking at some of the history in this part of the world -- the apparition of St. Michael the Archangel on the mountaintop. The pilgrimage to the mountaintop on this day was apparently a very important event at points in the medieval calendar. (Though if memory serves, one of the local observances moved it to the day before.)
The angelic cults and feasts are generally of eastern origin, and very broadly speaking, the Marian and rosary devotions are closer to the developed, established hierarchy of the Latin church. And, of course, Leo XIII is closely associated with St. Michael, with the prayer after Mass very popular in certain areas of the American Midwest (and occasionally sneaking into the Mass itself, before the dismissal). He was also a bit wary of Kantianism and Americanism, so I might have had difficult time making light talk, if I had found myself alongside the sede gestoria in the late 19th c.
Beyond doubt, one of the historic events of the age. The American mind will apparently have to sort through a few things in the coming years. The shining city on the hill might yet prove the litmus, one way or another. So those of us with some acquaintance with it have some thinking, reading and writing to do. Even if no one's listening quite yet.
Prejudice, it is true, is mighty, and so is the greed of money; but if the sense of what is just and rightful be not deliberately stifled, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling towards men whom they see to be in earnest as regards their work and who prefer so unmistakably right dealing to mere lucre, and the sacredness of duty to every other consideration.
If you compare the number of scientific studies refining various industrial processes with the number of studies looking to determine how to brew the healthiest cup of coffee (brewed by billions each day), you do get some sense of the nature of the mechanism. Even having built the mechanism of utopia, you do have to decide to realize utopia.
To the city's national theatre for a farce by the 19th c. national playwright. ($6, balcony) I've seen this playwright's work in three cities, and it's very different in each of them. Shades of Hoffmann's short story Donna Anna at points. The standard line is that this playwright isn't political at all, but that received idea was developed during the dictatorship; this is clearly a very interesting allegory of 19th c. constitutionalism, along with an authorial type (the playwright was a newspaperman and politically influential) who gets a bit roughed up in the course of things. It's not unreasonable to think that the 19th c. political fights here had an element of physical menace to them; perhaps there was some back-story there.
The style is much broader here than in the capital or at the university festivals, but the reason that it's broad is that generations of audience memebers have imprinted themselves upon it appreciatively, and perhaps even gratefully. Watch a national playwright's work in his or her home country carefully, and you will have before you a small group of people trying to tell you absolutely everything (and quite possibly succeeding in the attempt).
Historically, this part of the world has been at times a place of refuge for scholars from the northern wars; in early modern times, they were often of an alchemical bent, writing treatises under the patronage of the local nobility, and sending them off to the German book fairs. There's also a strong impulse to a vivification of life by the mythic and the ancient; the fantasy sections of the bookstores seem comparatively well-stocked, relative to other parts of the region. (Though it is common to the region; in Belgrade at night these days, a colossal LED image of a (14th c?) king lours over the river bridges.) And with the tech boom, like the American Pacific Northwest, the costs of living in this area have significantly outpaced both what the underlying non-tech economy could support, and the country's historical balance of income allocation. While there are certainly a good number of penurious folks, the standard of living in this part of the world is very high, even relative to countries with higher income levels; second homes in the country appear to be quite common, and housing is generally very liveable. (This part of the world sees it as a social obligation to build a sufficient number of homes for the population.)
But with the surging rents locally, it's clear that some sort of Camelot is being conceived. According to the old (Norman) legends, Camelot was created by Merlin's tracing of a circle in the earth. When value outpaces worth, look carefully at the sources of irrational desire.
The blue suit, and worse, the national flag in the lapel. The walking on the carpet. Possible mistakes. Especially odd, as there's a chance the host upended a centuries-old global diplomatic protocol to give him a better seat. The AI photo... Well. Imagine the next head of the church did the same with a threadbare Uncle Sam costume and a banjo. You get the idea.
Possible anger at decreased popularity among Catholics after several key appointments in the first term. But this was clearly (a) a sop to evangelicals; and (b) an attempt to spread an image, like the royalty-based ones, that unconsciously influences a public guided by the constant stream of images on the wires.
The image of the head of state had a peculiar effect in early modern times. It created a direct notion of power -- we use the word state as an extension of the physical presence of the sovereign, and this started at around that time. Although the facts are on point, this isn't like an embarrassing doodle in a royal sketchbook -- this image was AI on two levels -- first, on the technical rendering, but second, more important, a thought placed in people's heads. For some reason, I remember a newspaper article, many years ago, with an interview with a graffiti artist. He proudly pointed to his work and said: "See that? I just made you think that."
Procedural legitimacy is justified in two dimensions. The first is that a stable society follows from everyone inhabing their role, or playing within their understanding of the game. The second, perhaps unique to liberal democracy (or perhaps more general), is that in the determinations of the several roles and the game-playing, a sufficient number of ideas is created to give people an understanding of the event. There must be sufficient freedom and understanding constituting the exercise of power so that the objects of the power can identify the freedom of the lawgiver with the freedom of the subject. In a free and equal society, this provides the basis for the lawgiver's freedom. One must exercise power to preserve sufficient freedom for the exercise of power.
When the ways of thinking about power change, they don't so much augur political change, as make it a logical necessity. The building falls because the nature of gravity has changed.
To attempt to explain to people that their words mean less to them than these same words used to mean to others would, for obvious reasons, be a fool's errand. The only remaining task, then, would be to build the eternal forms in the present time, using only the shadows of the tools.
Or at least that's the sort of thing that I might say if I were trying to seem sententious and old-fashioned.
Apparently, the Executive is thinking about revoking the begging license granted to the clerics gathered around Rev. Harvard's old library. Difficult times for the crimson piping. Since the academic lawyers defending the Executive appear to be writing from schools with football teams playing with blue uniforms, based entirely on a pseudo-Goethean theory of political colors, my guess is that Old Eli can rest easy.
L'Etas Unis ne fait pas la guerre contre la science...