One thing I've learned in the context of being many kinds of outsider to the local sensibility -- beware the springtime, and the warm days. The social energies increase. The Christian Passion and the old mysteries are both springtime phenomena. Peculiarly dangerous times for the son of man.
Walking through Hell's Kitchen, I caught the word "spatchcock" from a passing conversation. And checking my YT feed, I see Phish is playing the Garden tonight. There is a logic to things.
fwiw, I think the usage comes from the UWS chicken rotisserie places that were a bit more plentiful on the UWS in the early aughts. Distinctly remember the signs.
A month and a fortnight, while winter arrived in the northern city. Not an easy slog, but buoyed along by graces visible and in, it has been possible. Of course, winter has a duration as well as an arrival, but sufficient is, and ever shall be, the day.
Non-project reading shifting to neo-Kantian ways -- I took out Cassirer's Kant book to tide me over when the libraries closed over Christmas, and now working through some of his other stuff. The project work continues apace.
When you find yourself outside the charm of a certain society, for some reason, the intuitive response is to lessen the powers of observation and propensity for contact; as you're no longer serving the purposes of these social forms, the logic that kept you engaged with those social forms now dictates that you slacken your energies so as not to interfere with things. But there are other sources of energy. In addition to the various brands of instant coffee dissolved in the water bottle. (The Indian uses his plants, the wartime German his chemical factories, and I use my everyday consumer goods. The point is to wisely use the things around you.)
In grad school, I picked up a useful phrase from a musician travelling through the theatre where I was training: "Take it easy, but take it."
After a few days of intense trial, when the weather warms and the mist rises from the ground, the animal nature relaxes into the small springtime, but the human spirit, perceiving this, correctly redoubles his discipline.
Take it easy, but take it.
When you get through a few things generally thought to be impossible, the world, of necessity, changes. The world, and by deduction, my experience, couldn't have been what it had been thought to be.
--
I'm not sure what prompts my unconscious to bring specific locations back to my mind from time to time, but it's amiably unheimlich to find oneself at Mass in the back of St. Pat's when the ikonostasis of an old orthodox church in Belgrade or an old Baroque SJ church in Transylvania comes to mind.
"...and rays of light you cannot see / Are flashing through eternity." (Poe)
Difficult evening. Ante faciam frigorum eius, quis sustainabit?
Perhaps related -- although the usual dawn workout went fine, when I returned to the books, higher thought proved elusive. Like a fog staring into a cloud. αρτον εχουσιον not on the menu. Will have to redouble the scholarly focus, now that I seem to have the ability to survive some of the the other things, by the grace of something or other.
Which poses a unique difficulty, as it's not a quality that folks usually possess or work to possess, and there's nothing in my present social role that would indicate that I'm capable of it, or should be wasting my time with it. I alone understand the necessity of it. I would do nothing else, if I could.
Even the most brutal authoritarian governments provide a place of internal exile for the dissident and the dissentient. The market-based society simply closes the door and waits for them to vanish from the threshold, one way or another.
Given present difficulties, frequently, a specific place from the travels will come to mind. Different countries at different hours of the day. This creates some difficulty, as I have no claim on these places, no right or adventitious chance that would land me on those shores. Before, I thought of them as unapproachable distant nations -- now, the place summons itself to mind as the idea of an impossible home.
Bit on the upswing after the solemnity. Mulling the possibility that it was the stage dimming before the Grail descended -- after all, the background context of this holiday is winter night. John of the Cross -- the armies... descended.
--
One does make acquaintance with the shadows of life during those times, in addition to the difficulties of the present, and I'm coming to realize that there were a few things askew with the early life. Every unhappy family has a right to be unhappy in its own way, but when two or three secrets, both the official kind and the family-bible type, cause a house that unhappy, I do have to fault the folks who insisted that the secrets be kept. The cause of much unhappiness, and a few broken things, and now, when the secrets wouldn't matter too much -- neither help nor hurt -- it seems clear that the cost of keeping them and riding out the storm was unconscionably high. Particularly for the ones clueless at the time.
Shadows of the past. Only visible in the light of the present. Onward.
Extraordinary difficulties over last day or so. Went from having a difficult fight in hand to utter exhaustion and incapacity yesterday AM. Slogged t through, not exactly covered in glory. Debated missing the midnight mass, but walked over in plenty of time for the standby line.
Midtown packed with materialistic tourists. Goods from afar -- Nicholas of Bari (translated).
A feast scheduled adventitiously, for the darkest days, but no less authentic for that. After two thousand years, the saving force in the spirit is already named Christmastime. It is already part of what we think with.
In the depth of darkest night, A birth. And from that hour, his death was inevitable. And so a good birth.
This is a very difficult way. I must remember that. From traversing it before, I remembered the inexpensive, healthy, protein-rich food and access to a world-class research library, but the experience has other dimensions.
The "quarantine planet" episode of the new Who comes to mind.
Although I should be more circumspect, as I've not yet quite lived up to the circumstance. Still a bit like a fellow punched randomly in a civilized place, or who wandered accidentally down a difficult side street. Strong, but befuddled, and very much not of the place. It is possible to rise to the circumstance, become a monk/ninja/knight/whatever of the place, and survive that way. But this is a function of time.
Absolute discipline and teetotal, of course, but still a bit of Touchstone in the forest. Corin's shearling coat might become necessary. A function of time, conditioned by identity.
It honestly seems that any time not spent reading or thinking about philosophy is wasted. (It seems to have taken the place, over the last year or two, of necessity, of the arts on the other side of the locked door.) Nonetheless, a few hours on the legal history project today. Someone on a boat who had no idea where he needed to go could get away with wasting absolutely not one bit of force of the wind.
Odd fatigue when sitting down to work after fighting through swarms of tourists for a few hours beforehand. Correlation? Causation? Calumny?
When Strange and Difficult Times began, almost fifteen years ago, my primary focus was on finding that one jungle vine to swing out to safety on -- so I focused my energies on finding a job in my degree fields. After a long bot of that, I split my focus between the survival of the difficult spots in which I found myself and preserving the mechnism so that either independent work or employments in the fields would be possible after the difficulties had been surmounted.
Now, many years later, I've come to realize that anything I hope to achieve needs to be an active concern while the difficulties persist. So it's a triple focus, really -- the search for regular work in the fields, the surviving of the difficulties presently at hand, and the independent work that might turn out to be the central work of life.
It's taken a long time to make that turn, but I don't think I would have acted differently in the earlier times if I had been a wiser beast. There is a logic to each circumstance; the trick is to keep both the awareness of the actual present circumstance and the integrity of the logic associated with it as clear as possible.
The renaming of the Kennedy Center might be a significant mistake. It's a status thing -- he, and any other New Amsterdam corporatist would likely try to do the same at the Met Opera or the Met Museum, and the point would be that they couldn't -- the social power of the boards. So it's a personal thing, and therefore risky, but there's also a philosophical wrinkle.
When the Republic becomes corrupt, the Machiavel comes along, the uncouth individualist who reminds everyone that moving fast and breaking things is part of what it means to be human, despite the increasingly museum-like silence of the Republic. But when the Machiavel attacks the hallowed individual personalities of the Republic, they're working against their own strength. Much wiser to wage war with an army of faceless bureaucrats.
Cold has returned again. 'Tis the season, I suppose. Surviving.
Arguably a mistake to return to the homeland after the first extended absence to a city swamped with highly materialistic tourists. The spell over their minds, that makes them endlessly desire objects in a rather craven mindset, and then, more importantly, pay for them, seems almost to serve as a leveraging of the biomass for the concentration of capital. There was a different sunlight in Philadelphia some years ago, I think.
The impulse is to get back to Bosnia or Serbia, though aside from being two very spiritually powerful places, I'm not sure why those two specifically come to mind, and I'm certain that the folks in either one would look askance at the list.
Once your life transcends appearances, things get a bit complex. There is no one to give you an indication of what one should do or think, no one to read you in to the plot, the plot having been revealed to be a thin conceit of the scribbler of the otherwise worthwhile fiction. One simply goes on.
Although I continue to arc back towards the world in my work, and hence have been reading a lot of law and legal history lately, any time not spent reading or thinking about philosophy seems wasted. So I waste time in order to attempt to be of service to an increasingly alien scholarly discourse.
Good workout at the gym. As there was no weekday Mass to sprint off to at the end, did a double session. Corpore sano. "...when the water runs muddy, I wash my cloak."
Onward.
Interesting lieder rhyme: Christbaum/selig traumme.
Rain.
Life in the digital/algorithmic gulag continues. Quite convinced that with time, having to live in this manner in this prosperous of a society will seem a political condition as real as those sent to Siberian camps (with, it should be noted, houses), carrying signed and stamped paperwork from the district soviet.
I actually built the Balkan digital nomad years on a remarkably thin foothold of being paid a fraction of market rates to do mind-numbing academic work on sporadic contracts -- the only possible way to live on that within the scope of American/European civilization was in southern Europe, and I'd like to think I made something remarkable out of it, thanks to the remarkable nature of the places I found. Some decent thought, criticism and study -- not to mention all of the $5 theatre/symphony tickets and kefir in the afternoons.
As for the present -- advancing confidently in the direction of my dreams, and waiting for the next unexpected thin ledge of foothold to come along.
Another Abp. (Card) to the big wooden chair, stage right in St. Pats. Was wondering. Homily last Sunday a bit interesting at points -- wheels apparently in motion.
Even at the global center of the electronically mediated social and political world, the in-person event still retains the power to reveal.
The morning meditations here are much more difficult -- even listening to the tape-delayed liturgy of the word from the academic chapel beforehand, the mind feels as if weighed down by lead, and once or twice, I've even drifted off while writing.
Theory 1 -- The structure of the meditation provides a comparison across worlds, and since the same task is much more difficult here, there is something locally increasing the level of difficulty for tasks generally.
Theory 2 -- In that I had been habituated to the meditations in times of relative safety and sufficiency, accomplishing them now, given the current difficulties, is much more difficult.
To mull.
Always make it look easy. Sprezzatura. "Backwards, and among heels." That sort of thing.
The reason is quite simple. Most people, trusting appearances, don't know what the world is. And without knowing what the world is, noticing a fellow who is seemingly exerting extraordinary force just to survive can awaken less-than-helpful inclinations.
It's the difference between staring into the abyss, and staring down the abyss. And, given the effects, it's a bit like whistling down the wind.
Vollman's peroration proving interesting. The Romanian/Bulgarian vampiric sections seem to be an allegory for something, but I've only read his later, straight stuff, not the earlier, slanted stuff, so perhaps it's a fascination in itself. Doubtful, though. Bit like the rat wars in Pynchon's V. And the Roland Hedley-esque weeklong war correspondent's return to Sarajevo makes for good lightness of being in a city of shadows. (And ending the tale at the Yellow fortress, which is where I ended my narrative as well, is spot-on. Hopefully not ironic.)
Fighting vainly to keep conscious during mediation after Mass. In fairness, the conscious/unconscious ratio at the original Gethsemane gave long odds as well.
It occurs to me that I've spent a considerable amount of time in recent years functioning at my absolute physical and mental limit, given the circumstances. I have my doubts as to whether this is an unalloyed good. As bad as it is to be comfortable, difficulty, especially when extreme and extended in time, can transform the action.
There's been a cold spell of late here -- over the last three or four days. Given present difficulties, this has been determinative of much, but I appear to have been able to keep slogging though (albeit on impulse engines rather than warp speed), thanks to increased protein in meals and layers of clothing.
(Teetotal, of course. It's been some time since I've had sufficient hearth and economy for vino with dinner.)
There's a bit of an art to the "Like the Drifter" mode. You can't pull it off as James Bond, but the important thing is to retain the possibility of slogging through a tough bit and then shifting into James Bond mode for a few hours. The surprisingly large number of human catastrophes wandering the city counsel caution when dealing with these forces of nature. One doesn't want to turn into a national socialist or a socialist national, but the intensity common to the speculative idealist and the commissar is really the only way to get through this kind of thing. Life on the frontier wasn't characterized by American niceness and ease.
Gently down the stream -- take it easy, but take it.
Tourists literally swarming through the research libraries. Right on top of the tables, chattering. Ventilation off for some reason. Supremely unpleasant, impossible to think, let alone start the work of the day well.
I'd delay the star of work until after the tourist hours, but given the late opening, the additional hour would lose the morning.
It's not that disproportional in the scheme of things that my attention is still so strongly with theatre and the arts generally. Just after undergrad, I worked with a small theatre in Cincinnati while doing admin work during the day -- ended up working with some of the global execs at a major firm during daytime hours, contacts which would certainly have sufficed for a prosperous career in consumer products. Similarly, after the conservatory masters, I did the same type of admin work in global c-suites in NYC, and then segued into developing a website with an exec from one of the large venues in the city -- both of these, had they been what I was doing, would have allowed me to carve out a decent niche in the arts-affiliated marketing world, or the marches and fens outside of the big-money corporate world. As before, I was tempted, but there is such a thing as a coherent life, and the work of one's life, so I actually fought quite hard to keep either from being a full-time first-priority focus. In the end, although I didn't, like Blackstone, bid farewell to my muse, she was kidnapped in short order, and then began the second of the three peculiar attempts at a coherent career -- the law.
Picked up Vollman's latest and last work -- and it begins on the familiar streets Centar Municipality, Sarajevo. Brilliant. So at least one thing of the mind has some go to it at present.
Would vanish to Bosnia, Serbia, or points east in a heartbeat, if I thought I had sufficient means for the journey. Present living situation and work is at best useful, and (perhaps simultaneously) at worst, more than a bit risky, In the language of computer games (which I notoriously don't play), I'm picking up the points to be found in the scene (making the annotations on works at NYPL I'd likely not find elsewhere for things I hope to write), but as to the larger game, I don't think things are going that well, frankly.
PS, still wondering at how V placed a piece in L'Osservatore Romano. Must have an old-school-capable agent.
Watched the crowds surging past as I had a bite to eat after leaving the library. Everyone in comfortable clothes, ambling down the street. I find myself looking for some signs of nobility about them, something that suggests a claim to possess something of intangible value that suggests a power or mastery vis a vis general relation to the world, visible and invisible. But it appears that nothing in them suggests to them that this would be desirable. They are in the great city, wearing comfortable clothes, likely having paid thousands for the privilege.
More, as with many of these reservations about the ways of my country, the most troubling thing is that they likely see it as a virtue. Merely unpretentious good-hearted folks walking down a sidewalk.
Pretend, folks. Try it.
Stopped in again at the philharmonic to eavesdrop the Handel a second time. Perhaps my imagination, but some of the funereal tempos in the second half (αναστασοσ) seemed to have been tightened up. Perhaps there's a tacit understanding that guest conductors use a bit less interpretive freedom with the weekend subscriber crowd. Hadn't slept in quite some time, though, so listening to the pece while trying to keep on the right page of the Goethe biography I was finishing proved surprisingly challenging. (Not all neighborhoods in the city have book-return boxes, so there are designated "book-finishing" zones to keep the knapsack light.) Might be my last visit to the concert qua lobby -- it's a lot of bother to go through to sit in the lobby and listen to the house sound on a distant speaker. Much more of a concert event than a drop-by cafe at this point.
---
To be absolutely clear, the present visit, on a continuum between holiday jaunt and death-defying salto mortale to the edge of the swarming crowds circling the abyss of darkness -- well, all told, I'd tend to go with the latter category. Still a bit hopeful, though as exhausted as I've ever been.
--
Notion: one reason people are a bit lost -- their vocabulary. The set of words that they use to describe things in the world tends towards simple existence, rather than focusing the mind on the purposes of life. Our manner of speech is dispositive. Vocabulary is logos -- you can't express a second logos using the words of the world, because each word relates to every other word, whether that be inference or deferance [sic]. Perhaps the reason the people are wandering like lost sheep too oblivious to realize that they're lost is that their purposes have been extinguished by implication.
An idle philosophical point after reading one too many spy stories: When a part of the government that does confidential work takes some basically good people, isolates them and their children from society, and has a rather profound effect on their minds and spirits, the only opprobrium involved falls on the government agency, not the people involved. If you decide to build the unhappiness house, the souls inside will be unhappy.
Hence my present aversion to the cult of Le Carre, though I was once a devoted reader (and prayed the office for the dead, sitting in the old apartment by the transcontinental rail in Fargo, when I head that he had passed away). Popular perceptions about confidential government work changed after those BBC mini-series, and it's rather important for a democracy to have the correct idea about the nature of its government agencies. Don't idolize the shock troops, as someone said once.
No opprobrium on the souls involved. Absolvo omnes. But do try to mend the agencies.
Absolutely exhausted. I've discovered in recent weeks that I can catch a few winks at 10F, and wake up before any organ failure sets in, but humidity seems to complicate the situation. Which is odd. As if the moisture on the ground and in the air accentuated the connection. Only scattered moments of rest, and back to hurtling through the day.
Stopping in at the NY Philharmonic's lobby Jumbotron for the Messiah. Remembering last year at about this time, the performance by the Transylvanian orchestra at the centuries-old university. I had my customary seat, front-row center, which was at balcony prices, following the usual practice for classical music events, but the space was so small that the mix was perfect there, and as the evening progressed, the music surrounded me and drew me into the mystery. It wasn't hard to imagine this a 19th c. orchestra deep in the mountains of the Balkans, playing the piece that had just come in from London. Sensing these mediations, understanding the mechanism that is creating the representation, is one way to enter a work of art. This is a paradox, in that attention is being turned to the things between the work and us, but like agitating the surface of the water, of the lake, it brings your attention to the place between the worlds, and from thence to the hidden world.
Otherwise, the place between the worlds is invisible. A stick, extending halfway out of the water for some reason seems broken. And then we begin to repair the mistakes of our own mind, rather than contemplate the rift between things. We try to make our minds more accurate, rather than our vision more clear and distinct.
I saw an extraordinary rendition of the piece on tape from the Edinborough festival; I think it needs some tincture of the North to it. Otherwise, as with this Jumbotron version that I'm currently eavesdropping, it's romantic instruments sounding their timbre and colotura embroiderings. What's missing is the rough creak of the rift in the lute, the cold wind of the spirit. Even in London-town. There is a story that the soprano in Handel's original company for the Dublin performance, I think, had some rumors swirling about her, and the audience entered into the story of her redemption. These things give us a foothold in the representation. A clew.
This (again in the lobby with the Jumbotron) is a very insipid performance. And yet, somehow perfect for the overpriced luxury-goods that make up the arts in this city. They expect a luxuriant experience. And yet: "Woe to you who are comfortable." Perhaps that offers a foothold on that expression. I think the Koran teaches that on the day of judgment, molten gold will be poured into the ears of those who listen to music. Keeping in mind, of course, that the Medina Philharmonic wasn't very highly ranked at the time. The music he condemns is likely the idle marketplace music. Music as appurtenance to a comfortable life, not a mechanism of revelation.
The Transylvania Messiah actually was a very powerful experience. To encounter this piece as a Christian is to meditate on a series of specific propositions. But within the context of a message being proclaimed. I remember thinking, after one particularly strong Beethoven's Ninth at Carnegie Hall (Barenboim/Staatskapelle Berlin), that if there were justice in the world, every newspaper on the planet would, tomorrow morning, have the banner headline: "We Won."
Art requires this transformation of reality. Not the plastic deformations of the fiction, but the conviction that what it is to exist has been changed by witnessing the event. "A tune beyond ourselves, yet ourselves," as the poem has it -- a work I once found fragments of in blue spray paint on the construction paneling at the Chelsea Hotel as I walked past early one morning, long before dawn. Peregrination. The Enlightenment critic once said that seeing the sculpted torso of the idealized figure, something should arise in us that says "I must amend my life." I'm convinced that this is the same phenomenon as the transformation of reality mentioned above -- something about what it is to exist has been vouchsafed to us, and we are duty-bound to change our stance to the world a bit.
So art has the obligation to bring to us this good news, to show us that things are different now. And on some level we realize that it is our notions of things that have been enlarged, since the tune was beyond ]us at first. But then we recognize ourselves after this sublation. Things having changed somewhat.
Christianity is a religion that happens within history. Actually, our notions of history, especially those having to do with Whiggish perfection, are intimately associated with the Christian viewpoint, the notion that things are fighting to change to the good inside of each person. The value placed on the individual soul's fabric is the great change from the darkness of antiquity.
And now, on the lobby screen -- "despised and rejected." Described with langour, as if marketing a khaki luxury bag. The notion of worthlessness itself being sold in the marketplace.
The sea of faith was once full, of course, and these terms had specific meaning. Now, I'm reasonably certain that very few of the folks in this lobby take these propositions to be true, and yet, they have meaning for them. What this meaning might be, without belief, perhaps presents an interesting question. To the modern mind, the truth-value of a sentence is generally thought to be whether it is the case. The cat is on the mat = true. And yet, we are not verification machines; determining whether something is the case might not be the work given us by the universe in hearing a certain sentence. It is not for us to judge whether the holy time is in fact as quiet as a nun. In fact, the proposition is more of a command, effective words, creating a certain disposition in us towards the world, and what it is to be in the world has changed a bit after hearing it.
Now in the lobby version -- "But thou did'st not leave his soul in hell" -- there was no reversal there. The point is that there has never been someone so desolate, and then an assurance arises. If there's no reversal between these two thoughts, the second one has no meaning for us. This reading has gone from langourous to funereal.
I'm not sure that I could talk through the insights that I had in listening to the version in Transylvania last year. I do know that I took each one of these propositions to be the case. And I understood that this message was being relayed, mediated by the local ensemble, so they were giving it the meaning that came naturally to them in the mountains of Romania. Both of us, then, peering at the source of this message from distant London. It seemed infinitely logical that the soul who had suffered should govern all things. And so, by the measure of that logic, it might very well have happened. The victory was more possible, once I understood what it was thought to be. Listening to that Ninth at Carnegie Hall, I didn't go in expecting a transcendent experience, I experienced the event, and once the event had substance, it became transcendent. Approaching the question of the truth of the message after the hermeneutic is vastly different from reaching for the higher meaning after deciding whether the proposition is true. We might believe many more things if our first question was "what is this?" rather than "is this true", the latter usually standing place for "do I like this?"
Woe to the comfortable. Those who do not take the thing in hand before deciding whether or not it pleases them. The difficulty, the thing interposed between ourselves and the representation, is often what gives us the key to the work. To place the question of our own comfort, whether the thing agrees with us, or we with it, before inquiring into the nature of the thing itself, is a basic error. On one level, this can be applied to a certain performance, and on another level, to a certain proposition of faith. Whether we believe it or not is not the first question we should have on hearing it. And we might find that, having understood, we might then believe.
Eavesdropping a carol service at the Temple in London while slogging through the reading in the research library in New York.
Gadamer has the notion of θεατρον as "angle on the action" -- the specific place in the Lycurgan stone theatre that the anonymous visitor to Athens found for the festival. Where he ended up in the theatre depended on where he was coming from, his social role, and his intentions for the festival. And that place in the theatre, in relation to the angle of the σκενε, defined the experience of the play for them. (The immersive roman doubled-theatre, amphitheatre, negates precisely this directional element.)
Even if one is the most questionable drifter who has ever wandered into the city, it is still possible to find a place from which, thanks to the angle, you can see the highest things, however far in the distance. Take the time to find that place in each place you find.
--
I see the government of Bulgaria has collapsed. Nothing to do with me, was just wandering the mountains of the south for a month and a fortnight. Didn't even pick up a newspaper.
Onward.
From my limited understanding, Navalny was very much a Russian patriot. More in the political sense, perhaps than was Solzhenitsyn, who was a patriot in the cultural and religious sense. Which is why one died in prison, and the other was able to move to New England, buy a house, and write.
It is a delicate balance. At times of extreme adversity, the places in other countries come to my mind -- the cathedrals (even those I've been asked to leave so that only those of a certain ethnicity would be there for the service), the theatres (even during the long evenings), and the coffeehouses (I tend to remember the better-ventilated ones). Culturally, I am Solzhenitsyn vis-a-vis things American. But for some reason, politically, I am taken for another thing entirely. Which is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've never turned to fight that sort of thing -- just kept trying to do the work despite it.
Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have made it a point to feud with the apparatchiks. Quite the opposite.
"Work, Uncle Vanya. We must work."
No matter how cold the nights.
One misreading of the adventures of recent years would be that the recent Balkan odysseys were the salto mortale, the one great sojorun out into the world, never to be repeated. In essence, I found that it was possible (though just barely so, and not at all in a sustainable manner) to live on the amount of money I had by living in inexpensive apartments in Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, etc., and as an added bonus, theatre, opera, and symphony tickets were around $5, so it was possible to have a proper cultural life as well. Rather enjoyed it, and certainly hoping to repeat the experience, if my fortunes here continue to be as they have been.
There seems to be a fundamental duality between having access to research libraries and having a place to read books from these research libraries. Perhaps its epistemological -- it only seems like there's a lot of books because there's nowhere nearby to read them after the stacks close. Especially now that the Starbucks have followed the gyms and gone to Disneyworld hours -- no more midnight Americanos or 4AM workouts.
The reading room in New York is actually spectacular. I'm hardly a monarchist, especially when it comes to other nations, but the land was a gift of the sovereign, back when the salient bit was the enormous aboveground reservoir next door.
And one does have to take a historical view of things, if there is to be meaning in the world, as Heidegger indicated to a perplexed Arendt who noticed him genuflect in a country church. I happened to be in the south half of the room when BBC went to the national anthem after announcing the death of the sovereign. Centuries later, unnoticed, a fellow quietly stood for the anthem of the neighboring nation.
One doesn't want to be dogmatic about these things, but existence seemed to be much more pleasant a few months ago. Granted, days of mind-numbing labor rowing the academic triremes, and limited libraries, having to shift countries every several weeks, bare-bones budgeting, etc, etc. But music, theatre, stability of life, etc. As it turns out, rowing the triremes is more conducive to a productive existence than is being driven off the ship. Perhaps only at first. The beginning of Priestley's Good Companions comes to mind.
Degrees of existence -- and the important point is the order of magnitude (or perhaps the magnitude of the order) that they all inhabit. I repeat this because it is the truth governing my reality generally -- three careers torpedoed, and standard of living presently very low. Though that's not much of a change. I've always been at least proximate to the church-mouse tax bracket. Still, though -- it's not an exaggeration to call this mode of life a gulag.
I'm very scrupulous about hygiene and laundry, especially when travelling, but the fashion look is skewing a little to "Luke the Drifter" of late. They say you should dress for the job you want. I appear to aspire to the position of a Zek of the first circle.
I do need to shift the writing -- both to make more words, and to re-institute the daily reflections, now that I've landed. TK.
When the libraries are closed, slogging though a recent biography of Goethe -- saw it in the TLS a couple of weeks ago. Not really a philosophical biography, more the sort of Life one might write for a novelist. Very approachable and clear, though -- general audience, not exclusively for the scholarship. Works cited (Beiser et al.) are the things I've been working through, so I'm apparently on the right track.
Interesting, his father's library had Albertus Magnus, but not Aquinas. And then the son becomes this mage of nature and patron to the philosophers. Careful the tale you tell. Or have on the low shelves.
I've occasionally used terms like "the greed spell," and talked about how the world of The Matrix is basically a true world (and not entirely in the context of the direct application of Baudrillard). And, sort of arriving the homeland after a clarifying few years in places like Bosnia and Serbia, I am seeing the country with a stranger's eyes. The most disturbing thing is the malice freely commixed with the greed and craven nature, as if it were a necessary ingredient of the pie. Add the implication of entitlement, and you have basically the national stance after the last generation.
The most peculiar thing is that they seem to think it rational. So perhaps further discoveries await me in the shared rationality of this Bluebeard's Castle of the lost colony.
"O Scotland, Scotland..."
Civilizational context is the term that keeps coming to my mind, after a few years in lands that used to be called second world, and as I now attempt to assemble a semblance of existence back in the greed-fueled, entitled city of animal-spirits-of-the-market at the center of my own country.
It is difficult to express, but in wandering the old brutalist apartment complexes and city centers, towering buildings often unremarkable for anything other than the possibility of housing a large library of paperback philosophy in the spacious, bare rooms, along with a strong table or two, the context of the social encounter is the civilization of the country -- adopting the German division of civilization and culture, this social sense is rooted not in the primitive strength of culture, but in the trust engendered by discrete civilized encounters. The fact that you politely request a cup of coffee is interlinked with the assurance that you are among people of a certain social conscience. These are, if not academicians, at least academic citizens. Neighbors and familiars of the Platonic gardens.
The difficulty of my position, and I felt this keenly when I was there, is that some of the people in these countries are quite legitimately pining for the way of life in my own country, perhaps after a lifetime of polite requests for coffee. (Much of this likely has to do with the specific region, southern Europe, the geographical Balkans and the few countries to the north customarily included in the clique. I would likely have come away from Warsaw, Prague, or Gdansk with a different sense.) And I am at odds with a few things here.
When the funding (menial academic work compensated at rates very favorable to the employers) vanished, I did the conservative thing and left at the point beyond which I couldn't guarantee that, barring a change in circumstance, I'd be able to make it back to the country where I could go to ground if necessary without undue risk of death. (Hospitals in that part of the world don't work on the Medicare bare-minimum model.) I held out and tried to change the reckonings of the fates as long as I could, but didn't risk it all, which was wise.
And as close as I was to cultural word of all of these places, the music, theatre, opera ($5 tickets enabled me to keep certain candles lit that otherwise would have been lost for lack of fuel or excess of wind in those years) -- despite this proximity, I was unquestionably, and quite rightly, the observer -- as I had neither the languages nor the understanding of what, in its most basic sense, the culture might have been trying to do with that language. So astute criticism was the best thing that could have been hoped for.
And now I'm back in my own country, a place that might seem to folks overseas like a meritocracy, but on closer inspection and long acquaintance reveals itself to be a complicated mix of powerful networks, in which, if you offend the great and the good among them, things can get very difficult indeed.
So I do think of these concrete apartments with ample room for adequate paperback libraries of philosophy and history (though the discounted agitprop texts of the past might have made the people less enthusiastic about this, and perhaps a bit book-averse); and I think of these old theatres and music venues (though the comprehensive rejection of the longstanding acting pedagogy (some time before the political revolutions) does make for some anodyne evenings); and I do think of these coffeehouses (though the politics and the stuffy air meant I almost invariably opted for a Western-style chain).
It wasn't utopia, but it was a chance to wander among some civilized folks for a bit, and work, and think --before returning to the danger and the possibilities of the groundless abyss hereabouts. If I had my druthers at the moment, I might want to stage a Shakespeare in Sarajevo, or vanish into the cheap seats of the symphony in Belgrade with a good book and the Dvorak. Or an evening at a municipal theatre in Bucharest, puzzling out the strange play in another language. But these are impulses, not ambitions. Ambition is thought to come, via ambulare, from ancient politicians who would walk about canvassing support. Offering the people ideas, and attempting to understand the nature of the people.
One can do that sort of thing when not fighting for basic survival in the more market-driven and capricious, and sometimes corrupt, world.
But, like the Sophist teachers, I am a foreigner, and for all my knowledge, not eligible for office in the gardens of the academy. So I must only teach.
The piece I've been working on during the days is coming into a clearer focus, though why I'm working on it still remains a bit of a mystery to me.
It's said that the artists, the writers lived longest in the concentration camps of the second ww. The people who were trying to use their time on earth, such as it was, to make something, or accomplish something.
Some truth in that. There's not really anything that can safely be called bare existence, if by existence one means simply being, with nothing, as they say, going on. Existence, which becomes a critical piece of philosophical vocabulary for a very specific reason in the last century, is a conglomeration of all of the small, unnoticed glances, breaths, heartbeats, fire alarms, etc. that are the objects of our attention while we live.
So just attempting to continue, to keep having life, as we have the sense of having life, reaches for a fog, in a way. There's nothing solid to take hold of, or event to reach for. And yet, intuitively, this is the life-force, especially in a prosperous and fearful age, in which, as Canneti said, death has become the coin fo the realm. Or perhaps that should be coign ("vantage point").
Our lives, phenomenologically speaking, are simply series of specific actions and intentions. The power, or I suppose eventually the capacity, to do that is what we should perhaps paraphrase "existence" to stand for. And yet, none of these moments really reach the higher life that we normally would associate with the fight of living. There is some distention between our strong desire to live, and the quotidian things we might do if allowed a few extra minutes above the sod. Is, then, the desire to live exclusively addressing the totality? Is that the only nominatum for which the force of this desire is justifiable?
There are exceptions, I think. Someone who wanted to live long enough to do a certain thing, for example. Someone who is doing something important for others. And, perhaps, someone who is attempting to accomplish something with the time that they have, such as it is. Why might this be so?
When we are attempting to make something -- ποεισισ -- the thing that we are attempting to make gives our work a method (μετ' οδοσ) we know, in a practical sense, how to accomplish the thing that we are trying to do. And this plan is based in knowing the connections between things, how they all hang together. The making of the art and the thinking of the concept for the art both require sufficient understanding to create the thing and sufficient judgment to both set our heart on the right thing, and accomplish that thing in a way consistent with our desires. And these are not separate -- they both require us to have a certain map of the way things are, and our desires teach us the associations, and the associations lead us to desire.
So in setting out to create something, the soul, the comprehensive principle, is engaged in both defining the world around it and coping with that world, making something within it. And the point is that these two things are basically the same thing. We understand according to our desire, and desire according to our understanding, The reason that we make maps of the world around us is that we wish to go to certain places, and our maps are created by depicting the places and roads that we desire.
So, when the understanding is a factor of desire, when the world is illuminated by our seeking, it is not just that something called existence is more full. We move from existence to action, and thereby have our being in a way not given to simple observation.
Morning on admin tasks around the city, afternoon, slogging through the old texts.
--
When there seems to be some causation between unwillingness to go along with questionable practices and people in authority, and some rather stern difficulties down the road, it's very difficult not to reason that the glib and craven folks enjoying the usual upper-middle prosperity of the States made another choice when faced with precisely the same situations.
A fallacy, of course. But a very, very tempting one.
Bit of a low-key day within the larger crisis. Slogged through a text that had to be slogged through if I'm to write the thing that I'm thinking about writing. Many notes.
Peculiar heaviness and inaction descended when I sat down to the work, lasted a bit over an hour. No question of doing work, just had to allow whatever was shifting back into place in the psyche or the innards to do so.
Winter makes the situation much more difficult -- I can get through the event, walk through the cold, but then the body needs to repair itself, or at any rate it is best that it do so. Temperate evening yesterday, but the cold does descend as the night deepens. And you can plow through and survive, but the ship does need to mend itself for a bit afterwards.
What might hope be without time?
Intuitively, we define hope (Ελπισ) by describing what hopeful people do: they look to the future with some expectation. But perhaps the essence of the word is hiding, undivided, in the second part of that definition. In our disposition towards the event.
How could you have hope without time? Or is this even possible. Perhaps hope is discursive, and needs to happen within time, and each time it happens within time, each time it is fulfilled or disappointed, the phenomenon grows more clear.
In the Greek, it can be associated with the double genitive. The hope of X in Y. In both cases arising from the thing spoken of. The one hoping hopes from himself, and the thing hoped of provides not generic assurance but some assurance of itself.
So the disposition of the one who hopes is directionally attuned to the future, to the unfolding event, yes, but the whole definition of the thing is in the way that he is attuned to the future, which arises from him, and is characteristic of him. And that to which he is attuned, the unfolding event, has its own nature, and something of that nature uniquely corresponds to the sensibility with which he is looking at the event.
Perhaps this might be thought of atemporally. Hope, as a disposition, encounters things, but it doesn't have to. I can be hopeful about just the present moment, in itself. The last gift in the box of Pandora, nothing further to issue.
A simple example in language: "I hope I did the right thing." Perhaps this doesn't necessarily look to a future time of vindication, of discovering that I did the right thing. Rather, the event to which I am attuned is the present moment, and I am looking at the event with myself inside of it.
The place of vindication of atemporal hope is not the future, but in the intuition of the larger picture.
Events continue apace.
Basic situ remains: top-tier law degree with good grades, many years on the stage, good conservatory degree, and presently slogging through gulag-level existence, ships and bridges equally razed, in the heart of the first world. Had carved out a few roundabout paths back to civilization, but those seem to have come a cropper in the last few days.
So.
Gleaning the things that I need for the next project from the research library, the sorts of things I couldn't find elsewhere. In the scheme of things, I will concede that this might be illogical, but my logic has it that (1) I hope to accomplish this work; (2) I will need these materials specifically; (3) they're in walking distance.
It also allows me to fix the mind on the quest. Always useful. Any quest will do.
Radical discipline is the only way forward. In a very literal sense -- if your mind isn't focused, you will stop walking forward in the cold.
The level of text production seems to have dropped off since my return stateside, for obvious reasons. Will work to get those engines back and running. When your life seems to be governed by dark-side logics, putting as much of your own λογοσ out there as possible becomes a form of tactical response.
Vade, liber.
Part of this is that I'm ramping the mind back up to speed after a fortnight of focusing on surviving the physical circumstance within the discipline. Reading some proper modern work on Dewey today, had to get through two or three rather ugly banks of cloud and fog. There's a reason that philosophers tend to be those who are living comfortable lives. (Pace Boethius, Socrates, et al.)
"When the water is cloudy, I wash my cloak. When the water is clear, I wash my head covering."
I'm trying to keep this channel from turning into a sort of live feed from the bridge of a starship in the midst of battle, or perhaps the engineer's radio on a locomotive out of control, the tracks having ended a half-mile back. But the "ephemera/legit" content split in the website design does encourage the occasional firm protest to the universe at the general circumstance on the "ephemera" channel.
Really, given the degrees and the experience on the CV, there is no rational reason for the events of the last several years (excepting the recent brief, useful, and pleasant years of economic banishment/digital nomadry).
I can only say that I've slogged through worse than the gulags for months at a time, and continue to do so. The family, given the fractious rivalries and the deep distance from normalcy that is constantly conjoined with sensitive government work, is not a source of reality or assistance, and each line of career development I've plowed out seems to be snowed over in short order.
At this point, I don't think of my life in the usual sense of being a certain person with certain degrees and skills trying to do a certain thing in the world. After many years, those appearances, which are appearances as authentic as any other, simply don't correspond with the event. Each day, I encounter the social illusion as illusion, keep the discipline as something that transcends the social illusion, and attempt to accomplish worthwhile work given the tools at hand.
Onward.
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