Just seeing the DC contretemps on the wires. First take: actually useful in some ways. One of the most ancient principles of international law is that no leader can make war when a greater leader actually has the power to order the peace. So the peace must come from an adversarial process. That goes way back, long before the days of the Universal Grotians.
Restaurant
Some say that there's a restaurant at the end of the universe. Considering what it is that organisms do and are, I think this to be an entirely reasonable synthesis of intuition. A dream or two might have suggested this as well.
Currently at my equivalent. An unremarkable Turkish-oriented easy-food restaurant in a mall. But it's open late, and its in a small city in the hills of the western Balkans. And it's across the street from the a station near the midpoint of the legendary night train from the coast.
The magic persists. The magic must persist. Else, we'll never understand everything else. The conceptual synthesis of intuition. Lege, tolle.
Fascinating mental problem: Sleeping Beauty.
Say Sleeping Beauty, who forgets that she woke up after she goes back to sleep, will be awakened either only on Monday, or on Monday and Tuesday. Prince Charming will flip a coin to determine which. Heads, wake twice, tails, wake once.
So Sleeping Beauty awakens, and Prince Charming offers to bet her a Coke that the coin came up tails. Should she take the bet?
Well, when she awakens, it's either the first day of the heads series, the only day of the tails series, or the second day of the heads series. So of the three things that could be going on, two of them mean that the coin came up tails. This would seem to indicate that the bet would be wise.
But a coin always has, give or take (there is a slight edge to one side), a 50-50 rule as to outcome. The condition of her waking up doesn't change that.
Sleeping Beauty's only chance for wisdom would to realize that it would be impossible for her to know what was going on when she awakened.
The moral of the story: If you can't know if any of the things that might be going on are actually the case, it is best to build your world around the things that you do know.
One of the rules that I follow on this little jaunt is that, no matter my feelings towards it at the moment, for every place that I visit, and every set of rooms that I rent, at some point in my life, for some reason, I will think about that place as someplace I'd like to be. And the challenge is to imagine that, and be transparent to your life at that point. Life, in a way, is a sort of crossing of these points of experience, and the point is to make the connections between them as strong as possible. Desire animates those connections.
Thinking much about the city. At the most basic level, I'm still, and perhaps fundamentally, an actor, usually in NYC, even given the subsequent credentials and travails. So those long mornings waiting in lines before dawn with an egg and cheese with pepper sandwich from the cart and a small cup of coffee with an inexplicable Greek bas-relief on the side (my favorite cup was from a diner in Inwood -- it had some lines from Poe), as the actors wait for the audition studios to open -- a present moment is intending towards precisely that.
Before the city, I was in the first MFA class of a national-caliber program modeled on the legendary first curriculum at J-----d, and our first class was as messy as theirs. I stayed out of it and haunted the theatres, but the others had long meetings into the night discussing the difficulties. I kept my own counsel until the mandatory exit focus group, but generally went along with the views of the others then. Support levels were very low and oddly timed, and the most intense areas of the curriculum seemed to have the least distinguished faculty. I found some good professors, though, and tried to work with them as much as I could. Had some good roles, genuinely trained rather hard for a number of years. Learned the art. And things with the program changed afterwards.
But only a few of us went to the city, and I think I was the last one standing. We were the genius fiascoes of the beginning, and the road afterwards was self-assembled. Very few chances at the beginning in the city (aside from a few readings). Eventually, I built up a cycle of fairly steady and rewarding off-off work (paycheck=subway fare) for several years. But then an ensemble member (and fight captain) put a barbed trident through my foot while I was halfway through a shoulder roll, rehearsing the title role in Spartacus. And the dot-com crash TKOd the day job. So, without in the slightest bidding farewell to my muse, I headed off to law school to try to get a bit of stability in the city.
Which is where the tale would leave the place and time towards which my thoughts are presently directed.
Notion. The church, or in the absence of the church, the political center, is the situs of the conflict of good and evil, not an institution characterized entirely by one side or the other. This is perhaps why those within the way of thinking of the place see places outside the territory of the church or political center as both good and bad. Intuitively, though, we think that the center is the bright light of good, which radiates outward with diminishing strength. In fact, the yin and the yang, as it were, at the absolute center are what give these collective notions and vocabularies of good and bad. The church or political center is half hospital, half baseball game. In both instances, it is the action of the place, not its inhabitants, that imparts its fundamental character. Perhaps.
Given that the situation at times in the past decade has been as physically and psychologically difficult as the more deliberate and world-apparent punishments meted out by states in the last century, I have little patience with people shouting about gulags from their McMansions, or even their reasonably well-furnished apartments. The point seems to be that what's actually going on isn't reached by these ideas, and the vocabulary simply isn't at hand to express why a good number of people (and specifically these people) are in extraordinary difficulty in a country where a significant preponderance are rather well off.
Every political situation arrives in advance of its aesthetic. And if you don't know the world that you're in, absolute virtue is the only way. With Thoreau to the woods. With Tolstoy to the fields. With Merton to the texts and study. There's a subtle but important difference between a fictional world and a false one.
Roughing out a general view: The structures of industrial prosperity built after the world war were idiot-proofed (the greatest generation having some notion of their children), so the social forms of the present could be completely incompetent, and the trucks of frozen hamburgers would still roll in every week. These social forms degrade, then, and become something less than meritocratic, as the prosperity is on rather firm rails. There are still selection mechanisms, and signs of status, but they're increasingly centered on the social forms themselves, rather than the facility to actually do things in the world.
All well and good, but this industrial prosperity is based on the corporate form, so to invigorate itself it does more things, the companies build, and drill, and sell. This keeps the organizational form of the companies healthy and lean. But as a program for society, it poses a few problems, as we might realize over the next few years. The logic of the New-Netherlands traders can do things in the world (e.g., Goldman, Grey's Papaya), but it doesn't claim to be a basis for the organization of society as a whole.
So the social elites have become distracted with odd notions of liberty and governance, and the remedy at hand is the corporate form
Difficult days for the publicists, those old-fashioned folks who think of the state as something more than an idea and something less than a sentiment. The res publicae is now the rem, or perhaps the rem line of code, the other words being the operative ones.
Big strategic changes in Europe. Haven't read any details, but the Germans are edging in under the French umbrella, and the tightly wound umbrellas of Whitehall enjoying an I-told-you-so fortnight over the independent deterrent. PM to ramp up defense spending, following the German increase earlier. Seems like people are buying rather a lot of guns lately.
I wouldn't worry, the British are far off enough from Crimea -- hard to imagine that they'd ever go to war over something that far away.
I've had this notion. After the second world war, international forces shaped both an organization of states, and a state. The second is an example of particularity, the first an instance of principles. Inevitably, conflict is the result of such an opposition.
It is right for me to say that the political order of the world should perish before I am destroyed. It is not right for me to say that the political order of the world should perish before my nation perishes. The political order of the world is the ground of the possibility of the individual state, and the individual state exists to protect the individual soul.
Beginning the several-day process of raising anchors and leaving this place. When I arrived, the first impulse I had was to run to the mountains of Bulgaria. It's famously a difficult place, the citizens flee to other nations, sometimes on the scale of an actual invasion. Legally, you have to have a certain amount of money to leave the country. Yet it is Europe. I've been careful not to wander past those bounds.
If I had to remain, I would remain, but as far apart from the society as I could be. The thing about prosperity is that the people who were once huddled together from necessity sometimes stay huddled together. Instead, use the modicum of prosperity to put some distance between yourself and the world, use the tools of the mind to perfect yourself, and don't look for truth in the streets of the city, even the clean streets of the cities of the future; cities are always only a tool, though the rich use them as an end (and tend to get in the way).
This city was on the great Roman road on the peninsula, but centuries ago, someone upset that apple-cart. Interestingly, the modern nation which is the successor to that country would benefit significantly from a bright, clean east--west avenue in this place. Run to the hills. Pursue private perfections. Open the roads. Just giving myself some good advice. Onward.
Thanks to the wireless (that word still works), the evening after the walk into the old city was remarkable. Live Gotterdammerung, followed (within moments) by a major American orchestra with a quasi-semi-staged Carmen. But these things over the wireless (except for the news) are of value only to the degree they crystallize something in the texts at hand. Still slogging though the neo-Kantians, and have taken a break from reading the Pittsburgh philosophers of the last century to listen to a few series of Locke Lectures in the evenings.
Controversial use of a tablet as a score by one of the performers in the Carmen. Having done many staged readings, I thought it was fair, though risky for entirely metatheatrical reasons best left to agents and producers. (It struck me that the others were likely taking visual prompts from something on the back wall, actually.) Carmen stands for poetry, incidentally. He has to kill it to make theatre. Finita la commedia.
To fall into the usual course of thinking and working would be to fall. Especially on these coasts. Teetering onward.
Walked the hour or so into the city center for Mass. Universe seemed to be falling over itself to tell me things, so like a Quaker sitting silent on a good day, tried to take in as much of it as I could. Peculiar place. The town square is perhaps the great Valhalla of elderly men playing dominoes, cards, and chess, complete with scattered evergreen trees from the migrating birds. Remarkable picture of humanity at peace in dozens of quiet conclaves.
The old Roman forum is partially unearthed, the pillars in surprisingly good shape. It's in the middle of things, surrounded by streets. A large sign across the street for the local chamber of commerce, several decades old, is dwarfed by an even larger sign for the call-center operation apparently occupying the building. On the other side, a small zoo with children screaming at the monkeys. Civilization eternally presents basically the same proposition to the same types of doubtful minds.
When I got here, I saw that given the location of the rooms, the best thing to do would be to sit at the kitchen table and work all day, and I have done that. Real inroads. But I had been hoping for ocean. It's a catastrophically developed place. The town center has charm, and there's a resort area further south, but in between, massive concrete buildings facing the artificial shore, and behind them, avenues lacking in basic sanitation, even for the region. Notably, the development money for the buildings appears not to come from either the public purse or the banks, per the local press. The dogs seem placid; the only times they were barking angrily around me, the subject of their ire seemed to be invisible (but moving). But I wasn't going to risk the run in the morning. Lunar colony mode. Compose in the lander, suit up for rare explorations, and clean off on return.
But this stretch of the Adriatic was the workers' summer retreat, under socialist rule, and that's continued to some extent. In season, there's a Mass in Polish in the city. There might be old ghosts here of the Slavic ancestry. They do come to mind on occasion. Et lux perpetua.
Pope's health troubles continue. I wonder, watching the stock footage of audiences, if all famous people are essentially vanishing into the same template within the mediated hyperreality. Is there any qualitative difference in seeing the Pope struggle with mortality, compared to the same case with another famous person or politician? Or has the television inured us to the ideal dimensions of the event, and there is now no difference between these figures qualitatively, in terms of the idea of who it is that we are seeing a video of. (News these days comes from the UK newspaper sites and YouTube.)
It seems the idea no longer governs, and the representation, albeit in millions of reproductions, makes us think of everyone as basically the same entity in relation to us. After Joyce's newspaper report "the snow was general over Ireland," we have the ongoing television coverage of mortality, general over the species.
Interesting (and correct) polarization against signs of national socialism stateside. Peculiar, perhaps, in light of the intervention in the European war, given the discourse around that. Not to mention the stateside political faction that seems to be fomenting the reaction.
Eventually, you've got to ask the fellow with a hammer to stop hitting you in the knee.
When I arrived, the strays were very docile, much like in the famously laid-back country (don't believe that entirely, by the way) just to the north. Met a mob of about a dozen on the main street, and they just trotted by. But with the first warming, things seem to have changed. Late at night, entire canine wars seem to be going on in the outskirts, noises of considerable extremity. Occasionally mixed with gunfire. It's my understanding that there's a regular control program in the national capital now, hopefully it will expand.
From what little I've read of the local politics, the American elections seem to have caused some waves. The opposition leader, long the target of foreign sanctions, according to the local press has hired the American president's former campaign manager (likely, retained his consultancy. apparently lives in the city where I grew up.), and one local news source explained the arrest of the capital's mayor on corruption charges as an attempt by the reigning powers to demonstrate an antipathy to the forces of Soros, who, not incidentally, the manager/consultancy attacked in their initial press release. I suppose Kissinger developed the model, but I'm not sure how I feel about America sending its campaign slogans abroad with these partisan consultancies.
I actually worked in those foundation offices on Sixth near the park for a few months when temping as an admin and auditioning in midtown. Interesting place. Free five-star lunches, but I always went down to street level for a slice or a knish/dog. Never ate the bread and salt -- not for any political reasons, just simply my way. Other work to be done, and power's an odd thing.
The statues in that town were very useful. A statue of an author near my rooms led me to an English translation of his works that were very instructive about the country. Peculiar translations of the titles. Popa, the local argot for pastor, became 'pope.' An expatriate from Hungary was 'the gendarme' -- and when it became clear that it was an ex-military fellow, I almost called out aloud "guardsman."
Listening to statues, arguing with books.
Perhaps part of the increasing transatlantic rift is personal. Listening to foreign leaders talk about the present leadership, it's like they're watching someone play pinball with one foot under the machine. Old line from Jean-Claude Juncker: "We all know what we should do, and if we did it, we wouldn't get reelected."
Europe generally has a much more sociological sense of duty among the leadership. No less bloodthirsty in the corridors of power, no doubt, but when they reach the office, one gets the sense that the work of understanding the right begins.
In the last city, there was an interesting tribute to Woodrow Wilson across from the research library--the tribute ends by praising him for his work in advancing a "rightful and united Europe" (droit/drept/recht) Perhaps due to this quirk of the language, the righteousness of the American politician is fundamentally different from the righteousness of a European politician.
I very much prefer the 'bildung' school of philosophy talks, which are meaningful both in their relation to other things and in themselves, but the trend is definitely towards those that only answer to the first requirement. I remember a talk one evening at a large state university that solely consisted of 'calling out' to the people in the audience who had done work in the field and offering a thought or two on each line of work, and leaving the interaction to the conversations afterward. (I headed out for a solo coffee.)
When a talk is only meaningful in relation to other things, like a jazz line that requires some knowledge of the original melody to have any meaning other than patterned exertion, it just means that the world of the event is larger than the room. An obscure point on epistemology in relation to someone else's article, even if it does make a new theory of mind snap into place for the first time, does require a distributed cognition of sorts. And the myth is that it's all one big cognition, slowly reaching its perfection (and a dangerous objective correlative is emerging in the mechanical world). In fact, these integrated speakers are simply responding to the events in the near space, without really advancing the cause of any larger project.
Heidegger's definition of a discipline, as opposed to an area (I think), was the creation of a reticulated shared field of reference associated with the world at the point at which it claimed a competency. A theatre faculty, for example, would be doing meaningful work so long as they all knew what each other meant, and shared the sense of the relations between the terms that they used, and these terms were associated with objective phenomenae of the art at certain points. The difficulty, though, is that most faculties make a much broader claim than that, and assert that they are connected to the whole, both in the particular and in the meaning that they create, but for that, you'd need to either have a very good philosophical understanding of the relation of the art form to the world, or a complete lack of a philosophical understanding of the relation of the art form to the world. The result of any discipline is either the transformation in the thing that it is studying (politicians learn history, mice master the maze) or a reliable map of the territory, although labelled in an imaginary language.
To connect the earlier thought, their relation to the melody might be real, but since the one outside the field doesn't hear the music as they do, it just seems like patterned exertion. (Many lit-crit/junket conferences consist entirely of these trading-eights.) But the point is that these patterns should be reliably associated with objective elements of the studied practice, either mapping it or transforming it.
Science has displaced personal understanding -- yes, the language of a given field, so long as it is mathematical (Kant's criterion) or experiential, is the mensura, but only according to its own logic. Humans still govern all talk of the totality of things.
Say someone totters into the agora one day and shouts: "It's all water! Everything is water." A short time later, someone thinks to disagree, and suggests that it's all fire. Now, as the discussion begins, no one is under the illusion that they are going to be able to discover the water or fire in things. What makes it meaningful is that a human, at the most perceptive condition they could summon, and in the public square, spoke their best truth, and there was some truth in what he said. When we respond to the idea, we respond to the soul who fashioned the proposition sive necessitatis.
And even the most dry talk, if you follow the cloud of distributed cognition, ends in a sacramental profession along these lines. If you were to spend your life arguing with the propositions generated and advanced by a computer (without considering them to be derivative of words spoken in the air), you'd rightly be called a computer repairman. The meaningfulness of the proposition isn't in the the object, but the res. The human, in relation to the situation, who fashioned a thought.
So I'm partial to the educative approach (interesting back-and-forth in the TLS letters recently about educare/educere) in which you give at least some sense of the argument from first terms, largely because this tends to put the responsibility on the speaker to say something themselves. Much as I think the very old practice of judges all writing separate opinions and letting the bar figure out the law of the decision was a much better scheme. The human voice, and the apodictic. And it's best if both the voice and the truths are in the same room
R. GLUECK: Is there no other device whereby the
discretion of the district attorney might be disciplined
to some extent?
MR. MEDALIE: There is this: The rule in the
Department of Justice, as I understand it, applicable
throughout the country except in the Southern District of
New York --
MR. HOLTZOFF: And the District of Columbia.
MR. MEDALIE: (Continuing) -- is that no nolle
shall be entered without the approval of the Department of Justice.
Now, the New York district attorney won't put up
with it because he does not see why he, being supposedly
an important member of a great bar, should be subject to
review by some person having a minor status in the
Department of Justice, because that is what it comes to.
For example, in bankruptcy cases, he might decide a certain
ease of concealing assets should be nolle prossed. Then a
person who does Important, but routine work, and does not
have the status of an assistant attorney general, would be
passing on his decisions, which would be perfectly absurd
because, in practice, it is found he does it mechanistically,
that is, he argues about minor points and says there is a
prima facie case. You frequently nolle prosse --
MR. WECHSLER: I never knew that to happen, George,
that anybody in the Department of Justice argued about a
nolle prosse.
MR. MDALIE: Then you mean that that supervision
is nothing?
MR. WECHSLER: Right, George.
MR. MEDALIE: It may be. In any event, the
United States attorneys in this district refuse to submit to
that. My predecessors refused, I did, and I think my
successor did, too, and it works pretty well. I never heard of any scandal as a result.
https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/fr_import/CR02-1943-min-Part3.pdf.pdf @1109
When you go to an institution, go specifically to the useful things at that institution. Otherwise, you're just trying to become part of the order of things, and that sort of thing happens without any effort on your part. The cathedral is a place created in the order of things that can be used for meditation and prayer, so if you find a big stone building, you might be able to get some work done. Additionally, it's the place set up (for many interesting reasons) by the present order of things for the transmission of sacred texts, and sacraments. The order of things itself is therefore what comes to the place.
Otherwise, simply running to the church every morning is like being a dog at the gates. And a dog at the gates has this advantage over humans: he's not doing it to be a dog at the gates in a certain world. He knows that there are useful things inside. Cunning fellow.
The First Circle work continues to be inordinately brain-scrambling. Have shifted the day so I do what thinking and reading I can beforehand, and afterwards is dinner and taped talks.
Have already drafted a short-story in my mind, sort of along the lines of the Red-Headed League, and with all the paranoia of late 90s Russian fiction about a secretive agency of some sort or other who hires all the academic outcasts of the moment and proceeds to use some sort of hypnotic writing to get into their minds. Fiction, of course. Current tasks are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful work I could imagine.
Chatter around the successor of Peter is a bit macabre, and given all the internal politics at issue, a bit tone-deaf. Hopefully, the next time is many years off, but the last time a reigning pope died, I was in St. Pat's, and the MC came out in choir (I think) and announced it from the ambo a rather long time before the media said anything. I think a second announcement might have dialed it back a bit, but I don't recall it being retracted. Might be wise to be reticent about such things. The more worthwhile people seem to have obituary notices in the paper a fortnight after the fact. In early America, the soul-bell would be rung when news arrived, so that everyone could pray at that moment, but it might be a different matter if few intend to offer an Ave or two. On the other hand, perhaps the simultaneous thought of millions of minds might be helpful. Hard to tell.
The parties are left with neither an impartial decision by a
panel of experts nor a transparent decision for which a po-
litically accountable officer must take responsibility. And
the public can only wonder “on whom the blame or the pun-
ishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious
measures ought really to fall.” The Federalist No. 70, at
476 (A. Hamilton).
(United States v. Arthrex, Inc.)
(Pincite in: DC District Ct. on DOGE TRO)
There is an important distinction between difficulty and peril. In the present peregrination, I've only felt genuine spiritual peril in two places: at a certain moment in a certain predominantly Muslim city, and a certain quarter of a city in German Transylvania. In neither case was there anything I could explain in the NYT, and there have been genuine difficulties, some rather intense, in other places. But those were the two instances of peril of which I was conscious. Conversely, the Muslim city was (and remains) the place of the most spiritual promise, and the other city has been useful to me for the theatre to be seen there.
One does take risks, but one is careful to always be ready for such moments. There are such things as souls, and if something exists, a fortiori, it can also not exist. But I've learned the most from the teachers who were trying to take everything from me (which made the more secular corruption of the state universities a bit easier to bear).
"Where the danger is, there the saving force grows."
Clearly, running into some productivity difficulties this week. Part of it is that when one part of your day is the least favorite part, it becomes the most difficult, and your mind tends to center more of the day on it.
On the bright side, I have shifted the web presence to more of a constant output model, so perhaps opening those valves a bit will help work some worthwhile writing in with the mind-numbing First Circle tasks.
One begins by beginning.
Completely uninformed amateur speculation, but my guess is that any plan which secures the place where they've been keeping their boats for over a century, plus a scenario of political/trade influence with countries near the sea would end things rather quickly. The territory taken seems to match those undeclared aims. Look at 19th c. naval maps of the base in relation to the sea -- it was the great gate. More than one war in the last few centuries over it, involving many of the same principals (sic).
Separately, a bit worried at this cadre of NYC businessmen doing deals outside of the diplomatic structure. Once they get a taste for it, publicists might be in for dark times. The fiction of the nation-state is a rather necessary fiction in a world of nation-states.
#notexpert #wiseacring
Pope with a bit of a cold. Oddly, thinking structurally, has been just as transformative within the church (so far) as the democratically elected president has tried to be within the government. Obviously, though, coming from vastly different mindsets, perhaps because of the distinct political form that has to arise within each institution in order to sufficiently empower a maker of change at the top.
I have two theories about the last election. First, that people voted for their neighbors boss, rather than voting for their neighbor. Second, that people tried to compensate for having very little power of their own by making as big a change as they possibly could. And as always, those thinking ahead of the game wired that button to their own benefit.
Feast of Fra Angelico.
There's perhaps some ambiguity to this image. The incident from the biography is that he's turning away from a lump of valuable rock and indicating the church. But a naive observer might also think that the austere monastic was fleeing the Masses of gold in the churches behind. A constant tension. When passing a church, remember that there's a rather important book inside. When passing a library, remember that there's quite likely a few books in it that would be more appropriately read in a sacred place. I remember happening upon the sacred Tibetan shelves in the library in Indiana one afternoon. Vigilate.
You know, the western European disarray is actually probably helpful in winding up the war, as there's less of a monolithic threat, but the mad-genius, never-happen way out of the mess is a redux of the Visegrad group as a defensive alliance (perhaps plus one or two). It seems mad given the current polarization, but these are the lighthouses in the shadows of the east, and their polarized alliances, in every case, are severally calculated to hold off the more potent threat in each geographic case. #notexpert #possiblyquitemad
Possibly interesting angle with the quashed quashing in the sovereign district -- unsurprisingly for that office, the two folks put in professional peril were ex-Scotus clerks. Still wondering why the blue team hasn't set up camp outside the DC Circuit--the LA times had a recent piece on where the challenges were happening, and it seems to be determined by seeking the favorable circuit. Which I suppose is good for the injunction stage, but might risk some unpersuasive percolating opinions. Fascinating to watch. Haven't a clue what's actually going on.
In a novel, when an author introduces a character, they are placing it in a constellation with all of the other characters in view, essentially positing that the sum of those in view compose a complete understanding. The second dimension of interpretation is the motion of event, which does the same by creating a sequence, rather than a constellation. So the composition is associating things which are divided, and the progression is dividing things which are associated. Both working to assert the claim that the synthesis, whether constellation or sequence, creates a complete spirit.
Power in the modern West comes from story and recognition, not status. It becomes about the ability to tell a certain story about someone. When someone characterizes someone to you, say, gives them a funny nickname, try to ground that thought in what you know of their status or position. (Status and position also come from stories, but these stories are grounded in agreements that run much deeper.) If you think that there can be no grounding of any individual within a status or position, and it's all a sort of game that could be played without reference to anything outside of it, then you are like the vast majority of people in the West, and you are likely highly susceptible to these powers of influence.
In Memories of my Life (1908) Galton described him as 'the traveller most gifted with natural advantages for that career' and added that 'he easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without being himself defiled'...
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-21380
Consistent browser bug: something is writing a json file and creating enterprise-level permissions for website certificates. If I were important enough to be concerned about such things, I'd be concerned, but it's entirely possible that it's just an Avira antivirus measure that kicks in at odd times. Like Luke firing a blaster at the Empire's drones on a remote frozen moon, I just take them out them when they appear. Drones will be drones.
...drawing on a phrase of his author Hans Magnus Enzensberger – “paperbacks can alter our entire sociology of reading, the intellectual turnover of society” – Unseld decided to begin a new mass-market series. He remained canny enough, even so, not to present it as such, preferring the term “edition suhrkamp”, with the subversive lower-case nouns typical of Enzensberger’s poetry. Launched with Brecht’s Life of Galileo as its first volume, followed by other in-house heroes such as Hesse and Frisch, the series was a roaring success. Even difficult philosophers such as Ernst Bloch or Theodor Adorno sold about 10,000 copies in the first month alone. (To this day, edition suhrkamp has sold more than 40 million copies). Whether people were actually reading Bloch or Adorno is another matter, but they certainly wanted to be seen with them. With his flair for fashions and genius for marketing, Unseld captured – and monetized – the zeitgeist of critique.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/lives/biography/hundert-briefe-siegfried-unseld-book-review-ben-hutchinson
Reading the TLS (substituting for the full paper in the interest of finding more interesting things) is a little like the vizier going to the balcony and calling out to the huddled wretches in the courtyard, asking them what was being talked about in the great palaces. The wretches are are both quite impressed by the distant palaces and honored to have the chance to talk about them, but you do need to see through both the critical wretches attempting to impress you and the agendas of distant palaces to suss out what the remarkable thing underneath might be.
Alternatively, I suppose you could use it to measure the inclinations of the wretches of the moment, or what the distant palaces might be up do, but I'm a bit of an idealist.
William James' image of riding a horse at night, but not knowing whether it is white or black. Compare Hegel, decades earlier, not able to make out the colors of cows in the gloaming. Or trying to time the flight of Minerva's owl--it never occurring to him that the sense of one flight-path might be Hesperus and the sense of the other, Phosphorus. Trying to keep an eye on the livestock has done much for philosophy. Acts of care, not sentiment.
Notion: The more a political system is understood as a political system, the greater the attenuation between the intentions of the people and the policies of the government. As each aspect of the process is increasingly understood, the testimony of the people, whether the direct democracy of the base level, or the votes of republican assemblies, becomes a discrete and objective phenomenon, and this operates in a zero-sum manner with its sanctity, which is to say the degree to which its own purpose constitutes the understanding and use of these testimonial acts.
Take, for example, a Tom-Sawyer speech by a major American politician in Europe. Since the speaker is speaking from first principles within a very complex system of political systems, the effects can be anomalous with respect to the principles of the speech. The currency of first principles, applied at each discrete level of politics, can imbalance things to the degree that these mechanisms have already been defined and understood. Contrastingly, within a naive system, say a nation still effectively governed by family tribes and with only a basic governance, the currency of first principles can be applied with equal (a scientist would say nominal) effect with respect to every aspect of the mechanism.
As the recent political discourse in the US demonstrates, when the people think they've severally discovered "what's really going on," in these mechanisms, the music becomes discordant.
One can't afford to be sentimental about one's circumstances. If things are going well, it keeps you from using that working space to get something done. If things become perilous, the melodramatic underscoring of the mind can pose real dangers. Detachment.
(And I say this having worked on late 19th c. melodrama at one of the better-positioned rooms in NYC to do such things.)
Interesting goings-on in the sovereign district. Wondering if the principled neophyte might have missed a clue in the communications from the Sublime Porte of Lafayette. There was more than one national sovereignty involved in the res. Curiouser and curiouser. #notexpert #nothingtodowithme #ijustreadbooks
Really, anyone with a serious mind in this world is the spiritual equivalent of the protagonists of Godot, no matter whether you're eating roots from the field and trying to survive each day on the roadside, or ensconced in a comfortable house or apartment with a well-remunerated daily sequence of obligations. None of us should believe, or even take seriously the things around us. We can't, or we become dishonest and join the dishonest.
One can be in the world without believing in the world. I learned that through long years of working day jobs.
At the end of the day, if you turn right after leaving the office, you go to an apartment to which you have a key. If you turn left, you will have to find something. Life is precisely that turn in the other direction, to a path in which something will have to come up. You will be in that condition before the end, if only at the end. Tolstoy attempted to teach himself this in the end, and died in a village railway station.
In the museum in Cleveland, just across from the famous water lilies, there is a green landscape by Pissarro. Looking closer, or to be precise, looking more precisely (in the manner encouraged by detailed American landscape painting and discouraged by the clouds of Turner), you see a figure asleep on the green hill.
In the last country I was in, the famous 19th c. philosopher had a theory of the spiritual condition of his nation's culture. He saw it as a green hillside by a village, this location bringing out the conditions of life most conducive to beholding the mystery.
Watching a production of Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj, I was struck with the thought that the play didn't begin until the skull in Hamlet's hand became Yorick. (Who was based on Richard Tarleton, a character actor with a quick wit, who would dance jigs with inprovised wordplay with the audience after the show.) Until then, we are holding props and speaking lines. All we have is this existence, this natural form, and so much of the present existence is about concealing this from us.
So. Uniting the thoughts. We are on the hillside. It is the only way that reveals who we are, and we are among those who are convinced that the world of most people's preoccupations is false. So we are left in this place, and the one gift it has for us is that last item in Pandora's case, that thing that made the old Russian writer hobble away from his house to parts unknown.
But, finally, in knowledge, we must hold the mystery.
You don't realize how completely filled with nonsense the American news is until you step away for a bit. It's clearly an entertainment mechanism, made real by claiming to describe some sort of reality supervenient over day-to-day life (and in that it perhaps has some predecessors). But like all forms of entertainment, it serves the function of legein, preserving the possibility of discourse, a range of things to be talked about and held in the mind, or perhaps combined and sifted through like some sort of Baconian cipher. Heid suggested that newspapers were the modern form of legein. Occasionally, they're rather up-front about it: "here's what to know/talk about."
A genuinely phenomenological description of what the news is might be interesting. It's a rather stark claim. "The things that I will read to you over the next thirty minutes (taking the 6PM news as a paradigm case) describe the fundamental condition of the world." Or perhaps only the recent changes.
And yet, once the actual impact is attenuated, if I'm certain that nothing said (outside the weather report) will predict anything that will happen to me in the near future, describing the changes without describing the general condition seems a stretch. I would learn more by reading a history book than listening to five minutes of nuanced discussion about current events.
So, like many forms of entertainment, perhaps it's not about knowing things. Or even speaking about them.
Basically, it's a colossal power grab, but in a mode of being that the current politics isn't calibrated against. In the story of the world that DC politics tells, the computers are just those machines that the interns waste time on, and that make the filing system go more quickly. Even in NYC business, simple passwords generally known among the office staff are a power move.
"But there is more than one history of the world." (John Crowley)
It's like that short space of time before word floats up to the C-suite that the brash outside consultants brought in by the new CEO have been spending their time making copies of virtually every database and system in the business.
(Translation: only a business where the CEO absolutely ruled both the board and the business would even think about risking something like this.)
As for the arts-related moves, taking over the KC board is likely a simple status move. Those board seats in NYC can't be bought with millions of dollars in contributions.
There are people who make every effort to pay at little as possible to go to the opera, and there are people who make every effort to pay as much as possible to go to the opera.
This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
.....
The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.
(bold: identical ES/EN/IT)
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2025/documents/20250210-lettera-vescovi-usa.html
I only joke about going completely mad because it seems the completely rational thing to do before going completely mad.
The clean air in February (rare in the Balkans) and the quiet kitchen are the two positive aspects of the current place. Slogging through, showering and laundering after each journey to the grocery, etc. But the quiet kitchen table is not to be wasted. If you don't run while you have the light, there's not really a point to pressing on.
I suppose if I had gone into this visit as a sort of voyage into the badlands, I might have bought some khakis and wandered the city, but having made an initial exploration or two, and observing how much work there is to be done, the wiser course seems to be following the scent of the lamp.
I did explore a bit, and I'll likely explore a bit more, but the work that is to be done at the table is the prevailing consideration.
Strongly dislike working on the Winbook model. I had a good system with the Chromebooks, which are very secure, and can be configured for decent privacy, but then had to make the shift (which actually involved a time of saving up during a low-revenue stretch) to the fenestrated models for extrinsic reasons.
It's no exaggeration to call it a panopticon; in default configurations, any marketer with sufficient interest could determine the average person's recent reading, precise location, long-range work, and social network. And that's before even thinking about the black-hat hacking.
Future ages will likely understand that we made these machines in order for humans to do what they do more effectively. They might be at a loss, though, wondering why we thought that was necessarily a good thing.
Perhaps the problem of the idealist understanding of the corporate form (on the model of Hegel's philosophy of law -- an idealist rather than rather than a social-science empirical study) is presented when a society exists primarily to preserve the industrial forms, along with the involvement of a healthy preponderance of the population (and the prosperity of this healthy preponderance). This is a different form of social organization, compared to the types of societies that prevailed when basic questions about the form of civilization in the West were answered. At minimum, these questions would need new answers, if the practice of thinking about what we do is to continue to guide life. (Or perhaps be returned after a century or two of pragmatic exile.)
Is the corporate form a modification of the old sovereignty based on the common good? Historically, this goes from the monopolies to the franchises, to the corporate structures that ruled entire colonial states. Perhaps. But the theory of deputed powers by the chartering sovereign appears to have been rejected over the last several decades. "Any lawful purpose" has become a bit of a fig leaf for spontaneously-arising forms of collaboration accomplishing much of the work of the society.
The reason for a Hegelian reading is on the analogy of his explanation of the building of a cloister, in the PR. One explanation could come from an empirical explanation, that a certain society needed a place of repose; another comes from the ideas, that there is something in the human spirit which seeks this form of existence. Over the last two centuries industries have transformed the planet, multiplied the population, and solved many problems. The philosophers in the West adopted a pragmatic approach, suggesting that the event would reveal the truth, and largely, this allowed industrial forms to flourish. (The East had a more sociologically-inflected form of industrialization.)
But now, having accomplished much at great cost, both human and environmental, perhaps it's time to explain what it was that arose in humans during this time. If only not to worship the work of our hands.
Perhaps.
The excitable young sidekick and his team of engineers have gained access to the government computer systems. The new leader attends a glitzy sports event and casts shade on the reigning pop diva, whose heartland, blue-collar team loses the game. It does feel a bit like ten minutes into a Bond film.
Executive branch announces that they intend to stop minting the Lincoln effigies. Interesting. Coinage is the quintessential act of the sovereign; practically the only interesting aspect of the UK privy council minutes. Haven't looked at it, but I can't imagine that the president would have that authority. So perhaps the interesting thing is that it's a logical point, like not printing the period on the end of the NYT motto, but one that would clearly contravene basic constitutional principles.
Also a bit off that the news is being dominated by these half-baked notions. Half-baked bread can be unhealthy. If they actually did the time-and-motion studies and thought about them for a bit, some interesting change might be possible.
Peculiar aside in Wilfrid Sellars' fourth Dewey lecture: discussing distributive form of an abstract entity as simply a collection of the relevant tokens (descriptors?) exhibited by the objects within that class. Offhand, perhaps joking, mention that there is a "Middle Eastern" version that can't be uttered.
In this way of thinking about it (my parsing here, not Sellars), the name of the abstract entity that breathed o'er Eden would then be a novel expression standing for a certain set of tokens or descriptors common to everything in existence? #notexpert #musing
Interesting piece on St. Francis of Assisi in the TLS. Takes the intuitive view that deliberate poverty is in essence anticapitalist. But these orders became the institutional correlates of reformation. And this naturalistic individualism which was taken to greater extents to the north became one of the bases of reformation and the first stirrings of private industry. Even in the late middle ages, the OP and the OFM were associated with the global church as against the church of the native place. The OP tended to adopt saintly patrons associated with global trade and the episcopy, while the OFM would sometimes advocate the cults of the (then) new order of indigenous saints, furthering the sense of naturalistic individualism, as against the longstanding cults of the place, the latter frequently with ancient pagan overtones.
Characteristic of one of the Weekly Readers to use the present superficial divisions to explain all things, and thereby introduce the world to more things, but, having been introduced to more things, these superficial divisions seem less and less tenable. At a certain point, perhaps contra naturalistic individualism, it is error to think as a child thinks.
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, "You'll all be drowned!"
They called aloud, "Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!"
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.(Edward Lear)
I go mad, I go mad, I shall wear my trousers plaid...
Again, I only joke about going completely mad because the threadbare leprechauns pacing the ceiling seem to expect it. In fact, they worked it into the coronation oath.
It would be a mistake to think too much on the current politics. Like going to see a movie when there's work to be done. Actually, when I was doing Ph.D. work, the company that offered absurdly cheap movie passes launched, and I considered it, as the Sbux I walked three miles to in order to work on a stack of books had a movie theatre next door, but it was a bit like the philosophy professor who welcomed graduate students by suggesting that they spend their first year reading novels -- in the abstract, something to be thought about. Given the work at hand, quite mad. I have the daily queue, and the books I hope to get through in the coming days, but it can be a bit of a slog, especially with all the piecework.
The one good bit about the current rooms is a having a good kitchen table in a quiet room. The present location was a bit of a misstep. I'm not sure which is more disturbing in the evenings, the sounds of the barking dogs, or the sounds of the guns hopefully shooting above the barking dogs. It's an interesting place. But in the off-season, the sea isn't much use. At any rate, the air is cleaner than in the large cities, which was a significant factor in the choice. In the Balkans in January and February, the cities can be a problem.
Ora et labora.
Nietzsche, 1888: "It is not the victory of science that marks this nineteenth century of ours, but the victory of method over science."
Method: also the early modern English Christians smuggling prayer manuals printed by hidden presses in the shires among the endlessly sermonized parishioners of the established church. A substitution of a private and personal domination for a political domination.
Which then perhaps recursively appeared in the public space.
Absent notions of individual rights and basic fair play, the formal appearance of things simply reconstitutes itself in each generation, using some fraction of the population. It then becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
Given notions of individual rights and fair play, the appearance of things is falsified, but in a good way, by the material nature of the shared life; the nature of the shared life, shared by all, becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
An authentic society reveals the forms of things to be secondary; if the forms of society ever become the essence of society, it is virtually certain that a fraction of the population has simply been discarded.
Perhaps.
I can only say that I've sat at the desk all day (with the occasional break, like King Zog, as reported in Time magazine, for calisthenics) and that I never stopped working. I will assume that the disparity in time devoted and tasks accomplished reveals something about space and time that I've not yet understood.
The state universities, despite the intuitive Saturday-football notions of what it must be like to be there, are actually peculiarly dangerous places to be now. The reason for this is that they are consciously creating a social mechanism with some portion of the students who are in attendance. This has very little to do with scholarship, as one usually thinks of scholarship. (Outside of scientific technology, in which the university is explicitly committed to fostering discrete social mechanisms outside of the university.)
Part of the difficulty in the humanities is the imitation of positivism. (The disciples of Comte were angry at how broadly that term was used in the academy in the context of other fields.) Since scientific papers analyzing materials according to the assumptions of a particular field are knowledge for that field, the form of those papers is taken to be a verification of intrinsic value by those in other fields. The danger comes in the fact that the explicit purpose of the exercise is now the creation of the social mechanism, so this art of pseudo-postivism has been refined by explicitly political social networks as a social form in itself. And as the social form is entirely artifice, there's a significant danger of corruption.
But if you sidestep the frenzied mimetic in which you simply use the same words as the others and say things that make you popular there, it's possible to use your time there to do some real work using the legacy assets of the place, such as the (book) libraries and (basketball) gymnasia.
The danger is particular to the state universities because, to put it bluntly, there is usually a great mass of fungible students to be dealt with according to the rules of the place, largely without concern for external social networks or internal mechanisms contrary to the prevailing norms. In America, the state universities exist to teach the young folks a lesson or two. Mostly by faculties recruited from the more prestigious schools to the east or the west.
But the work can be done. Just don't expect it to be recognized. For the simple reason that no one will be looking to find it. They have different purposes in mind.
(Preemption: this is not the Aesopian sour grapes from being refused a dissertation defense -- the point is that there were always two completely different sets of grapes at issue.)
Interesting politboro machinations perceptible from nomadic exile: targeting an agency whose organic authority seems to come from executive act, and which operates in a sphere of authority (foreign affairs) in which the courts usually handle questions of presidential authority with kid gloves seems well thought-through. The real target seems opaque. The agency has only two of the three letters of another agency working in the service of democracy abroad, so unknown trip wires might or might not be found at various levels of access. Ultimately, though, this is where the authority of the executive is at its height, so this is the vehicle they'd probably want to take to the courts, rather than the goings-on at Treasury, for example. The best counter-argument is the appropriations authority, but the theory there would be that the existence of the agency is necessary to the mandate, and that's both a question of fact, and not the best ground on which to plan the battle. Apolitical, as always. Interesting times.
Christian outposts in the southern Balkans, perhaps for the obvious historical reasons, seem to be in the mountains. And as soon as I understood where I had landed in this latest jump, I did have the strong urge to flee to the Bulgarian mountains. The present country is generally thought of as a bad place to be, and although I try not to let these generally held perceptions affect my thinking, the physical aspects of the place do genuinely make it an unpleasant place to walk down the street. And that's right next to the ocean, inaccessible behind wall-like private developments, with platoons of strays guarding the street-level in the evening hours.
Man, flee!
And yet, one interesting aspect. This sort of place seems to traditionally be the place where the less well-off of Central Europe go to the sea when they manage to get away, and there's a chance that the ancestors, perhaps proximate ones, spent some time here in the summers. So less a nostalgie de la boue than a sort of solidarity.
From the propaedeutic session of a seminar I recently listened in on: Bad philosophers point out the errors in others' philosophies. Good philosophers find the merits in others' philosophies. Great philosophers find the reasons for the errors and meritorious aspects of others' philosophies.
Bit historicist and possibly Hegelian, but no less true for that. Plato didn't argue against his interlocutors, he led them to their own strengths.
There is a correlative to travelling through these societies. Just as you can see the direction of the wind from the way the trees have fallen after a storm, the great north-south and east-west currents of history have marked the peninsula. I don't think you can understand the present nature of this city without knowing that it was an important place on the road from Rome to Constantinople, and one that fell under the control of the Sublime Porte. Just as you can't understand the 14th c. mass conversions slightly inland further up the coast without realizing that the military forces from the south would invade within a century. And forces from the east, west, and north have left similar traces.
The challenge is to fashion individual lives of fullness within these world-historical lines of force. One you get past the Hegelian fallacy that since the nation can do things that individuals can't do, it is therefore the grounding for the individual, you cease to look to these winds for actual sustenance or even ultimate spiritual purpose. But, and this is where the greater reading comes in, it was the greatness of those times, and offers a dimension of experience to the present. And the challenge is to bring these spiritual purposes forward in time within a culture that values individual human lives a bit more. (Without identifying that with a wind from any direction -- it must come from the place simpliciter.)
The richness of earth, but lifted a bit more out of the mud.
Dystopia could never emerge if only the nefarious folks work away at the technology. Widespread commercial pressure to innovate the technology so that people could more effectively feed cartoon farm animals, win the crypto-spinning lotto, or doomscroll while staring into the glowing screen would be essential to developing the means.
Much of the last three days taken up with trying to get the laptop to act as expected. (For example, not spinning an hourglass when asked if the antivirus is working correctly.) Rebuilt Windows, should work for the nonce.
Still very much at the ragtag-fleet level of technology. Sufficient is the CPU.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)