Bit of a cold, rainy day, as the rhetoric might have indicated.
In fairness, there's a bit of daylight between the proposition that district soviets should be erected in a wave of partisan fury against the kulaks, and the notion that there should be a social mechanism that ensures that people who object to prevalent corruption aren't perpetually barred from employment and left on the street to die. Sort of, you know, a middle way.
The fact that the society seems prosperous and the people visible within it seem content only establishes that things are well for those people in particular. It seems intuitive that industrial prosperity and hidden (or vanished) populations, large or small, have a causal relationship. As I once asked myself as I walked around an idyllic upstate vacation house for a society of priests, "who am I not seeing, and what is their relationship to this, and to me?"
I stand corrected. The Khachaturian much more soulful tonight. Very interesting.
Though the juxtaposition with the first piece on the program is still a bit like the scene in the Russian film Train Station for Two when the melon-seller asks the pianist to play something with a bit more ethnic bounce to it.
The NY Phil has been doing this for a few years -- I remember stopping by a few times before heading to southern Europe.
I'll actually take a bit of the karmic credit for the notion -- on winter nights, I would sometimes walk through LC and stop in at the Met Opera box office to watch a bit on the lobby monitors. Always listen at the doors.
Warmer evening than yesterday. Tourists swarming midtown. Getting a clearer handle on Dewey's logic at the research library. Very much looking forward to discovering why I've been doing that.
Part of me wonders if I caused this latest shipwreck by needing to get back to a research library with collections in English, an inexpensive gym, and cheap, healthy food, all three of which are a bit scarce in the Balkans.
If that is the case, and I somehow wished this on myself, I'm definitely going to need to have a firm word with myself on the matter, given the other crushing difficulties incurred.
Unrelatedly, the streets here are incensed with marihuana, especially in the afternoon and evening. Doubtlessly, small children at the intersections inhaling intoxicating amounts of the drug. Not to mention the odd querulous Jedi.
Hm. Stoppard's died. An absence that looks to go on for some time.
Always good, if slightly mystifying, to see a good artist find favor with the powers that be. Did his Artist Descending a Staircase both at university and in summerstock in Massachusetts. Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center gave me an entire political aesthetic, down to the cut of the suits.
There would have been plays from the machine in any event. But he went beyond the form, and made them creations of the thing that creates the form for itself as something to live in. And so those of us downstream, waiting in our small theatres for the hand-me-downs from the big city, got to play in some thoughtful and witty pieces that didn't already have to be so when they were made. Many thanks for that.
Chilly evening.
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Scene: A country house, brick, ~17th c. A row of pear trees line the wicket fence and gate. It is evening.
A lone FIGURE approaches the gate, unlatches it, and enters the close. CLOSE IN on the scratch of the pebbles underfoot. Disregarding the old bell-pull, he pushes a lit button next to the door frame, and the doorway lights come on automatically with the chime, heard distantly in the house. The VISITOR waits a moment or two, and then ST. PETER arrives, incongruously dressed in full biblical fig of white flowing robes. He seems neither particularly interested in the event, nor flippant about it, as if watching a wager on the table that might yet go either way. Long stare, Pause.
ST. PETER: (Staring at the visitor's knapsack and broad-brimmed hat.) Yes. Well. We have no idea how you managed to pull that off. The Scotch is in the library. We'll talk in the morning.
###
A propos of nothing, I've become fascinated with John Dewey's formal logic. Which is a bit like a Roman gladiator taking an interest in Pythagorean esoterica on his walk from the robing rooms to the amphitheatre (the theatre doubled, the lack of σκενε, the absence of angle), or Eugene Aram trying to get a hold on the decimalization of the coinage while being led to his execution. But life is what happens when other people are trying to kill us, I suppose. And there is a long arc there back to a current project of mine. I circulated a propos to a few low-key European schools, hoping to do a Ph.D. around it, but the last of those refusals came in recently.
Dewey is the great progressive and public intellectual, bridging the end of the long 19th c., and elevating the public tone to the middle of the 20th c. And he stood for what America was to the wold in those days, the naive realist with wealth and influence. But he's not writing from a blank slate.
I have this sort of New Yorker cartoon in my mind of him showing up to a meeting of the Boston philosophers of the Metaphysical Club, and profusely apologizing for the degree to which he was still under the spell of German philosophy, specifically Hegelian speculative idealism. "Oh," says one of them, perhaps Holmes, casting a quick look at the others "I don't think that will be too much of a problem..."
Among many other factors, he apparently found it very hard to publish things when writing using that vocabulary. So he shifted the words, but perhaps not the underlying sense -- the lingering deposit of faith, or perhaps it was just bred in the bone, and would not out of the flesh.
But what held him in the state of that problem? Why not fashion new Georgics, or transpose folk songs up past their Transdanubain seventh, up to... Whatever there was when there weren't other things in the way.
What story does he decide to take a position within, rather than write as if no story other than the one that he was writing at the moment held power over him? Because this is the essence of metaphysics -- not the diorama of incorporeal things, but the small arrow pointing to a certain spot within it: "You are here." The metaphysician clings to this description of the world that he is within because it gives his speech meaning and reality.
Start with Hume and Locke. They point out that rather than the world being a list of things that are, each of us receives the world through sense-impressions, and creates a sensibility while these impingements echo within us. Then Kant writes to point out that the world didn't give us the sense of what these things were -- it was our minds that understood each thing to be a certain thing. After Kant, Fichte subjectivizes this force that composes what the world is, and points out how it can be strong, and how it can be weak, Hegel points out that this thing that understands the world is doing different things in every age, with history itself being advanced by the self-realization of these souls. But then the shifting spectres of this idealism (the belief that it is the idea of the thing that gives the thing its reality) caused some people to wonder if we hadn't lost the firm grip on the mechanisms of understanding that Kant had given us. One group of the neo-Kantians set the doctrine forward as a refined epistemic; another looked to incorporate psychology, the understanding of what the human mind was, with this explanation of what it did. Meanwhile, Darwin sets the world alight with his story of evolution, and the hard sciences begin to tell the story of creation in that light.
Back in the States, Dewey begins by studying Hegel, grounding his understanding in the truth of the idea, rather than the distinct sense perception, or some great list of things that are, and why they are that way. So he has a sense that we are caught up in history, and our ideas serve history by giving it some substance, although not as a clear understanding of the moment as history. Darwin's influence was felt on these shores too, and so this Hegelian speculative idealism gains a scientific grounding. The changes in the world are proceeding according to a certain logic, although this logic is not merely veiled from us, but incomprehensible within what we think to be acts of comprehension. But there is a freeing aspect to this, because our ideas can advance this logic simply by being themselves, and not as explicit explanations of what the present moment is, sub specie aeternitatis. Our rationality can operate within history to advance history, not by undestanding its cunning, but by observing the things that conduct towards self-realization and social progress, and those that are retrograde to it. And idealism gives him that freedom, because there is no realism demanding a precise description of the mind-independent event of objective history.
Now jump back to the European debate. Kant's epigones had much trouble with the thing in itself, the inability to understand the essence of the object. We, instead, create our reality from appearances. Science and Darwinism implicitly suggests that the true description of the thing doesn't need to reach to its essence, because we receive the truth of the thing in understanding its empirical nature and its place in the story of things by scientific explanation. Jacobi had objected to the thing in itself, as without it, he could not enter the system, and with it, he could not remain in the system. But perhaps this was how Kant's propaedeutic was meant to function. It conducted us to the limits of our understanding, and kept us focused on those limits, rather than thinking that we had a more complete understanding through our "F=MA"-type reasoning.
So this learned naivete of Dewey's lands in a certain relation to this debate. The thing in itself, the essence of the object, he, like the other post-Kantians, leaves in Kant's sepulchre. Instead, he recognizes that scientific understanding can allow us to participate in this worldmaking. But we do so behind the veil of idealism, our ideas being merely chimerical forms that arise within us as the human race negotiates this undescribed and undescribable path, This, I think, is the important bit. The object has us in its power, and this has to to with the thing itself, but we, instead of straining our understanding towards that aporia, seek to become complicit with these forces. By helping along the evolution and the changes in things, we are operated upon by these things that we don't understand, and there is no obligation to do the impossible and attempt to understand them.
This resonates for me with Dewey, and with his time. But I think there might have been some important doctrines buried in that Koenigsberg sepulture, and perhaps, now that progress and the Enlightenment have shown us their dangers, perhaps it's time to go back to Kant, again.
Saprere aude, as Hamann quoted in his letter to Kant. Few know that it was the mystic of the North, romantic and student of the culture and historicism, who introduced that ancient notion to the conversation.
The month and a fortnight at the mountain in Bulgaria was consciously a sort of 'recuperation behind the lines' time, a country house with some novels in it to repair to for a bit. And then the journey back into the thick of things. I seem to have survived the transit, but the bellum omnium contra me is wearing a bit thin, especially in winter. At least in the trenches, I wouldn't have been convinced the Kaiser was gunning for me personally. (Though I'm not saying the idea wouldn't have occurred to me.)
So once again, it's a situation that shouldn't be, and the ways that things that shouldn't be happen inside the always already-understood world are interesting... in an academic sense.
When you have to head back into the abyss, something in the mind reacts very strongly against that prospect. In the event, though, precisely the same part of the soul that had risen so strongly against the prospect rises against the event itself.
Puritan non-Christmas in the great city of the age.
Honestly taken aback after a few years in less commercialized societies. The greed spell isn't a good look for humanity, spiritually speaking. When the English theatre became commercical rather than courtly in the mid 16th c., there was an abundance of wealth on display. Greed was thought to be good, largely because it offered a power structure distinct from the monarchy and the aristocracy. (In fairness, the same principle made hand-wrought lace very popular.)
Anti-Catholicism had much to do with this as well. The ideal virtue was no longer that of the the poor and austere monk. Of course, there were some complications to this as well. The global orders in the church (OP, OFM, etc.), precisely because of their global presence and connection to Rome, were more closely linked to trade than many of the national churches. I grew up thinking that the commerce of the holiday was the secular error, while the church preserved the spiritual truth, but the reality was much more complicated. St Nick was a trader form the beginning, patron to the commercial interests after the translation of the relics to Bari. Christianity is a transactional faith, or at least more transactional than many of the others. As a result, there are modern hospitals, sanitation, and electrical service more often in these Christian trading nations, and many of the others look to them with envy.
But that's the culture, and I'm considering more the microcosm of the individual souls. Listening to these people, and watching them, I see the deformation that greed causes, the same greed that fuels the engines of commerce as they desire the latest goods. But in the case of the individual, the manner of living will not serve that individual when they have their existence within eternity rather than temporal progression. And basing the whole calculus on happiness and freedom of the marketplace has made for a very craven public discourse.
Happiness must have some connection to the things that are going on. If you are happy while there are bad things going on, you've simply shifted your perspective to include good things not presently in view. So to make personal happiness the goal of public policy means that there must be something going on that is, however loosely, associated with this condition of happiness. The usual way of describing the civic order is located in these things going on. America cuts to the chase, and says happiness is the good. But the difficulty is that it is possible for bad people to be happy when doing bad things.
I waver back and forth as to whether to categorize my experiences of recent years as political or not. Physically, the reality of daily life is often the equivalent of gulag life in the stories about other countries. I don't think that I will ever be able to explain the things that have happened to me, largely because my focus is on describing the way things are. When bad things happen, they simply get in the way, and I do my best to move past them as quickly as possible, rather then using them as fodder for the thought.
Ultimately, you must try to be good. The reason for that is that, even though there is a chance that good and bad are illusory, absolutely everything else outside of good and bad is inherently capable of being described in more than one way, and we can't be sure that we are riding the right horse, as William James (I think) had it. Although the mechanisms of industrial prosperity make for an abundance of goods, there are a lot of people leaving very difficult lives, and some of them are in places where one wouldn't think a difficult life was the order of the day. So you must think that you are doing good, and you must think that you are speaking the truth, or you will never be sure that you were even attempting to do the right thing.
Eavesdropping on a concert at the NY Phil Jumbotron. Interesting juxtaposition of a very thoughtful piece with the Khachaturian piano concerto. Brings to mind a moment in the old Russian film Train Station for Two...
https://youtu.be/bUya5DBvw_g?si=fbUJlldBb_LXKim1&t=4907
In fairness, K is very useful for orchestras in the second world -- crowd-pleasing, and not requiring the band to play a tune beyond itself.
Eve of Puritan non-Christmas. Thick clouds, very rainy night last night. Usual tourist hordes. Perhaps my imagination, but the faces in the crowd seem to be much more domestic, compared to other years.
The city seems very evil today. Uptick in the number of rude and oblivious comments from visiting passerby, an old toothless hag cackled noisily at me as I walked past, that sort of thing. Tourists literally swarming the tables of the research library.
Sloughing on.
Surprisingly warm in the city. Hordes of midlanders pacing the streets aimlessly, looking to participate in the much-bruited heaven hereabouts. As it turns out, it's just another city, although the confluence of millions in this context of liberal democracy does make things interesting. But it's nothing about the place itself. The charm of this Camelot is in the ways of the people, not the magic circle Merlin traced on the ground.
One meaning of "ground" closely associated with the philosophical one is the background whiting or umbering (?) of the canvas prior to painting. The shared social life operates as a ground, not merely a background presumption, but an active, epistemic basis for saying what any given thing is. If the ground were to be different, the painted sunset would have to be different.
The ground of social interaction in this country is highly mediated. The sensibility that I hear around me couldn't govern a New England town based on regular town meetings -- it's largely constructed from television, and allows people to encounter each other within an industrial mechanism in a sufficiently voluble manner. Which is no great loss, perhaps -- except for the fact that this occasionally artificial social mind is, historically speaking, what we use to identify what it is that things are in the world. This epistemic function, perhaps consequently, has been relegated to the media of the society -- we rely on the news/entertainment discourse to tell us what things are, and how these things function together -- but the common social mind, now largely an artificial creation of the media-driven society, still operates as a check on the things that we're told. Whether or not they ring true.
The nature of this three-way interaction is important, perhaps. For me to be convinced that A is X, I no longer have to have a sort of Habermasian sphere of discourse appear in which A is X -- the cultural mediation simply announces the fact. The critical bit is that the artificial social mind, which operates as the functional check on the claims of the media, doesn't have to concur with this proposition; it simply has to not reject this proposition. So it can have no commitments that are inconsistent with A being X, which is a very different thing from collectively determining that A, by rights, is X.
Perhaps.
Interesting bit at morning Mass -- arrived from the gym at precisely the start time as usual. (A change in the gym opening time a few years back meant I had to shift to the parish, as I couldn't make it across town for the morning informal pontifical at the big house.)
Smelled something burning as I walked down the side aisle -- some gaffers tape on one of the votive candle units was smouldering. I knew they had had a similar event that resulted in much damage recently, so once I determined that there was no staff member or senior parishioner type to be advised, I tamped it down and made sure it was out before turning my attention to the Mass of the Faithful. Alerted a sacristan to it afterwards, noticed that she spoke to one of her friends, and I then observed that friend conferring with a staff type, so I went over there to make sure word had filtered down. Lines of communication at parishes can be a bit medieval at times.
Hardly the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, but probably enough to make the insurance types ornery.
I do miss eavesdropping on the UK academic chapel. Extraordinarily useful homiletics, compared to the US mine run for the daily liturgies. The point is to think about these things, not to have a thoughtful expression while listening to them in the conventional manner.
Last night, Handke's Moravian Night. (And there is something about the ending that makes reading it in the course of an evening worthwhile.) In fairness, I can't vouch that everything I read was in the text, or that I read everything in the text -- narrative tends to get a bit floaty at 3AM. Started in WSQ, them moved a bit north.
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Frankly, jumping into this adventure in winter gives new meaning to the word "exhaustion."
And, you know, there was nothing inherently wrong with that ex ante level of meaning. It was perfectly sufficient.
During the Balkan nomadry (which was actually the second trip), I was able to secure reasonable (though extremely basic) accommodations, find and prepare nutritious food, and the extremely inexpensive and available tickets for theatre, music, etc. meant that I could engage culturally a bit, which is what I do. (And there's a book of criticism now, whatever its virtues.) The thing I most valued in these places, though, was the explicit civilizational context. The social understanding is set forth much more clearly there, and much of it is centered in the universities and academic culture.
And now I'm back in the initial scheme -- rather firmly (and mysteriously) excluded from the theatremaking (conservatory masters, a decade of work), practice of law (top-tier school, good grades, two bar exams), and the academy (thousands of undergraduate papers graded, 300 pp. dissertation, faculty refuses to schedule a defense).
So, as against those claiming that "whatever you can get away with doing" is a fair means of building a culture, I have to point out that it rarely results in the survival of the worthiest, or even the most qualified. And without a civilizational context, there's not really a "base camp" to retreat to. The only option is to keep working and thinking, because that's what I do, but it increasingly looks like even the basic existence of internal exile to a place like Siberia won't be possible. Once outside the scheme of things, there is no means of survival. (Especially as the social safety net in this culture is being used for permanent structural and political support for some populations.)
And, following the structure of the thought, the missing element most needed is the present civilizational context that would allow a foothold for understanding the situation. The most that the craven discourse would offer is that I've lost some sort of a game, or gambled and lost by the simple fact of existing.
It's less rage against the dying of the light than pointing out with a sort of mute disbelief that the order of things was unconcerned with light from the beginning. And the important aspect of this is that it's thought to be an epistemic virtue -- the making of all things new.
Light, more light!
Must expand my culinary horizons past baby carrots and tofu blocks. (I made it a point to eat abundantly in the mountains, foreseeing precisely this possibility.) Fortunately the discount biscuit shops have stepped into the breach: $1.49 for five name-brand (i.e., not filler) granola protein bars. (Went back for a second box.)
Stopped into the Philharmonic jumbotron for Sibelius 2 last night. The notion seems to have progressed since i last was in these climes. Three rows of chairs, lobby mostly quiet. But the difference between European halls and US city halls is discomfiting sometimes. Less a cultural stasis for the music than an authoritarian controlled space for acting as one acts at a concert. In fairness, the toughs lurk in the shadows in both courts, ready to provide any social sanction thought necessary.
I had heard S2 many years ago here at an open rehearsal, and what the conductor (??) then brought out was just what I was missing here. These two melodies at the end, both the obvious one and the other one, have to appear like massive ships in the foggy night. Some inattention to that section in rehearsal, perhaps, as there seemed to be some rhythmic skittering underneath at those points, the quieter themes sounding more like fragments of radio transmissions in Arctic shipping than an underlying coherent logic. I'm an utter amateur, of course -- that's just the way it seemed when listening to a live feed piped into the lobby (and mixed a bit too far to the bass) underscored by the nearby cafe and the conversations of passerby.
Feast of Christ the King -- yes, he's at least that. Else, someone else might be. More and more I see these religious doctrines as attempts to identify and describe the immanent truth, no less true for that, but human words can't exhaust human experience. And yet, it us the only purchase we have on things.
I don't think it's an accident that John Dewey's work has been rather unceremoniously and ineluctably placed in front of me just at the point at which I am increasingly surrounded by evidence that the social experiment on these shores has gone wrong, perhaps incorrigibly so -- and not at all in the context of abstract propositions and evidence; the event is to be drama, not treatise.
"Where the danger is, there the saving force grows."
To the extent I learn things from social interactions (which, tbh, is not the best way of learning things), I keep coming back to a fundamental duality of imitative life versus alethic life. If you're doing whatever you're doing because it is an inherently meaningful thing for you to do, I think there might be some danger there. We populate the world of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, massgoers, coffeehouse denizens, what you will, from a sort of abstract social command. The social deontic governs. But there are also people who use these forms of social interaction to do things. Their behavior is regulated, not constituted, by the social deontic.
------
Still on the thought of transubstantiation as the reversal, not the consummation, of sacrifice. In the old sacrifice, which formed a large part of the social form of religion for millennia, you began with living animals, and ended with bits of food. With the sacred meal of the Christians, we begin with the bits of food, and reverse the process.
Hm. Apparently, the good grocery, in addition to making the good, cheap 100% peanut paste, also makes a form that's only 90% peanuts, with the usual fillers of oils and sugars, and this is in a very similar jar, and is occasionally mis-shelved with the other. S'alright, perhaps I needed the sugars and the oils in the diet.
#discernmentofgroceries
My guess is that one reason things are the way that they are on these shores because people no longer believe in accountability to a final judgment on the soul. And they are right to say that they have a justified belief that the proposition as they recite it is false in the manner in which they say that it is false. But the reality of final judgment, which is only partially expressed by determination and negation in our varied understanding of the event and reduction of it to language, is nonetheless sufficiently true that they would amend their lives, if they understood.
Relatedly, there is some obligation on the fellow who actually tries the locked doors to the stairway to a better life. If most never even try, there is some obligation vis a vis the certain knowledge acquired, and more, the encouragement to keep trying the doors. Else, we're in Plato's cave sans Plato.
Becalmed day. Mass, quick meditation, walked to the research library, making a quick stop at the discount biscuit shop for a couple 10 oz bags of pitas. Novella of the AM (still meandering through late in the PM) The Return of Munchausen. Modern Russian, a bit dark, and anecdotes a bit attenuated from the originals, but still enjoyable.
And then to the work -- the mind played a trick it has sometimes played before in low-rest, high-stress times, and simply refused to engage when given access to the text. Like working through the different gears of a transmission until you find the teeth that will provide some resistance. A very low gear for much of the day.
On the upside, the books are much stronger, the food much healthier (trademark carton of tofu, young carrots, etc.), gym much better equipped, as compared to wandering the Balkans prior to last Friday. A few traditionally important creature comforts missing, but slogging through that, and if I can just get the mind to catch hold a bit more strongly, I might be able to make a good thing or two out of this odd interstitial rough landing.
Again, the nation's difficulties seem to entirely be from too much prosperity in the middle bits of the population. A far higher number is above poverty (see the second Picketty book), but this freedom from want has prompted some strange wants indeed. In any society, you really do need a comprehensive notion of what it is to be a human being, and not just someone who has managed to survive the ex-post-undescribed culture and civilization. There has to be a civilizational context -- a shared notion of being with others, and this shared notion gives the rule to smaller judgments within the social life.
On today's Gospel -- I've never thought of it, but the "okay, now slay my enemies" at the peroration might have a hermeneutic function. If those left behind when the leader went off to the foreign court to get the crown had all stayed inside with doors locked for fear of the others, perhaps they wouldn't have enough social cachet to carry off the massacre.
Odd evening last night, walked down to the park piers in the West Village just past NYU -- usually a peaceful place. But almost completely deserted, on not that chilly of an evening. Will resist the temptation to the long journey in the evening hours -- walking can use up the evening hours rather speedily. Not to mention the dragons.
Odd day. Last night was calm, wind tempered, sheep safely grazing in the 40F weather, etc. But I had to stop in for a rare Sbux, as the coat needed some stitches before the night, and the unusual influx of coffee at that hour made for some peculiarities of the digestive system. (In fairness, three venti cups at the end of the night might have been pushing it.)
Then gym, Mass, meditation (keeping it under a quarter-hour, this is no time to start deepening the practice), laundry. Then a quick couple hours of dozing in the park under a tree (civilized -- the rule of thumb is that a 19th c. British fiction character might reasonably have been described as doing so), with a strange dream about computer record-keeping systems and the last country I stayed in over in the Balkans.
National dreams seem to have a peculiar force with me. Perhaps I'm a Hegelian. In the utmost extremity of a past winter, I recall coming to consciousness (from cumulative lack of sleep, presumably) as I paced the streets, earnestly seeking the depot of the national rail system, in one case French British, in another, German. Not quite at that level of intensity quite yet, although O Sacred Head Surrounded was on autoplay in my head as I walked to the research library after the nap.
Perhaps I'll wake to find that I'm actually an acting teacher in LA, and this was all a dream conjured by an alien species to give me some sense of their culture, and time to practice the flute. In which case, these "humans," as they're called, are a real piece of of work.
In terms of how badly crashing hard out of the Balkans could have gone last Friday, I should be grateful.
I am grateful.
Bitterly cold evening in the city. He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but those of us with a coat or two are thought to be capable of rising to the occasion. Which was eventually the case. But it took some time before the shift from 'wow, this is difficult' to 'I will prevail, come what may.'
"If the river has to be crossed, it doesn't matter if the water is warm or cold." (Teilhard du Chardin, SJ)
At morning Mass -- καιροσ -- I'm sure it's occurred to everyone else in the Christian world, and I'm just late to the table, but the sacrifice of material food that becomes a living form precisely reverses the act of sacrifice that takes a living form and changes it to material food. A response to sacrifice itself -- closing the door.
Yesterday, the pontifical, as usual when I'm in the city, and then evening Mass at the west side parish, which has a fair national profile as a progressive church. I realized with some dismay as the services progressed that neither faction of the church has retained a vocabulary that opens the Grail. And they're in utter conflict politically. Colossal new murals in the cathedral of local police, ambulance staff, and firefighters, commingling with angels. In scale, outpaces not merely any other decoration, but also runs rampant over the architecture. I remember a few rectors ago, there was a reaction against the (quite good) slightly abstract bas-reliefs of E.A. Seton and one other figure, which were removed, and the rector put in a porcelain Italian-bespoke liturgical realism bas-relief which (fortunately) vanished soon later. That was the same push that replaced the booklets with missals (the one now used), but didn't calculate the depth of the missal brackets on the pews. "Which one of you would attempt to conquer a kingdom without sitting down to count the cost..."
Difficult slog. Focusing on focusing the mind to work level despite all the whatnot.
Another dietary dilemma -- enormous can of artificially flavored crisps for 0.87 clearance. Purchased. In wartime, one feeds the troops with what's at hand and not explicitly prohibited. And one hopes that a lifetime of generally speaking nutrition-focused choices will allow for the occasional spells of living off the land. (The land in this case being the industrial wasteland of the processed food industry, and their food products that I'd usually just walk past in the aisle, even on clearance.)
Moral dilemma of the morning. At the discount biscuit shop (the days when a truckload of McVities Digestives arrived are still written in golden memory), it was either the usual flour and water only pitas, or an Indian Ritz-type cracker. But the latter was twice the weight and many more calories. I'm not sure if this was a rational decision or mandamus from the muscle tissues after a hard hour of lifting, but, reader, the crackers were chosen.
In a city I rather like, at a coffee chain I rather like. Sufficient is the day.
I finally figured out that the prompting, almost like a voice, asking me if I was happy was in fact sort of raising the proposition, so that I could consider it. Shades of Faust, concededly -- "stay, thou art so..." and one step further than Kantian pure disinterest, perhaps, but it's a good suggestion. My life is constant work to create the possibility of worthwhile work, but it is good to be happy when even that first kind of work goes well. Despite the wolf at the door under a big sign that says "Danger: Wolf at Door" rented from Wolf, Inc. on strict terms, with full arbitration waiver granting that all claims are to be settled by a wolf.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's someone at the door.
To create and sustain a platform for the free and productive functioning of its own mind. This is the biological task of the flesh, and it is also the task of the fleshy organism in the world.
"When the water is muddy, I wash my cloak. When the water is clean, I wash my head covering."
The notion of a secular monastic outpost and menial work in the upper Midwest with access to research libraries seems to be the wisest course. Steering for it. though there will be some roundabout routes taken, and the journey might be long.
Had I more time and better boots, I would have been in the mountains here every day. As it was, the weight bench and the table with a laptop were the usual course of the day.
Up until 3AM going over proofs and final editing for the latest manuscript, another compilation piece. The move to wordpress was precisely with this end in mind.
Have sent it off, hopefully it will make it through Napoleon's lines in time for the Christmas book fairs.
After the events of the last generation, and given the present state of the country, it might not be a mistake for those without a real role in things to stay away from the homeland for a bit, perhaps for a very long duration. Widespread, largely undescribed corruption can be fought by those with some sway, but the wise commoner who has taken a few knocks from the corruption might be well advised to seek safer shores.
The Roman generals of the famous epitaph didn't despair of the Republic. But they were generals, and hoping for the good of the republic, and thinking and writing along those lines can either be done on the cold streets of the cities, or in a more civilized place.
It would, of course, be a mistake to keep harping on the surprisingly long list of people and institutions who seem to have operated with a surprising level of dishonesty in matters relating to my interests in recent years. Such habits of complaint make the mind grow small and fearful.
At the same time, though, one feels an almost scientific obligation to report the extraordinary coincidence. Perhaps it's a sign of a new form of matter. The anti-alethic electromagnetic state.
#saturdayradio
Odd to discover that PHC took its name from the cemetery in Moorhead. I only accidentally ended up in Fargo/Moorhead (though it happened more than once), and I've walked past that cemetery many times on my way to the library in the small Lutheran college, or run past it before dawn on my circle of the town during the pandemic years. Lines in a country churchyard, perhaps.
It is said that the Christian church is like a hospital. There is an inherent duality to any Christian society, I think. The social forms and political powers that would exist absent Christianity exist within Christianity, and the faith does its work both on these people and on the social forms in the society. So a completely Christian society is not a righteous society, but a society in which the precepts of the faith are effecting changes within every aspect of that society. Of course, this also means that those whose social position is identical to that of Jesus Christ will continue to have a very difficult time, even in the floreat of the Christian society. But, in such a society, they hold the place from which the world is judged, and if they remain faithful to the doctrines, they can perhaps provide the critical assistance in the transformation of the society.
Perhaps.
Just now putting together that the taste in childhood canned alphabet soup was paprika. Seems exotic. Perhaps an attempt by the Central Powers to conquer the tables of America one by one. Or reparations, perhaps. Cargo ships filled with paprika showing up overnight in industrial towns in the American Midwest. To be transformed into a letter-soup without diacritical markings.
UK politics seems to be going bottom-up for its controversies. Mortgage papers incorrectly filed, rentals without the correct approvals, individual prisoners released in advance of their set date. These are database discoveries. Similarly, the enforcement issues in the US by the immigration police seem to be keyed to fingerprints in the system, police visits, etc. Also database discoveries.
I distinctly recall that politics used to be about significant actual events that actually occurred. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that. Will have to check the blog archives.
Decided to press on into the mountains after the run (only a few times here, a route uphill across the long silt rise to the beginning of the rock). Bit like Gurdjieff making his escape, or perhaps Merton taking the Gesthemani jeep out into the Kentucky mud roads for a bit. Unjustifiable, but refreshing.
Once I was past the paved walking paths, I was hoping to find a trail, but saw no blazes, so I just set out across uncleared land, uphill on a vector that I knew would hit the road. Sure enough, after an hour or so of tough climbing over wooded land, a 1980's second world passenger van hove into view. At least the top half. Then to the hiking hut on the road, and past it, up into the gap on a well-blazed trail, as far in that direction as the path went before it doglegged back to the summit of the hill it was on, so I bowed slightly to the path ahead, and turned around. Decided to take one of the trails down, which was an exercise in Fenimore Cooper/Dan Boone alertness, as there were basically no blazes. Basically following a creekbed, and occasionally winding off to the side -- which was confidence-inspiring, as I knew that I wasn't just walking down a creekbed.
But on a large mountain, it's hard to get lost. just go down and walk back around, if you need to. Not like going off-piste in a completely strange range.
Solzhenitsyn's massive historical cycle (latest volume soon out from Notre Dame, I think) got me though the winter in the city a few years ago. I carried the books around so much that they wore down much more than the public library might have reasonably expected them to. (Some entirely fair compensation was provided at their request.) Other parallels from east of Europe were found in different works -- a few characters in Green Tent, Life and Fate, etc.
Identifying with characters in stories from distant countries can be useful. It allows you to contextualize your own difficulties within a more universal sense. If you face a good bit of socially rooted adversity, and you only have the stories of your own people, you might not understand the event. Once you have a more clear understanding, you don't jump over the Wall, or swim the Tiber -- you cross the aisle and sit in the back benches of the loyal opposition awhile, or linger with the cross-benchers. You step outside the sway of the partisans.
A duality. When I was first escaping the homestead, doing professional theatre in the summers, I was in rural Kentucky for several years. At the time, the only way of getting the national papers from New York was driving to the neighboring town and putting in an order at the tobacconist's. Issues fresh from the airport would show up soon afterwards, the Times having been put on a plane after being printed in midtown. (The new presses are one landmark that you pass when going from the city to LGA.) And that was a lifeline, in a way, keeping me from attuning myself to the local mind, keeping free. On the other hand, it is very dangerous to want to think as the powerful folks think, to say things that they would find acceptable, to, in short, have my being as one within that world. The talisman of foreign vocabularies, if it is to be a talisman and not an enchanted mirror, is is not an object of identification, but of strangeness.
Strange dreams of mirrored images, and strength. Armaturum Dei.
At one point today, I was trying to find a mountain trail with a red blaze, based on the information from the hiking map posted by the road. (Balkan hiking maps are among my favorite forms of European fiction.) I was reminded of the afternoon in the mountains above Rasinari, near Sibiu, in Romania. I had gone off-piste after a rather frightening encounter with a few sheepdogs, and I thought I had found a marked trail, so I followed the red blazes for awhile. Eventually, the spatial distribution was peculiar enough for me to realize that the marking was for forestry management purposes, and not marking a trail at all. Things are seldom as they seem.
Quite aware that this sketchpad has taken a turn to the maudlin, but it can't be helped. Seeing the battle to come, one is obliged to at least make note of the fact.
Normal service will resume shortly. Currently plowing though some things on Frege for a seminar that I'm eavesdropping on, the daily lectionary essay revisions are proceeding apace, and the two or three other projects in my "desk" file (as opposed to my "second desk" file, and I think a "third desk," or perhaps a "credence table" might have to be added) are a bit quiet at the moment, but the trajectory is set. Very glad to have edited and published the Balkans ebook before the peregrination ended.
One of the reasons that I had been thinking about Poland for these peregrinations is a very peculiar sense that I've picked up on, particularly in the city, and particularly among certain factions in the city, that the types of extraordinary adversity that I've encountered are somehow appropriate to large fellows of Polish ancestry.
But funding constraints dictated a southern route. Still, quite the extraordinary journey.
Things will likely get rather interesting in the coming weeks. I have set my intentions, as I explained at the end of the travel journals in the recent Balkans book, and I somehow need to reach that scenario -- right now, I'm thinking upper Midwest, a bare-bones apartment with access to a research library (Minnesota interlibrary loan is good for that -- the public libraries reach the universities). In the journal entry, I called it an internal exile, and given my degrees and recent experiences, that's not an exaggeration. Writing, reading, and separating myself from the culture. Not in a shack-in-the-woods way, but in the manner of a quiet fellow in the upstairs apartment who doesn't watch television or read the American papers.
It's certainly different from what I had been hoping to have, either in the theatre, or with the T1 law degree, or with the research doctorate, but precisely this difference is part of the present reality that I hope to explain, eventually. And I fully anticipate that I'll have to work in a sort of internal-exile type retail job, or something along those lines, possibly for the duration of these times, however long that might be.
The folks who have been tangling with me a bit over the years would likely gain some satisfaction from hearing that, but I was never fighting them on their ground. Frankly, I did the honest thing at each turn, knowing that my success if I had done the dishonest thing would have been worthless.
And this retrenchment isn't at all a sure thing. Times have been extraordinarily interesting, which is to say difficult, so even securing this foothold deep in the homeland will require a small miracle.
So. Next chapter.
The lingering injury and the amount of work at the desk meant that most workouts here were in the gym, occasionally with the sauna afterwards. (Basically a weight bench and a set of barbells, but sufficient, and I very rarely visited the small sauna when others were around.) It served for the nonce, and the mountain air was invigorating, as were the walks to town, but I would certainly hope to come back some time when I could simply walk around on the mountain all day. (And had proper boots.)
When I discerned for the priesthood with a society with an outpost in upstate New York (Issac Jogues territory), I spent most of the days on the retreat there up on the (small) mountain with a Psalter. I also remember workshopping a play with an off-off theatre in NYC at someone's house in Vermont, with a mountain visible out the window. Woke before dawn and walked up the hill before rehearsal.
Levavi oculos meos...
The mysterious hip injury sustained in Skopje appears to finally have mended. (Mysterious as to nature and duration -- sustained after stumbling on a relatively mundane asphalt anomaly.) Good run up the base of the mountain. Decided to continue upwards (at a reduced pace). Excellent views. Made for a long workout.
One bright point -- just now passing the one-year mark with the daily essays on the Mass readings. Have discovered that with time, they have grown marginally less foolish. Perseverance is a great way of bringing on the mystic tutorial, I suppose. Have begun to work through revisions on the early ones offline. With time, one becomes aware of the distance between what one thought and what one wrote.
If I keep this up, should be able to pad out the gesamtewerke by at least a volume or two. And that's in folio. In octavo, the demands on library shelving shall be enormous. (And justified.)
I have enjoyed these peregrinations through the Balkans very much. I'm not sure these folks know how lucky they are in the scheme of things. A country needs both civilization and culture, and any country in which it's thought important to build enough housing for everyone, police officers can be rationally argued with on a contested point (observed, not first-person), the arts and literature are priced at a level that ensures general availability (literally a tenth the price of the luxury-goods pricing), and it's a general practice to linger over conversation or a good book over coffee in the early afternoon is infinitely better off than the folks living in McMansions, spending five hours per day in front of their televisions, and constantly trying to stifle the terrifying fear that they might someday lose everything.
Famously, the Westernization of the countries to the north and east involved an attack on the "office tea" culture. As globalization continues apace, some of the countries in these parts might want to define some of these virtues before the holding companies do.
At a bit of an impasse. After giving the art everything I had through conservatory and then the decade afterwards, and being completely sidelined for a few years, I earned good grades at a top-tier law school while taking as many doctrinal courses as they would allow, and then when nothing came of that, I wrote a doctoral dissertation while grading thousands of undergraduate papers. Frankly, I'm not certain which button to push now. And over the last decade, I've had to go to ground more often than a lightning storm in the Midwest.
The informal aspects of career life in these United States might stand some scrutiny. Prosperity from the mechanisms of earlier generations is no justification for general dishonesty. There are some rather bad things going on, and some honest folks are being put in real peril.
Harumph.
I generally don't wear t-shirts, especially with words on them. (Scattered past exceptions for things like Star Wars, etc.)
But if I were to make an exception, I might look for a t-shirt that said something along the lines of: "Someone who isn't allowed to defend a dissertation didn't fail their doctorate. Not scheduling a defense is historically a sign of political disapproval."
But those very rarely turn up in thrift shops.
Interesting, just learning about the 19th c. split between Austrian and German philosophy -- motivated by the anti-Kantianism of the Habsburgs, apparently. Which might have mirrored the Wolff/Pietist divide of a generation before. Austria goes positivist, which ends with the holy rota in Vienna, while German lands go from Kant to speculative idealism, and then take Kant back out of their ruck.
Some local resonance. Apparently, Budapest followed Germany, even post-Compromise, because the German philosophy was seen as more enlightened and European (not to mention non-Austrian). I had known that the Shakespeare lineage in Serbia comes from the German, in contrast to Romania, where the French translations were the source, because the upper classes could afford to flee to Paris for a bit (the same roads followed much later by Cioran and Brancusi -- I think Brancusi actually walked there). So that would make for this culturally German corridor just beneath Austria. And might explain why I liked Budapest and Belgrade so much. If I had to jump to here, I'd likely angle to land in one of those two places. Sarajevo is powerful and unique, but just before my last stay there, the city told me that she likely couldn't be of any further help to me, and she turned out to be right. Powerful dreams, though. As for points eastward, there are a few cities in Romania that I like a lot, and it's culturally much more Western, but there's something about the art, music and literature that much more strongly draws me to the other side of the peninsula. I end up reading Kraznahorkai or Andric instead of Two Thousand Years or Carterescu. But this is just idle thinking, as the odds of an avenue opening to any of these places is rather slim, and I'd enthusiastically head to any of these cities (with one or two exceptions) for a longer stint.
In a cynical view, you could say that if you have a lot of money, a large house, what you will, in most European countries, your house is a piece of that civilization. It is subordinated to the claims of civilization. States-side, it often seems that if you have a large house, a lot of money, etc., you have only that property as itself, and the civilizational context is simply the desire for more people to be more prosperous in that manner. It's laudable aim, but if you think about it, if your neighborhood realized that they would each be twice as rich as you if they took away your house, you would want a more idealist grounding for liberty. And that's precisely the ground I've seen vanish on more than one occasion. At the critical moment, the civilizational context, the rules of the game, the larger meaning of which the specific social encounter is just one part, vanishes in favor of private advantage. More, it does so under a claim of right.
It's not about the rule, or lack of a rule. It's about where you situate the meaning of the property claim. If it's a part of the republic, if you own a piece of America, it has meaning in its inherent ideological content. If the meaning is the immediate possession, virtually anything goes.
Similarly, if a deliberative process is part of the society's general attempt to bring as much truth into the world as possible, arguably necessary constraints and biases come into view. If the committee is simply a group seeking as much private advantage as possible, this has a certain determinative social character.
You can't always know the nature of the war.
You can know that there is a war, and from time to time, you can know that there is something you should do in order to survive, or there is some advantage to be gained.
At the beginning, everyone enters the adversity and forms an idea of the nature of that adversity, and the nature of their own response to that adversity. After things go on for a while, and time passes, and things stay essentially as they have been, you begin to understand that it has become impossible to know the nature of the adversity, or your role within it.
But we ourselves are much more than the ideas that we might form of ourselves. There's the saving force.
The mistake would be to cling to the image that you formed of the adversity and your response to the adversity, even when the situation no longer seems to bear that out. Then the adversity takes on a confusing and random character.
None of us understands what this thing called human experience is. When it gets strange, use this as information.
The Fall of York makes for some fascinating reading. Letters patent are apparently constitutionally reserved to the government in the present UK order. The Times suggests there was even some talk of extinguishing the title, which suggests that some of the constitutional thinkers rearranging the furniture might be (perhaps deliberately) oblivious to the value of the pieces.
Today's edition takes the line that the primary countervailing force was concern for the welfare of the Duke, and avoiding psychological harm. Not the first thing that usually comes to mind after a hard-fought negotiation, which the news also suggested.
And the whole thing is of interest because it gives some grasp on the political order, even to the clueless foreign passerby. While of course there are souls involved as well. Uneasy lies the head that wears the coronet. Any family in the service of the state tends to live in a bit of a silo. The damage that can do to all involved shouldn't be underestimated. The republic, by its nature, isn't a sinecure. The opposite, in fact.
Anniversary of a tragedy in a neighboring country -- partial building collapse at a train station. I was actually in a train station in that country on that morning, but I was in the national capital, having taken the legendary overnight train in from the Adriatic coast. (Less than a bus ride.) It was a difficult ride, as I hadn't yet figured out that the ticket agents could call down to the yard at the origin station to find out which cars were open-plan and which were compartments. I was stuck in an airless compartment with five others, very warm. And the custom in these areas is apparently indoor clothing, no shoes, etc. Spent most of the ride hunched over in the corridor, half seated on a small ledge, trying to get some sleep.
When I arrived, I discovered that tickets for the trains to the new part of the city could only be purchased, at that hour, with a credit card from that country. It was a bright, new spacious station, some distance from the city proper. I stared in disbelief for a moment at the information desk, and then said in my best low-key ironic tone, "not much of a train station then, is it." Irony can be comforting at such times, but a more perfect spirit wouldn't have done that, I suppose. So, having done this walk before, I walked the vector to the large church (not the city's cathedral, much like St. Peter's in Rome), and from there to downtown, across the bridge, and to the new city.
Heard the news about the events in the other city later that day in some disbelief. I suppose a pleasant morning's walk through a city I like a lot wasn't that high a price to pay.
On a subsequent visit, I discovered by hopping on a train at the station in the new city (intending to pay on the train) that there's no fare collection between those two stations. Or at least so I was told by someone with a lanyard. But I also later found a proximate bus line, after taking it to the museum of the old republic, and the buses and trams are free now.
An interesting morning. Also a lesson to be a bit more jedi, even after a night like that and even in a circumstance like that.
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