Assembling, checking and compiling the gesamtwerk on Amazon and the Wordpress site. Making the mimesis monograph available in a few different formats, and reprinting the poetry book. Apparently the files I recompiled the monograph from were either older than the filenames indicated, or had become corrupted in the interval, so I did another proof, and will hold off listing it on the Wordpress site until Amazon has the final version up and running. Bit like the poet at the country house sending off a few envelopes to his London publishers before heading back to the front lines. The possible futility of it inspires a bit of perfectionism.
Fascinating talk at one of the UK Inns of Court on Milton yesterday. Viewership in the two-digit order of magnitude. There's an extraordinary amount of very worthwhile things on YT that no one knows about. Over dinner, I flit between the best chamber music in the world and very worthwhile talks with a handful of listeners. The trick is to not just subscribe to everything -- so you can see the scrolling feed -- but once you identify a certain worthwhile area, look for comparable channels. Every dinnertime, my feed is filled with evensong from UK cathedrals and Oxbridge chapels. Not going to swim the Tiber anytime soon, but the BCP liturgy is compelling.
One oddity on the Milton panel -- I think they did an entire evening on Milton's dramatic sensibility without mentioning Comus. Or I might have missed it -- multitasking, as usual.
Eavesdropping on an Oxbridge compline. The spirit itself requires an architecture, more than an immediacy. Not because the transcendent things are complicated, but because we are. We need to be raised to the condition of our own complexity to stand properly before the sacred. The dark in us illumined, the recalcitrant and sluggish will roused to attention.
This is the truth to much of Orthodox liturgy, I think. God doesn't need the repetitions, the grandeur, the awe-inspiring things. They exist to awaken us, to help us across our half of the bridge to the other place.
Things appear to be at a bit on an inflection point. At such times, it's always good to do what the television football and basketball broadcasts I remember from childhood used to call the "game reset." Basically a quick description of the story so far.
After about a decade of work in the theatre and a top conservatory degree, opportunities seemed to vanish for several years. So I went to a top-tier law school, and, perhaps because I was a few years ahead of most folks there, who had gone from undergraduate study to the J.D., I seemed to be a bit of a target for some faculty members. One in particular went very far over the line in my opinion, so I transferred to another top-tier school back in the city, got good grades, and took as many doctrinal and black-letter-law courses as they would allow (which almost no one does). Was largely shut out from the career paths, though. Perhaps coincidentally, it was a religious school, a faith different than mine (though not inconsistent with mine). A few difficult years followed; things got about as bad as they can get in the First World. Then I did a research doctorate, but after writing a 300 page dissertation and grading thousands of student papers, the faculty refused to schedule a defense. Perhaps coincidentally, during my time there, I had respectfully pushed back against a few practices that I firmly believed to be unethical. A few years of the same adversity followed.
This peregrination has been valuable. I've been able to fund it out-of-pocket, no credit cards, thanks to the relatively inexpensive cost of living, and the purpose of it -- the cultural exploration -- made the game worth the candle.
And yet, there's that story of mine that was unfolding in my own country, and that seems to have paused for a bit. This has been a time of work for me, not a vacation, but I'm conscious that it's the exception to the general difficulty that I've faced in my own country. These three careers that I've attempted (the first is still my life's work) collectively finding no traction can suggest odd things to the mind. I've firmly set my mind against thinking of anything like a vast conspiracy, but at the same time, I've come to realize that the generally held notions of what it is to live and work in my country couldn't account for these events. So there is no conspiracy, that's true. But, equally, the generally held notions do not describe what it is to live and work in this society. The present distorted national politics are not epiphenomenal.
I've been envious of the lives that I've observed in these travels. Even without a lot of disposable goods, people make generally better lives here. Coffee in the afternoons. In many countries, most people have second homes in the country. Bookstores in every neighborhood. I've kept an eye out for positions that I might apply for locally, while doing the global job search, but an American lawyer/academic/what you will is not exactly a logical staffing solution in most of these contexts.
I do rue one mistake. During the pandemic, I headed to the upper Midwest, a place that I like very much. I had just finished the PhD work, and my hopes were high that I could land a position either domestically or internationally. But in the interval, given the things I've described above, I've come to understand that even with my skills, degrees, and experience, the best that I can hope for in this culture is to find a place, read as much as I can, and write as much as I can, while finding a retail or basic position somewhere in the neighborhood. (And then part of the work will be in explaining why that is.)
There are role models for this kind of internal exile, and I think about them daily. My regret is that I didn't fashion such a place during the pandemic travels when I could have abandoned the job search and found a basic job deep in the rural Midwest, and set up the fortress of solitude. I am still convinced that if I can write and study, I will be able to accomplish some worthwhile work. And these studies are the sorts of things I would do even if I thought that everything I did was certain to vanish like words traced in water, as the romantic poet said.
So the wisest course seems to be to try to set something like this up, though it will be considerably more difficult now. And it looks like there will be some extraordinary difficulties in the near term.
Spiritually, this has been an extraordinary journey. The progressions of dreams in these places have been carefully noted. I will close this by relating something that I wasn't sure I would ever relate. At many points during these journeys, I have been conscious of a woman's presence, very near, and each time I am aware of her (there is of course no one around), she carefully asks if I am happy. Well. As I think about the question, I'm often tempted to reply somehow that no, reading philosophy while sipping a bit of kefir on the roof of the supermarket in Bosnia isn't precisely the dream, but I am happy in being able to continue the work, studying the philosophy, thinking about the theatre. But it took me some time to understand the point of the question. Happiness is not some condition that follows the work, or that occurs when the work is going well. Happiness comes from seeing the entirety of your life, as you do these mundane, particular things, and knowing that this living presence that studies, prays, observes, is a miraculous gift. When Thomas Merton saw those around him at a nondescript corner in Louisville (that I've walked past many times) seem almost divine, it wasn't because they were doing extraordinary things. Our prosperity has misled us as to the nature of happiness, I think.
Perhaps I should have told her that.
Perhaps I will.
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Morning run down the mountain, into the town. Filled the ruck with provisions, and walked back up.
Thick grey fog over the valley on the way in. Had the sense of walking from the clear and open place into the foggy confusion. When you spend a week or so away from the towns, walking into the street plan does bring a cloud on the mind. You can almost feel the energies of the place. Harmless town, quite nice in places. Suspect it would be the same anywhere. On the return, the mist was general.
Mountain in view on the return, solid pack of snow now established at the top. Summit appears to be right at the treeline, but in this part of the world, it's hard to tell. The mountains in southern Bosnia and Montenegro (several evil names) appear to be mostly without vegetation for most of the peak. There are summit routes to the one here, but without a vehicle, it looks like it would require a starting time well before dawn.
Surprised to find some of the characters in Against the Day in the same coordinates I've been through of late. Decided to pick it up out of the generic ereader folder, and put it back on the top, so I can finish. The earlier time or two I made the pugnacious slog through, I hadn't yet set my foot on these mountains. Started this read in the cafes of Belgrade a few months back (I think after visiting the House of Flowers, which is now the House of Small Pebbles) but there have been many literary detours and frolics in the interval.
Fascinating piece on homelessness by William Vollman in the Vatican newspaper yesterday.
Not linking it, though, since I had the same reaction to it as I did to the original papal document. The reactions of (even excellent) clerics and picaresque novelists don't always describe the thing itself very clearly. The graphic nature of the article is shocking, yes, but the shocking nature of it also has the unfortunate effect of supplying a certain social logic, in that it is the shocking people who have no homes. The truth of it is that you can be the most clean-cut, clear-thinking one in the room, sometimes even the strongest in the room at whatever the task is, and if you offend the wrong groups of people (remember Madison: the danger of faction), you will possibly be due for extreme misfortune. Granted, when the home is lost, almost everyone falls apart after a few days, and then the picaresque novels and the socially conscious colportage has a foothold. But the implication that all of its victims lose the plot once their plot of land is taken away is dangerous. There are clear-eyed, very intelligent, and puritanically clean-living folks at Mass every morning and pacing the streets in the evening. When he visited the big city, Christ often slept on the side of the Mount of Olives.
A democracy, or really any state, relies on the public understanding of its present nature. Part of the present problem might be that those with sufficient wealth and property, thanks to the media, can have an understanding of the present politics that's a bit attenuated from reality, both conceptually and also as to what it means to actually live there, in a place not insulated from the contact with the full spectrum of people in the society.
Most critically: do not assume that this is a meritocracy, or that there is a workable social logic determining who is wealthy and who is fighting to survive. Knowing that (1) you are good and (2) that you are momentarily safe from want is not sufficient proof of the health of the republic.
Becoming convinced that the political problem in my country is the absence of a credible opposition. Reminds me of the comedy bit about Dukakis against Bush. Bush rambles on incoherently for a bit, and then 'Dukakis,' asked for a rebuttal, turns to the camera and speaks his whole reply: "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."
A rodeo clown distracts the dangerous forces of nature while the workers go about their business.
But like Hickey in Iceman Cometh, I have withdrawn to the grandstand of philosophical self-detachment, to fall asleep watching the cannibals do their death-dance.
If there were to be a project to save the humanities, philosophy, history, etc. from the slough of trite-minded despond into which it has lucratively wandered (to make all things new is the primary, and always necessarily frustrated ambition of the thinker -- but the present moment is slightly different than the usual), it might look to make available the most important books in each field from eighty years ago. After that point, the humanities decided to imitate the technological sciences, and see every bit of a knowledge as material progress to a more perfect machine. In fact, from Socrates to the present, every teacher has tried to teach the same things, and when it has gone well, the words were meaningful.
Germany in the second half of the 19th c. did something very remarkable with philosophy, history, the study of literature, etc. I can't imagine the present mechanism ever managing to accomplish half as much in its time.
Hebdomadal walk down into the town for the week's supplies. Mountain ranges idyllic with the changing leaves, warm breeze from the south blowing some extraordinarily fresh air from the mountains. Unlike last week, the principal peak silhouetted by very faint sky glow on the return, as I walked back along the axis of the Milky Way.
I cannot overstate the importance of having a good ruck, whatever your situation. It's the sort of consumer good that's replicated by the million, but if you know what to look for, you can find a good one at about the same price as most, and much less inexpensive than those constructed in such a manner as to provide good advertising copy. That, and the wide-brimmed felt hat, the sign of the artist since the mid 19th c. The Dauphin had his horse, I have a ruck and hat.
Given the advances in manufacturing, there is an abundance of goods in the world; the ultra-high-end in my experience is generally much overrated. So you have to be selective, but not in the manner of the fashionable. Once you identify a certain good that would be useful (ruck, hat, boots, etc.), honestly investigate the thing itself, find out what makes it good, and look for that sort of thing. (Finding out what was the best 75 years ago can provide some pointers.) No need to keep consulting the magazines to find the good things. As Gurdjieff pointed out, that usually leaves you at the mercy of whoever has a large marketing budget at the time.
The difficulty with late afternoon/evening workouts is that the body tends to think that the fight is o'er , the battle won, despite the clear understanding of the mind that there is nothing keeping me from sitting down to another hour or two of work of the day that I stopped in order to go to the gym, instead of starting in on a second project more appropriate to the preprandial hour (reading, dinner prep, etc.).
By far, the most salient point about the political reality in my country is that this isn't an exception, or atypical, like a normal, liberal Western democracy where, for a season, professional wrestling on television becomes popular for some reason. From the mechanism that has swung into place behind the administration, it should be evident that this isn't a superficial change in government. (Having noticed a few things about his early backers, I'm not surprised by this.)
But this doesn't mean that all good citizens should rush to the barricades. In fact, the polarizing political hyperbole and mobilization from the opposition basically ensured the election of the present executive. Just note where things ring false, and remember them as specifically as you can, and use the falsity that you observe as the basis of your political discourse. If you were debating a madman, you wouldn't conduct the debate as if he were sane and impute the rational form of his ideas to his side, and you wouldn't start frothing at the mouth yourself. Just indicate the falsity.
And it's not just the political sphere. Having been a professional actor for a decade (as a matter of principle, I count the last three years, in which for some reason I couldn't even book a non-paying job), I went to a top law school and earned good grades, and I spent four years on a research doctorate, and I came to know the prevailing culture in these places very well. The country is the test of a certain principle -- whether a prosperous middle class (by recent sociological books, a proportion much higher than any in the past) can stabilize and govern itself democratically. At this point, we can only hope that a time-traveller somehow reaches Philadelphia at the founding to describe the world of televised politics. But absent that, perhaps we should make the necessary adjustments.
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The disclaimer of self-interest, of course. But the fact that quiet people who basically keep to themselves and read a lot, even with strong degrees from good schools, sometimes find it virtually impossible to secure the basic necessities of life because they haven't formed a sufficient number of corrupt connections among the great and the good is one of the chief signs that I'm pointing to. Ask anyone who has attended a good school recently about the scholarship there, and they'll likely talk instead about how important it was to make acquaintances, whatever the intellectual cost. This is one sign that the civilization has turned against the culture.
A certain type of civilization begins to form. I recognize it, because I've been travelling through several civilizations of that type over much of the past few years. But the good people in these places who are trying to make their own world a better place look to distant models for inspiration, and they used to look to my country for that.
Seek, strive, find, don't yield, &c.
Feast of St. JP2 -- rather good fellow. Caught the encore at the very end of the Chopin competition last night, after listening to much of the last round or two. And the feast of John Cantinus a few days ago. Polonia resurgens.
When I was at the (very new) altar of Czestochawa in St. Pat's before the present peregrination, I thought about going to Poland, and using the churches there for meditation and prayer, but the budget indicated a more southerly course. Not at all a complaint, the spiritual riches of Bosnia and Serbia are very worth encountering. And yet...
Another late night on soul-stilling tasks that flew in through the transom after the fires were covered. And so, another late morning. The sins of yesterday will put the following mornings on edge.
Thinking about that scene in The Matrix (a true film), just before the protagonist signs on to his task. The Fellow opens the limousine door and shows him the life on street level. From memory of seeing it many years ago, every device of the cinematographer is enlisted to make it seem as if the story of the people in the limousine is the only possible story. Similar moments in other films. Not everyone has the decision-point of serving one of several powerful folks in the CIA, or dying on the street, but I think the right choice was made. Frankly, I prefer the Whitehall memoir version of the event, where the young, hapless fellow is back at the college in time for dinner, and then depending on the answer, enjoys a life of intrigue or prosperity in the City. But perhaps the set of published memoirs is not reflective of the whole.
See through the devices of the cinematographers. Help the fly out of the bottle, as W said. The consolations of philosophy displace other, more insidious consolations.
Fascinating heist at the Louvre. Saw one news report saying five guards were held at bay with an angle grinder while the crown jewels were made off with.
Puzzlingly low valuation. Perhaps someone was trying to save on the insurance. Crown jewels have no value. If you get the crown jewels, values change.
In most notions of royal monarchy (there are other kinds), the rule passes with the crown as devised by the previous monarch, though the interplay with public and private law makes for a multiplicity of state mechanisms.
And I'm still wondering what Albert thought he was doing with the Kohi-Noor. Lost half the rock.
In the same manner, when the thought comes to read a certain book or watch a certain film, first consider the aspect of actual experience that this mirror might be pointing towards. It's quite likely that this is what the mind is trying to tell you, as it's likely why you found the book or film to be worthwhile.
Somewhat pining for a book-lined study in D----- or some similar part of town. Pining is generally bad, but it can indicate the useful action for the day. If I were to be in such a place, I would read Kant, so I read Kant, regardless of the actual circumstances. This is one reason why we need to be careful of eavesdropping djinns who would want to do us well -- these almost-wishes that some thing were to be the case are not desires for the thing itself ("Stay, thou art so fair..."), but indications of situations in which we can do what it is that we're trying to do. So, get about doing it.
"...to whet thy almost blunted purpose."
Methinks the ghost was being polite. That purpose was rusted solid, caked with mud, and leaving a trace in the grass of the yard where it had been tossed for a season.
Unrelatedly, have been lifting recently instead of running. Brings some obtuseness to the mind, particularly on a traveller's diet. (Remembering the post-lifting, post-sauna peanut butter, chocolate, banana, and coffee protein shake at Gold's in the city. Tended to hit the spot.)
One of the curious moments of theatregoing in the last year was the Hamlet at the Hungarian theatre in Cluj. I saw it the night before I left on my second visit, and then coincidentally, it was scheduled for the night of my arrival for the third visit, and while I was there, appeared on the calendar for the night before I left. Only one of the unheimlich things in those visits. (Deo gratias.)
It was the old standard Hungarian adaptation with the peculiar mystic poem at the end.
[Correction, I have now checked the standard 19th c. Hungarian adaptation, and there is no mystic poem there. Apparently interpolated in the only production I've seen. Perils of actual theatregoing.]
But the uncanny thing about it was that the projected supertitles didn't use the original English text, but one of the "plain language" adaptations. As a result, the only place the actual text was happening was inside my mind, as I watched these other layers unfold.
What to do when the unheimlich is your homeland. And the only place the truth of the text seems to be is within the echoing mind.
If I didn't consider it a mark of civilization and culture to work with a care and decorum independent of actual circumstances, the events of recent years would have created a very different person.
I think this is ultimately the right view. We inflect and direct the time from a moral center apart from circumstance. We are not creatures of the event. We create the event.
(cf. Heidegger on that last bit, of course.)
The parallel mechanisms of government that have appeared in this administration are revealing -- diplomacy run from the Upper East Side rather than Foggy Bottom, etc. This administration is fundamentally corporatist, so it sets aside the instruments of the republic, and lets the consultants run the show. And, in part, this is useful. This moment is the ascendancy of the Machiavel, and the decrease of the Republic, and this is a necessary circle. Pisistratus diminishes the Areopagus. The individual within society has to be defined from time to time, else it grows indistinct within the republic.
But that circle of meaning can also be made discontinuous in the process of widening it. And, separately, we shouldn't be surprised if the profits of the present moment ultimately don't accrue to the republic.
And the decline of the republic isn't an idle matter. It is the survival of both the state and those within the state. People are dying on the streets of the prosperous nation, and more citizens will likely die on the streets in the times to come.
Perhaps: The prosperity from the postwar mechanisms of industrial development in the West are essentially idiot-proof -- their greatest-generation architects knew their own children rather well. But as a result the basic character of society is no longer attuned to the production for the common good. Although sustained by the baseline prosperity of the industrial mechanisms, its sense of phenomenological and social reality largely comes from mediated forms, such as television.
So the pillars of society are strong, but the fabric is weak. The mechanisms of this industrial prosperity can be populated with some fraction of the population, and there's no need to make it a meritocratic selection. Those not incorporated into the mechanism are simply surplus, in the society's view.
The fundamental reversal that must happen to avert the emergent technological-industrial dystopia is perhaps that we need to shift from thinking of the shared life as the population of set industrial forms to the more basic awareness that the social perspective necessarily implies the totality. The proper question: What are all of us going to do now? And with the robustness of the industrial forms, that question can be answered as boldly as possible. Otherwise, I doubt that humanity will be the most salient aspect of the coming world.
Perhaps.
Tried, as a matter of duty, to slog through Sorokin's Blue Lard, and had some worthwhile musings on the first bits, but by the time of the infamous Stalin/Khrushchev scene (though K seems to stand for a more ominous international cosmopolitanism, not the fellow himself) I had to put it aside. He's doing interesting things, but it's a bit like the last play I saw at the war theatre in the country to the west -- the way of doing things might be shocking to the locals, but it's simply alienating and confusing to the more objective observers, who are simply trying to follow the message of the artist. Became impossible to understand what he was trying to do, specifically, with these seriously disgusting somatic devices. And reading obscenity qua obscenity is not my cup of tea.
Perhaps my view on domestic politics is a bit like Ovid's perspective on the city, as he looked out (the other direction) over the Black Sea. Distance does give some perspective. Reading the domestic newspapers, it's virtually impossible to determine where the news section ends and the entertainment section begins. (One of my conservatory mentors, a Czech scenographer, had a standard talking point on the relegation of the arts section to the middle of the entertainment section.) Events on scripted television series are considered news. That's simply flabbergasting, and probably why a reality TV star is running the show.
Considering the American mind, the most dangerous thing is that the entire sequence of thought, political and otherwise, now seems off-kilter. It begins in this matrix of news and entertainment and lattes, and while it used to reach back into the fabric of existing things, the exercise of thought now moves away from the fabric of things. Deliberate thought used to have a recuperative effect on the mind and the discourse.
And this isn't just about political discussions and thinking. Matters large and small miss the mark, but the frozen hamburgers roll into the small town every week nonetheless.
I think if I were to land back there now, I would be a bit like Sam Beckett, watching them silently, waiting for them to land in reality, to find the way things are, like they used to be able to do, if only for a moment.
Quasi-sequi-hebdomal walk down into the town for provisions. Filled the ruck with groceries from the German chain, and walked back to the the mountains in the cloudy darkness. Even invisible, save for the scattered point of light from a solar cell or chair-lift track, quite the silent presence. Can sense them from the direction and character of the wind, almost.
Still in wonky schedule world. Rolling with it.
As it turns out, the cheapest coffee in the store can be genuinely bad. Roasted within an inch of its life, and only the faint scent of twig underneath. Was worth a try. Water would be preferred to it.
There are two kinds of cheap coffee -- a lighter roast of a cheaper bean (often Robusta), or the dregs roasted to indistinguishability. The latter in this case. Saw a company name in the UK, but in retrospect, looking to UK import/export for good coffee in the Balkans is like choosing Philadelphia soap based on a trust in the metropolis. (At the founding, a famously bad soap precisely because of the non-rural fabrication process.)
In the Balkans generally, the Montenegrin bean is the best, but the Bosnian roast is the finest processing. Romania makes a decent cup in the Western style, and Hungary has the trade lines, so you can get the really good stuff from the Mideast in the small shops for not that much more.
Essentially lost the day to that schedule change that came out of nowhere and extended into the early morning. Fardels.
Must return to being more robust about those sorts of things. There's a bellum omnium contra omnes on.
A bit like finding a hotel in the mountain away from the front line and forgetting to keep your mind on the larger picture. Restful, at first, but there are trenchant engagements elsewhere, and one might have to go over the top someday.
For all the talk about the southern Balkans (which, strictly speaking are the central Balkans, geographically), the people lead very comfort-filled, if not comfortable, lives without the stream of disposable goods. Long coffees in idyllic courtyards outside the apartment. In some countries, second homes in the country are the norm. I've enjoyed these villages qua capital cities, but hopefully, the intensity hasn't vanished, as the village mentality doesn't always fare well when thrust into the larger fight. As in a short story of the Greek-Catholic Romanian priest whose statue I found in the neighborhood, and whose works I later tracked down in the research library, in times of war, they simply vanish from the villages at a more or less constant rate.
I do envy all of the housing that they build here (think the opening credits to 'Irony of Fate'). They see it as a social obligation to build sufficient housing for the community. Massive Brutalist concrete structures in which one could keep immense libraries of paperbacks -- Hegel, Solzhenitsyn, Kant -- from the ubiquitous bookshops. (Americans, statistically speaking, read less than one book per person per year; the numbers are much different here. My kind of folks.)
Lo these many years ago, I set out to work as an actor. It was my understanding that this would involve a short time of extraordinary difficulty. Then, after a decade or so, I studied law, and it was clearly set out that law school would be a short time of extraordinary difficulty. Then, after a short spell as an utterly briefless non-barrister, I set out to write a research doctorate, and it was clear that this would involve a short time of extraordinary difficulty.
Clearly, life in its essence, or at least my life, which is all I shall ever know of life in its essence, is a short period of extraordinary difficulty. And I don't know that it's wise to quarrel with either of those particulars too much.
And yet... From looking about, it would seem that these difficulties would be a bit more productive if they were like the difficulties encountered by others who dared less in these prosperous societies. The paradox: dare greatly, and you might very well have no place to stand. Dare less, and you'll be allowed to harmlessly linger.
Peculiar moment in an international public law conference that I eavesdropped on last week. An interesting talk, another international/regional tribunal might be coming into force, and the speaker was setting forth the case for it. I sent in a question on a certain historical precedent that would seem to have to be made explicit in the tribunal's assertion of authority. The moderators ended up posing the question, and the speaker gave a very thoughtful and surprisingly categorical response. The moderator seemed troubled by the answer (or perhaps the question), though, and then launched into a long, involved question about how much historical precedent had to do with legitimacy, and if covenant among the actors of the time might equally provide legitimacy. Watching this, I understood that he was attempting to dispel the hold of history, and this is a bit troubling.
It's consistent with the Weberian project of modernity, yes, but in the great European debate between historicist legal legitimacy and enlightened legal codes imposed by fiat, recent history offers considerable evidence against the latter. Watching it, it seemed qualitatively identical to the conscious positioning that I saw going on in law school days among the professors who were aligning behind the debate over Romer, etc. They wanted something, and thought they could achieve it politically, and they simply didn't want history to be thought about.
In a perfectly constructed world, this would be troubling enough. But I've encountered more than a few corrupt gatekeepers to these corridors of power, and if simple political will is enough to trump history, then the corrupt mechanism will rule without those on the outside of things being accorded any legitimacy other than whatever present political force they might bring to bear.
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Incidentally, I studiously avoided using the verb "trump" during law studies, and once mused aloud about doing that during a constitutional law 'cold call.' It just seemed too easy a word to use, when a more full explicitation was possible.
Interesting times in the homeland. I continue to think that the most egregious and jaw-dropping things going on might be contrived to be so in order to distract from the things going on deeper in the mechanism. When a mechanism shifts polarity, it changes throughout, so I have to assume that changes are going on at the enter of things while these egregious things are going on on the outside. And the people around this instantiation of the government are very tech-savvy people, connected to some of the companies powering the movement towards digital governance. (I noticed yesterday that half of the layoffs in one government agency were rolled back due to a "coding error," which would seem to indicate not merely a digitized process, but the fact that commands are arriving from on high, without too many cooks in the kitchen.)
Fundamentally: the present political moment is phenomenologically identical to a movie -- it arrives on entertainment devices, and is as scripted as 'reality television' was. But the mechanism of the medium isn't anodyne with respect to the audience member.
Tweaked the website design. (This blogger site is only a sub-site of the larger site, which you can get to by clicking on the link at the top.) Looks much better now. Branding shifting to the wordpress url, as it's more durable in a crisis, should a crisis arise.
Mulling not renewing the annual payment to keep it ad-free. Everyone I know uses ad blockers, and I suspect that for the rest, it will just look like all the other websites.
Had a moment recently in which it appeared as if one of the big chutes in the great game of chutes and ladders was soon to open up under my feet. I learned a lot from my reaction to that. You have to have equanimity, whatever the danger or the event. I understood that truth very clearly two or three years ago, but it appears that the equanimity might have slipped a little in the interval. The uses of adversity are sweet, but it takes a conscious effort to make them part of your life. Working on it.
From cultural reasons, there is a prevailing sense that a life is not properly lived unless you enter into the melodrama of it, and really feel the event. As someone with a conservatory master's degree in acting who has played 19th c. melodrama professionally in the city (the play subsequently became popular, but not due to our production), I can vouch for the fact that this intuitive approach to life bears little resemblance to the experience of actual melodrama, and likely comes from a completely different source. Actual melodrama requires an absolute clarity, not the muddle of fears that make up most of modern experience.
You must maintain equanimity with respect to these chutes and ladders. It's possible that, in the fullness of time, both the chutes and the ladders will get very strange indeed. Determination, regardless of the event.
Two quick cultural references. First, C.P. Snow's dictum that there are two types of people in a crisis, those whose faces go pale, and those whose faces go red with passion, and it's better to have the first type in charge. Second, the anecdote (perhaps in Chambers Book of Days, perhaps elsewhere) about the first sighting of the Spanish Armada. News was rushed to the waiting forces, but Raleigh (I think) was engaged in a game of lawn bowling. The breathless messenger arrived with the news. Raleigh's (?) response, essentially: "We'll finish this game first." And they did.
This "ephemera" subsite continues to be completely invisible to the search engines -- the usual fixes (sitemaps, manual robots.txt, etc.) seem ineffectual. No indexed pages in Google, all sitemaps inaccessible to the search engines. Perhaps due to the present focus of the search engines -- blog content generated by hand used to be the gold standard for search, but it wouldn't be much use for the uses that search engines are put to these days.
I don't think I've ever had a computer that worked exactly as it was supposed to all the time. We blunder onward through the forest, bread cast on the water, breadcrumbs cast on the darkening path.
You can't trust appearances. (Even though that's all we have.) The church used to teach people that, but now that teaching has fallen away. Philosophy used to teach people that, but that art has now been safely insulated from general experience. People now have the altogether unjustified sense that appearances can be trusted, perhaps because they've been scientifically verified, perhaps because the reality of television is entirely based on appearances. It is necessary to take off the VR glasses, as it were, though it's perfectly possible to die with them on. Enlightenment, though not a function of our own will, similarly isn't an inevitable part of life.
Perhaps we should be concerned about the fact that the resources of the species seem to be increasingly turned to the construction of extravagant machines for cheating on homework and winning raffles. There are already tried-and-true ways of accomplishing these things.
A set of logic gates can be used to process a proposition, i.e., it can tell you what you want to know about a certain proposition by decomposing, processing, and then re-composing the thought. But what we want to know, phrased in terms of a discursive proposition, is not necessarily always the real answer, or the necessary knowledge.
A bit of AI sitting in the middle of a field would harm no one, of course. The problem is not the thing itself as a substance or entity. The danger is in making the existing mechanisms of the world subject to AI control. And since we don't really have a handle on what the mechanism of the industrialized world is, we fear losing control of it. It's like fearing the ability to make a Frankenstein without understanding what he is being made out of, and what form he might take. The Chinese box itself is simply a remarkable automated deterministic abacus; the real difficulty is that people want to use it to control their machines, as they might hitch their wagons to a wild horse, or delegate their roulette bets to a trained monkey.
If a politician demands to be accorded the honors due to a modern Gandhi. it is possibly because he fears that the spirit of Gandhi will testify against him.
--
Separately, one interesting thing about Kraznahorkai's work is his collaborations with Bela Tarr. The film about the fellow who beat the horse in front of Nietzsche is very worthwhile. K is an actor in it as well, I think. I think I read that Tarr is now based in Sarajevo. The diaspora goes in all directions.
There was an interesting below-the-radar moment when Budapest sent a contingent of police, ostensibly for training, to the Bosnian Serb entity at a time when the arrest of the leader was being mooted, and the goal of the exercise turned out to be a possible exfiltration. These lines of affinity and alliance are centuries old. There apparently was a moment at the last NATO summit when the US president turned and high-fived the Turkish president after reading northern Europe the riot act. That moment might linger in a few memories. And then there's the odd saga of the NY mayor, close to the Porte Formerly Known as Sublime, who is now cultivating a relationship with Zog's state to the north, which is very closely aligned.
(Apparently, Zog wasn't mad, he was just having to constantly elude the vengeance killers who were seeking him out in the opera houses of Europe. The vengeance code is still the operative mode of justice in parts of that country, though apparently the church is starting to make inroads on it.)
(End of Joycean political riff.)
Tuned into a webstream of Nabucco right at Va, Pensiero. Indeed. Quomodo in terra aliena...
Actually, I think if I had a foothold on this side of the world, I might be able to do some real work. But as a tourist, I'm a reader, and I watch the goings-on at the theatres and the coffeehouses carefully. Harps slung on the trees for the nonce. (Which is, objectively speaking, a waste of a perfectly good pint.)
Quasi-sesqui-hebdomadal walk into town for dry goods and provisions. Long walk back up to the base of the mountain with a rather heavy ruck. Exhausted. But now there's protein to replenish the energies.
I hear that 'rucking' is now a form of exercise in the city. As always, way ahead of the curve. Started with law casebooks and the types of laptops that a startup in the aughts could afford, and went from there. My German Alpine corps nylon ruck (I've owned at least three or four of these -- the finest inexpensive ruck on the planet) continues to serve me well.
In an age in which religion is not commonly held to be good or necessary, it's probably wise to think for a bit why it has generally been thought to be necessary. It wasn't entirely an imposition. (Pace Westphalia.)
I think you have to do one of two things. Either try with your heart, soul and mind to see the real truth, past the commonly held notions, or in the event, especially when the event involves others, to deal as honestly as you can. (This is, of course, a reflection of another duality.)
If you don't do at least one of those two things, the odds are you're probably going around doing things as a part of something that you wouldn't want to be a part of if you understood what it might be.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html
Quick skim--very interesting. I query the characterization of the Benedictine abbeys as utopian communities expressly raised against the 'logic of accumulation,' though. Some were not exactly Savonarola/Shaker.
There is something dangerous as well in the hypostasis of 'the poor,' perhaps. Not having a lot of things doesn't always affect who it is that one is. And pace the 19th c. social scientists, it's not exactly a coherent or contiguous class.
But, that said, very laudable (co-authored!) document. If you have a lot of things, realizing that some other people don't have a lot of things is a good first step.
And Kraznahorkai takes the Nobel. Bien fait. Mulling completely destroying the careful budgeting, booking a bus to Budapest, ordering a glass or two of unicum, reading an ebook, and taking it from there. Will likely stay at Hans Castorp's largely empty (but pleasant) mountain villa instead, staring out at the snow-covered peaks, newly visible, as the rain and clouds have let up. And, of course, the ebooks. Sufficient is the day. And the ebook.
There was a long interview on YT that I was meaning to watch, but never got past the first ten minutes or so. Apparently, he uses the mental composition method (Edward Albee once said he did the same) for long stretches of text and then records them.
Listening to a true-blue Thomistic homily on truth on the occasion of the feast, I'm struck by the tenuous position of metaphysics. The danger is hypostasis; to glean meaning from the synthesis and relation of imaginary things can lead to a belief that a question has been answered that was never in fact truthfully asked.
The dam broke with pragmatism, but before that, in Kantianism and speculative idealism, before the mind lost faith in its own words for things, and a trust that the relationship between the words and the things was both adequate and possible, some ground was gained. Read the moderns with a dash of the salt that they're so freely flinging into the readings of the old texts. Critique the critique, as my university debate coach used to say. And keep some Kant in your rucksack.
At Oxford, the feast of (proto-doctor) St. Henry Newman. I well remember reading his Notes on the University in Ireland (later re-titled before the syndics set the linotypes) while working part-time at a hardware superstore on the Upper East Side after earning the law doctorate. Seek truth in things, not things in the truth.
The local (regional, peninsular) preference for close, dark, unventilated spaces continues to puzzle. An unfortunate convergence, perhaps with the airtight buildings required by forced-air climate control. I've kept the exercise outside as much as possible, only going to the indoor spaces/gyms when I absolutely needed the weights, but... There has to be a sensibility towards air and light. Perhaps that's what's missing.
Feast of the Prayer-Beads -- on the occasion of Lepanto.
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath ...
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
Some time ago, my country decided to trust the social norm rather than the thing in itself. And I think that was a mistake. There is a solid philosophical grounding for it in pragmatism and the frantic attempts to get a grip on the mind after the waves of speculative idealism passed. (German transcendentalism was seriously discussed as a threat to the republic in some of the legal scholarship of the late 19th c.) And trusting in the alethic aspect of the social norm at the cost of the truth of the idea might be at the root of the present political unrest. (Though both factions in that unrest are very deeply rooted in the state. The list of establishment backers of the present administration is long and deep.)
This isn't just an abstract political idea. It's how life is conducted, from the deciding of political questions to deciding which server at the neighborhood fast-casual restaurant gets enough shift hours to pay the rent. The trust isn't in principles, but in the prevailing social norms. And these norms are associated with powerful industrial mechanisms of wealth creation, yes, but there is a problem if a society has informally decided to dispense with the notion of truth. The cash value of the thought, to use William James' expression, is that those who focus on the idea are sidelined, and eventually excluded from the game, whether it be cooking hash browns, studying law, making theatre, or studying at the university. And since the game is coterminous with social existence, there's no home to go to then. Importantly, the reason the society does this is that it genuinely believes that the social practice leads to a more truthful answer than the idea. And they're wrong about that.
Some fraction of the population would suffice to populate the corporate mechanisms of wealth creation that form the visible fabric of social existence in the both the West and the East. What all involved might be slowly coming to understand, as the political mechanisms begin to fray and fragment, is that the ability to populate these functioning mechanisms leaves unanswered the question of whether the social form shaped by these norms is a just society. And that questions posed by ideas can linger longer than the ideas themselves.
https://youtu.be/KcAaLk0ngWw?si=CWGsYZ8q0wygDOW2
Postprandial -- Dewey lecture at Chicago Law -- interesting. The notion is that there are goods that people would pay to categorically eliminate (e.g., weddings, Barbie dolls), i.e., the commodity ultimately has a negative value, and yet the acceptance rate is high, and people might pay as individuals to acquire the good, given that everyone else is doing so.
The interesting thing for me, just based on what I'm thinking about now, is that it seems to confound the notion of the pragmatist 'cash value' (James) of political and social ideas. In other words, pragmatism says that the real meaning of our shared social speech is that it signals what it is that we're likely to do. Take weddings, for example. If socially, we talk about how wonderful they are, but the individual cash value of that talk is actually that the commodity has a negative value in each particular case, that shared social speech either has an inverse relationship to the actual value placed on the event, or the speech (belief) isn't governed by the individual's private valuation of the institution (object). Perhaps there's an inherent tension between shared speech and values, which are inherently normative (e.g., the village values weddings), and private intentions, which are keyed to actual personal value and intended behavior. (And I don't know that pragmatism easily accounts for the first case.)
This would be a rather good time to have won a lottery. Of course, one would have had to actually buy a lottery ticket or two. Lack of foresight.
The number of gambling parlors in the Balkans is sort of unnerving. Occasionally, you read about a protest against them in a neighborhood. But in some residential areas, there are literally two or three per block. Some say it's a good place to just sit and socialize, have a beer, etc., but that doesn't correspond with what I've seen of the indoor furnishings. My guess is there's a law that says that prohibits open windows and doors, but if you walk around enough, eventually you'll see one or two with a door propped open and the lights on inside. Basically a wall of televisions and monitors, some cafe tables, and a counter or window. There appear to be two types of employees -- usually both on the young side: those who are attractive enough that you might want to give them money, and those who are... persuasive enough that you might end up giving them money. And the folks sit inside, apparently for long stretches.
It's bad form for an exile/expat to moralize about the places he visits, but seeing situations like that does make me want to start a Shakespeare theatre, or strike up a good conversation about Hegel. Without a vision, the people perish. In fairness, I'd probably have the same reaction in many small towns in the American Midwest. (I actually did a Shakespeare tour through the high schools of Appalachia once. Remarkable experience. Gospeleers of the mind, and the classics.)
The most you can ever do is keep the work true. And don't expect folks to place too high a price on it.
There is a list of titles on my machine that I'd really like to read. Perhaps I'll just set all else at naught, set up a chair within reach of the coffee-making devices, and sit there and just read until folks show up with butterfly nets and bailiffs. Honestly tempting. Sort of a modern, ground-level stylite.
But perhaps there's a middle ground.
From my window, I can sometimes see the flocks of sheep being driven to their daily pasture. A few days ago, some kine walked over and lay in the field behind the parking lot. It's quite idyllic, especially if you position the chair so you can't see the dumpster. Not that I have anything against civilized trash collection. In the last city, I walked up to the 12th c. monastery (closed, shops open) along what appeared to be the old road, which had been used for fly-tipping for generations. Morality isn't a benefit of civilization -- it's a prerequisite.
And tomorrow, the first Monday in October. Will have to tune in to see what shenanigans the current politics are prompting at 1 First St. Spittoons being flung, newbie (US for 'puisne') justices fleeing into the curtains.
The back of the Scotus building is very unheimlich. You have the chambers windows on the upper floors, but they look out onto a sort of suburban, run-of-the-mill Americana street, as opposed to the usual urban landscape. Very, very uncanny.
If I were to head back states-side, I suppose the salto mortale to the mountaintop would be to land in NYC or LA in a position to reinvigorate myself by actually doing theatre, but the cost of living, and the fact that both places are dominated by the same professional networks that I hit a bit of a brick wall with before the JD likely mean that those doors would be closed, at least to start with. The second scenario would be either a law job or a survival job near a large research library that I had access to, so I could continue the present work on some level. The third scenario, largely recognizing the difficulties of the first two, would be very humble quarters in the far upper Midwest: Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. near modest libraries to which I had access. (Minnesota might be good for that, as their public system has interlibrary rights within the state universities.)
To be clear, all of these plans would involve some real difficulty, thanks to certain specific headwinds. The choice is probably whether the difficulty is to be characterized by the salto mortale to what is likely a rigged game, but still proximate to the art -- or the long, difficult journey to humble winter quarters and a supply of books that, while it might not be optimal, would at least be sufficient.
On the other hand, something interesting might appear in the interval.
"Events, dear boy, events..."
sunday morning -- latin mass on youtube
The church is of the world. And does the work of the world, and has a comportment to things in the world as an already-understood part of the world. But in its worldly relations, there is also sacrament, which has one meaning for those in the world, and perhaps another for an unworldly passerby.
Fear not to enter his courts in the slenderness
Of the poor wealth thou wouldst reckon as thine
Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness,
These are the offerings to lay on his shrine.
These, though we bring them in trembling and fearfulness.
He will accept for the name that is dear
Mornings of joy give for evenings of tearfulness,
Trust for our trembling, and hope for our fear
"Beauty of Holiness" (Munsell)
Pulaski Day
Pulaski day Mass and parade in the city. I recall, before setting out on the present peregrination, going over to the altar of Częstochowa at St. Pat's, also with the icon of Kolbe to the side. I envisioned a trip to the ancestral homelands, meditating with the icons in the churches in the afternoon, working and reading in the mornings and evenings. And a peregrination did, or perhaps has, come to pass. But circumstances took me much further south, in the contested regions, with peoples very different than my country and my ancestral background. The circumstances have not always been idyllic, but I'd like to think that I've made as much use of the circumstances as I could. Instead of the country churches, kefir above the market while reading philosophy on the Kindle. Instead of the chandeliers of the theatres of northern Europe, rooms in which a different sort of work was going on.
But destinations, and this is very important, have the character of being a different sort of experience. You must expect a transposition of things when you arrive. The truths and places in which you began will seem to be at a distance, and a different vision will be set before you. Enter upon the event.
Some years, especially before the high-security pens arrived, I would find a place opposite the cathedral for the Pulaski parade. I would watch the faces of the marchers as they arrived at the cathedral, with the prelates arrayed in front and flags waving. The expressions on their faces were quite remarkable.
Clearly, today has not found me in the sunlit uplands of the mind, despite the fact that the recent clouds and rain here appear to have abated for a bit. Perhaps it's the shift to margarine from butter with brunch. (Long story -- needed to arrive with foodstuffs at the end of the journey, and it travels easier.)
I have no desire to march on the Winter Palace, as that's just a roundabout way to try to rule from a Winter Palace. Live simply, so that others may simply live. I have my own Garden of the Incapable Administrator, and the sword of Cincinnatus is plowing the fields of the mind (barring deracination). But securing sufficient means for simplicity can be a challenge in some cultural contexts. Excess is much easier, given the economies of scale.
And this isn't an idle question. Those who don't play along are not infrequently simply thrown out onto the street to die. J.K. Galibraith, in his diaries, in discussing the Indian universities that he visited, recalled the situation at the American state schools in the Midwest (and not merely as an exercise in Ivy League superiority). Go along with things, or head back to the farm. The university is a very old structure composed of many levels of folks with interwoven rights and responsibilities. But a technological research institution has, or at any rate perceives, little need for constitutive liberal freedoms. These questions are real, and presently insistent. Those millions of folks you see on the park benches of the West aren't all easily explained by simple stories about the way the world is.
Avoiding people who work and speak in a craven or shallow way isn't simply a question of personalities or style. A person who is craven or dismissive, and seemingly not that careful a thinker, doesn't act according to a lack of reason, they act according to the simplest form of the prevailing social discourse. The way things seem to be within the prevailing discourse is occasionally not the way things are, and in bad times (both material and spiritual), the distance between the common speech and what might be called the more authentic appearance grows larger.
It is important to deal with people who demonstrate a capacity to judge the social forms that make it so easy for them to understand the world.
'Things are seldom as they seem -- skim milk masquerades as cream..."
Based entirely on the half-decade of experience after the MFA, I still have this rock-solid, utterly naive hope that if I can get to the open union casting calls in NYC, the opportune event will happen. The lure of the union hiring hall. Hope springs eternal.
Actually made a point of doing just that during some of the interesting times in recent years.
After the conservatory masters, the theatre where I trained actually offered me a job in the back office -- which was a bit like taking someone who had been training for D-Day for three years and asking them if they'd like to head to New Jersey instead. I took it seriously and thought about it. But in the end, after some discreet inquiries, I could tell that it was thought to be employment in the machine, not a path to work in the art.
And to the city I went.
One of the dangers of keeping a notes-and-queries commonplace like this is that people might expect that I would say dark things in bad times and bright words when in the sunlit uplands, but that's really not the case. Perhaps even the opposite. Were a meteorite to head directly for me with legal processes scrawled on it that would translate to certain financial ruin while telegrams arrived from all sides telling me of unfortunate events in others' lives, I would probably muse on some random Greek verb, or mull a line from a play.
Our physical bodies exist so that our minds may exist in freedom. Determination defines; freedom expresses.
There is something peculiar about the character of the anti-war protests over the last year or two. A few generations ago, those raising concerns over, say the bombing of Dresden, wouldn't have gone out and joined the Wagner society and walked around in lederhosen. For one thing, they would have understood that it would have cost them some credibility as Americans raising concerns about American policy.
Troping of the colors
https://www.thetimes.com/article/ad6cd2c3-fdf1-458b-91e0-d6c8883c67f4
https://www.reddit.com/r/flags/comments/1nrgwse/usa_flag_changed_on_wikipedia/
Within the tricoleur scheme that flourished in Europe and elsewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, red seems to reliably stand for populism. (Some interesting historical contexts for this.) Which makes this kerfuffle sort of interesting.
Interesting.
https://nova.rs/kultura/odrzan-sastanak-ansambla-drame-narodnog-s-bajicem/
The first show that I saw in Belgrade on the last visit was an adaptation of Tin Drum -- I assumed that the octavo-ish leather bound things the cast was waving during the curtain call were copies of the novel. On the contrary, they were their passports. There were a lot of marches in the city centered around the universities (including one very large one, several hundred thousand marchers heading towards a place a half-block from my rooms -- I stayed inside that day), and at the theatres (at least the JDP and the city's national theatre), the actors would make signs of political support during the curtain calls. The audience would sometimes join in, shouting political slogans.
Usually, the items waved were passports -- sometimes the actual ones, as some had passports from other nations (or at least of different colors), sometimes, I could tell from the action just offstage that a stack of passports was being handed out in an ad hoc way. (On at least one occasion, two folks had to share.) I observed at least one conspicuous abstention from the practice, but he made a point of forcefully applauding the others. As things progressed, the actors sometimes brought out a large placard with an RFID code. (As I carry no cell, and the switching code masks make mental parsing too difficult, I have no idea where that semiosis led.)
I have some notes -- might do a longer piece on that.
October 1 -- Incipit Michaelmas term in the courts of England and Wales, and with it the legal year. The Michaelmas goose, fat from the harvest stubble, the barristers returning for the London season, the municipalities and unincorporated associations electing their new officers before the winter. The imaginative appurtenances to the judicial branch of the empire of the mind.
Apparently, the walk into town for groceries and back will take the better part of the working day, so I'll focus on compact foods, and try to minimize the trips in. Stopped and talked to a shuttle bus driver from one of the larger hotels to ask if folks from other hotels could pay a few pieces-of-eight in exchange for passage, but he (quite understandably) seemed to understand neither English, nor non-linguistic expressions based on my English thoughts -- apparently grocery acquisition will require the hebdomadal constitutional.
Quite idyllic. Flocks of sheep on either side of the road, and the sheepdogs here, admittedly based on a small sample-size, are much more pacific than the mastiffs with chains and PVC pipes around their necks in the mountains to the north. The low bleats of the sheep, the thunking tones of the copper bells, and the cries and whistles of the shepherds. In the evening gloaming, no less. Quite romantic. And the massive mountain above the road is always good for a conversation or two.
"My way is certain, I am not mistaken in following it."
(Lines painted on the wall of a church somewhere)
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