Dystopia could never emerge if only the nefarious folks work away at the technology. Widespread commercial pressure to innovate the technology so that people could more effectively feed cartoon farm animals, win the crypto-spinning lotto, or doomscroll while staring into the glowing screen would be essential to developing the means.
Much of the last three days taken up with trying to get the laptop to act as expected. (For example, not spinning an hourglass when asked if the antivirus is working correctly.) Rebuilt Windows, should work for the nonce.
Still very much at the ragtag-fleet level of technology. Sufficient is the CPU.
I do follow the Prime Directive rather carefully in these cultural and political contexts. To take an example from the local historical constellations of meaning (and I stress that it is not my own), the analogy would be less to Hegel in Jena than to Lenin in Zurich.
Libraries, coffee, theatre, and only incidentally observing the local life.
One of the dangers of extended periods of adversity is that the notion of what it is to continue, the disk-image for the operating system, as it were, can become the general, false, schein-based received notion of life, rather than life as you had been living it, which was largely in reaction to such notions.
This is why it is good to keep in mind the things that you've done in reaction to the general notion of how things are.
For example. Graduation from the JD was at Lincoln Center. Due largely to accidents of history, I had no friends among the faculty there, but such moments are sill important. Rental gowns were expensive, and basically plastic bags with some trimmings. As the garment district was an easy walk away, I just picked up some decent zegna wool, cheap satin, and some sewing supplies, ordered a pattern for a church choir-robe, and altered it based on photos from a Harvard commencement. Cut and stiched it by hand while listening to freeware bar review tapes. Turned out rather well.
I had hoped to hold onto it for future use, but had to reduce to a knapsack not long afterwards. Perhaps a bit like the ancient Japanese wooden temples completely rebuilt at periodic intervals to precisely the same specifications. The platonic form endures, and with it perhaps the notion of platonic form.
Sufficient is the day.
Interesting, the UK sovereign apparently was behind a last-minute renaming of naval vessel from "Agincourt" to "Achilles." The interesting thing is that it's thought to be bad luck, interrupting the unswerving course of setting sail somehow. Reversals and the action.
If the stories are to be believed, his predecessor renamed the vessel named after her at the christening, as there had never been a previous Queen Elizabeth in the nation where the boat was built.
The experts that write think-pieces, and are quoted in the media, and constitute the equivalent of public intellectuals in this mediated culture are almost unwatchable or unreadable. Unlike the scientists, priests, artists, revolutionaries, and politicians of the 19th c., every element of their public presence is calibrated to capture a place in the mediated narrative. To continue to be on television is the most important thing. And, reasoning from the stronger, every place in the cultural discorse is animated by the φρονεσισ of holding a place in the public discourse.
Perhaps it was ever thus, but I doubt it. The whole reason for priestly austerities in matters of ultimate truth is that the apodictic can be contaminated by place-holding. This is why those with the most credibility in the mediated narratives are those with authority outside the narratives: heroes from the untelevised past, authors who have written books no one has yet read, artists in the legitimate arts (as they're called by the industry magazines) outside the mediated matrix.
The apodictic requires that it be the same whether you are wealthy or poor, well-connected or a face in the crowd. This is the grounding that Beckett finds in his novels and in Godot.
Only those with nothing can speak of something.
After the peculiar, and peculiarly quelled (a quiet Christmas season in the malls) political unrest in the last country, the next country appears to be a similar situation. Theatres appear to be cancelling performances now--which complicates the larger plan of inexpensive coffee and theatre that was the primary reason for setting forth into the Balkans.
Even with the Russian revolution, the Mariinski performances went ahead until the evening beforehand. The audience just went home instead of going to the bars afterward. (Source: Solzhenietsen's Red Wheel novels.)
The actors of ancient Greece passed freely between warring city-states. At university, they claimed that this was a sign of respect for the arts. Thinking of it now, the possibility strikes me that they just didn't want to waste the ammunition.
And the coffee. Let us not forget the coffee. Yes, the corporate mindset is a problem, but having a spot every few blocks where you can walk in, get a coffee from the counter, and just sit down and read for an hour or two is a mark of civilization, and an optimal mix of civilization and culture.
Almost without exception, I've avoided table service coffee here. There are so many deeply felt political and religious issues afoot, that I heed Gurdjieff (and possibly Joseph Smith): It's hard to know what might be in the coffeepot.
Tempted to do an Amazon resupply box to Midtown, fly there, pick it up, eat dinner in the grocery cafe, and then fly back. Would be basically the same cost as the shipping and customs. And one of the things I hadn't appreciated about the Amazon was that strong cheap things are surprisingly hard to find, even in the more developed economies here. Stories of academics, even in recent years, coming back with suitcases of inexpensive jeans.
Jeans are actually not bad, as the fast-fashion conglomerate that operates the three or four major chains in the Balkans or the Turkish chain generally has them at a reasonable cost, and with some looking, you can find the traditional cut, rather than the fast-fashion serf look. The other elements of the box are proving more problematic.
Will muddle on, repair the existing kit, but still odd to be thinking about Midtown after all the difficulties of recent years. It did offer a world-class library, an inexpensive gym, cathedral churches, and cheap, healthy food. (Even when some of the other essentials were absent.)
As someone trying both to survive his own tribe, who seem to be angered by his claim to be a part of said tribe, as well as his tribe's enemies, who would be after him for basically the same reason, a neutral ground like Bosnia, specifically Sarajevo, might seem a logical place for work. It's a beautiful city, and a very spiritually powerful place.
The difficulty is precisely the reason for the attraction. I transferred to a top-tier Jewish law school in New York, reasoning that I would be on more secure ground in the context of a religion of the God of Abraham. But there are old hatreds afoot, ones that I was largely oblivious to at the time, and I was largely the outsider there. The spiritual dangers that I might be oblivious to, in a more serious dimension, are my greatest hesitation, and the reason that I might look to cities more grounded in the East-West rather than a city the distinct spiritual power of which I've personally felt.
I really can't overstate the importance of countering the sense of pragmatic ethics that seems to dominate the universities and the society. The people doing bad things and getting away with it, long a preponderance on both counts, seem to be under the impression that such things are the sanctioned form of social and professional life.
The rejection of pragmatic ethics isn't to say that ethics should be more strict, but that they should be rational and enunciated. That's specifically the proposition that the gleeful rich take to be the mark of the mark.
Twitter still inaccessible. Authentication emails apparently not going out, same as before. Shifting that sort of thing to this location.
Skipping the morning runs is wisest. Walking through the city proper yesterday, many mangy strays, some in small groups angrily chasing after a bit of air. Still looking for the most useful modality of function here.
I'm wary of mentioning things like this to the locals, as the likelihood is that the first solution would be a bit of useless dog-killing, but perhaps the more effective solutions are percolating. Investing in some high-pressure water cleaning kits would be wise though. Fixture of the Manhattan morning.
Risks of booking terra incognita sight unseen. Onward.
So if the calendar is to be believed, we're approaching precisely two thousand years since the passion, death, resurrection and ascenscion of Jesus Christ.
Bit odd that no one has mentioned this, no?
Really, given the determinism of the prevailing social forms, becoming aware of the nature of things is a bit like being the only person on a train who can see that the engineer is inebriated, the passengers mindless, and the tracks built by an unknown corpration that neglected to furnish a map along with the timetables.
Hence the need for the acquaintance with the minds of the past. That which I cannot change is no part of their thoughts.
Twitmachine inaccessible again.
Wandered to the old city, which is also apparently the new city, and quite a walk from the rooms. Old Roman ampitheatre, basically just dug out of the silt, nothing to distance you from the relic of the time. Possible to walk through the tunnels, and out into the arena. Half of the structure is preserved, the other half, the downhill half, which presumably therefore had all of the pens and machinery, only survives at the basement level.
Seafront open, recently developed, excellent walking quay. Socialist statues. Seems to be more typical of socialist countries to make statues of young heroes. Kouroi of righteousness. The outpost of Venice is embedded in the old walls; the admission fee of twice the ampitheatre seemed a bit steep to go inside a small turret.
There are malls, but from the scale of things, it appears that very much the opposite of Sarajevo’s development, the economy is still informal and small-shops based. I’ll continue to supply from the large stores, Turkish, I think, on the same principle under which I shopped for supplies at Walmart when working in rural Kentucky. When you are of the place, or you’re not absolutely reliant on acquiring cheap and effective things, the small shops are certainly the way to go. Otherwise — on a military campaign, the quartermaster doesn’t care much for provenance.
You really do need to put your clothes in the hot wash and take a thorough shower after wandering less-developed areas of southern Europe. Part of the routine. Hence Goethe’s travelling cappa magna, below (on the twitter feed). I keep the washable trenchcoat on at all times. Remarkably fecund place. But why still now, after decades of development in which the northern countries developed civic sanitation systems? The elderly woman I saw sweeping the street was working diligently, but using a large stick to which a bundle of small sticks was attached at the end to sweep the sidewalk. Or perhaps it’s the climate, the lack of hard frosts against the microbiota. Garibaldi divided Africa.
Peculiar signage outside the old stone church, seems to be functionally a proto-cathedral, but apparently canonically a co-cathedral. Claims to be the first site of Christian worship, but the structure dates from 19th c., and earliest claim to archaeological dating of previous structures is 14th c. (based on a single engraved cross, now lost). Narrative of the place is the struggle against the national form of socialism, during which it became a puppet theatre. Better than the English, turning Blackfriars into a horse barn. Or perhaps an argument for building small churches. Just in case.
“Just enough Cross by the way to enter the soul in the light
Just enough work by the day to turn us from error to right”
(Old Shaker Song)
