Part of the reason that direct Presidential statements now seem so peculiar is that he doesn't know who he's talking to.  The previous President was talking to the public as a public official, having sufficiently imagined both.  He spoke to the Court of the Aeropagus and the citizens assembled on the field at Gettysburg.  If you concieve of government as happening by company and enterprise, a faction seizes the mechanism of governance and runs it as a corporation.  But if you conceive of government as an answer to the question of social order, you are drawn into a different relationship with the people, and you can address them in that way. There is a certain collective someone you are speaking to.  The corporatist, as opposed to the publicist, has no one to address when he addresses everybody. Compare a CEO giving a general talk, and a CEO talking to the people of the company.  In the first case, they simply haven't imagined the public in general.  Perhaps this is why there are so many television personalities in the administration -- they have a manner and a vocabulary of speaking to all and sundry, but they haven't imagined the folks on the other side of the camera as being particularly worthwhile.

Perhaps this is another aspect of the Republic and the Machiavel. Rhetoric flourishes in the republic, or at least complete sentences.  The Machiavel has a different approach to meaning.  The language becomes, not strained, exactly, but where the language becomes important, they're almost at antinomy, because the Machiavel's order is originary, not classcally ordered.  In making all things new, individual words take on a strange, rather than familiar, context.  Think of how many debates in the first term focused on odd terms abstracted from their constitutional context -- they become headlines, or perhaps captions, and their meaning becomes the present use.  Now, you can do that with individual words, but not sentences. The Machiavel sounds like a parody when he speaks, because he is waiting to one day unseat the classical order of the sentence.

None of this is criticism -- these are the two necessary aspects, synthesis and diaresis. But it is much more logical to be governed by the synthesis.  

 Last port of call was a bit bad, but the time before it, in Hungarian Transylvania, was very interesting.  The Kruschevka housing was a bit dispiriting, but the theatre was there, and the coffee, and some (centuries-old) academic/urban energy to the place.  This constant flitting is wearying.  It seems as soon as my system finds the rhythm of the coffeehouse reading, and groks the local theatre, it's north/south/east/westward ho. This is another reason why coffeehouse chains are a good thing. Even when places turn them into their own sort of thing, e.g., drive-through milkshake caffeinated milkshake stores in the American Midwest. "I Have Been Here Before."(J.B. Priestley)

 Travelling novel -- The Philosopher's Pupil again.  Sometimes, an author can have a hidden conceit or game that ends up giving the novel structure, and the novel can be read on its own terms, without knowledge of the 'Inside Baseball' stories.  But I thin, for this one you do have to know the gossip, or at least the story that was put into the mix as gossip.  When you see that, and know the relationship, everything sort of falls into place.  Conversely, once that reticulated, purposive structure appears, everything could equally be dismissed as just a bit of gossip.  Not a rack behind.

 On the Feast of St. David, no less.

Without question, my favorite name day was the afternoon reading the Mabinogion at an UWS Sbux, and then seeing the Stratford Lear at Lincoln Center.  Afterwards, it almost seemed as if the city were made of gold.

Safe arrived at the ancient capital of the southern republic.  City preternaturally quiet on a seventh-day morn.  Interesting rooms in a slightly dodgy neighborhood very near the center, the dome of the parliament outside the window.

Journey difficult, but not nearly as difficult as it was the last time I followed this path, as I made sure to ask for an open car, rather than compartments -- they had to call down to the yard to check.  Still, though, climate control proves elusive on this line (which, in fairness goes into the mountains at points).  Exhausting journey, and then the last several hours might have qualified as a medical coma, as I didn't so much drift into unconsciousness as slip off the continental shelf of consciousness.

 Interesting layover in the nation to the southwest.  Walked about a mile to the banking district to see if I could get some of the destination currency.  None was available, oddly.  Many folks in camouflage in the banking lines.  (though there was a good rate available in the station when I arrived).  Then walked back to the station and then a mile in the other direction to a hardware chain that I knew had good wooden bath brushes.  One should try to be the type of fellow who would walk two miles for a good bath brush.  Keeping up standards.  Like daily shaving in the trenches in the Great War.  Surprisingly difficult to find a wooden brush in these parts, even in the German sections of Transylvania.

Just seeing the DC contretemps on the wires.  First take: actually useful in some ways.  One of the most ancient principles of international law is that no leader can make war when a greater leader actually has the power to order the peace. So the peace must come from an adversarial process. That goes way back, long before the days of the Universal Grotians.

Restaurant

 Some say that there's a restaurant at the end of the universe.  Considering what it is that organisms do and are, I think this to be an entirely reasonable synthesis of intuition.  A dream or two might have suggested this as well.

Currently at my equivalent.  An unremarkable Turkish-oriented easy-food restaurant in a mall.  But it's open late, and its in a small city in the hills of the western Balkans.  And it's across the street from the a station near the midpoint of the legendary night train from the coast.

 The magic persists.  The magic must persist.  Else, we'll never understand everything else. The conceptual synthesis of intuition.  Lege, tolle.

 

 

 

 

Balkan bus and rail odyssey (in the lands of the original of that name) impends.  Flixbus to Montenegrin rail, most likely.  Back online by Saturday afternoon, God willin' and the crick don't rise.

 

 

 

 Fascinating mental problem: Sleeping Beauty.

Say Sleeping Beauty, who forgets that she woke up after she goes back to sleep, will be awakened either only on Monday, or on Monday and Tuesday.  Prince Charming will flip a coin to determine which. Heads, wake twice, tails, wake once.

So Sleeping Beauty awakens, and Prince Charming offers to bet her a Coke that the coin came up tails.  Should she take the bet?

Well, when she awakens, it's either the first day of the heads series, the only day of the tails series, or the second day of the heads series.  So of the three things that could be going on, two of them mean that the coin came up tails. This would seem to indicate that the bet would be wise.

But a coin always has, give or take (there is a slight edge to one side), a 50-50 rule as to outcome.  The condition of her waking up doesn't change that.

Sleeping Beauty's only chance for wisdom would to realize that it would be impossible for her to know what was going on when she awakened.

The moral of the story: If you can't know if any of the things that might be going on are actually the case, it is best to build your world around the things that you do know.

 

 "Don't pine. It kills."  

(John Crowley)

One of the rules that I follow on this little jaunt is that, no matter my feelings towards it at the moment, for every place that I visit, and every set of rooms that I rent, at some point in my life, for some reason, I will think about that place as someplace I'd like to be.  And the challenge is to imagine that, and be transparent to your life at that point.  Life, in a way, is a sort of crossing of these points of experience, and the point is to make the connections between them as strong as possible. Desire animates those connections.

Thinking much about the city.  At the most basic level, I'm still, and perhaps fundamentally, an actor, usually in NYC, even given the subsequent credentials and travails.  So those long mornings waiting in lines before dawn with an egg and cheese with pepper sandwich from the cart and a small cup of coffee with an inexplicable Greek bas-relief on the side (my favorite cup was from a diner in Inwood -- it had some lines from Poe), as the actors wait for the audition studios to open --  a present moment is intending towards precisely that.

Before the city, I was in the first MFA class of a national-caliber program modeled on the legendary first curriculum at J-----d, and our first class was as messy as theirs.  I stayed out of it and haunted the theatres, but the others had long meetings into the night discussing the difficulties.  I kept my own counsel until the mandatory exit focus group, but generally went along with the views of the others then. Support levels were very low and oddly timed, and the most intense areas of the curriculum seemed to have the least distinguished faculty.  I found some good professors, though, and tried to work with them as much as I could.  Had some good roles, genuinely trained rather hard for a number of years.  Learned the art.  And things with the program changed afterwards.

But only a few of us went to the city, and I think I was the last one standing.  We were the genius fiascoes of the beginning, and the road afterwards was self-assembled.  Very few chances at the beginning in the city (aside from a few readings).  Eventually, I built up a cycle of fairly steady and rewarding off-off work (paycheck=subway fare) for several years.  But then an ensemble member (and fight captain) put a barbed trident through my foot while I was halfway through a shoulder roll, rehearsing the title role in Spartacus.  And the dot-com crash TKOd the day job.  So, without in the slightest bidding farewell to my muse, I headed off to law school to try to get a bit of stability in the city. 

Which is where the tale would leave the place and time towards which my thoughts are presently directed. 

Notion. The church, or in the absence of the church, the political center, is the situs of the conflict of good and evil, not an institution characterized entirely by one side or the other.  This is perhaps why those within the way of thinking of the place see places outside the territory of the church or political center as both good and bad.  Intuitively, though, we think that the center is the bright light of good, which radiates outward with diminishing strength.   In fact, the yin and the yang, as it were, at the absolute center are what give these collective notions and vocabularies of good and bad.  The church or political center is half hospital, half baseball game.  In both instances, it is the action of the place, not its inhabitants, that imparts its fundamental character.  Perhaps.

 Given that the situation at times in the past decade has been as physically and psychologically difficult as the more deliberate and world-apparent punishments meted out by states in the last century, I have little patience with people shouting about gulags from their McMansions, or even their reasonably well-furnished apartments.  The point seems to be that what's actually going on isn't reached by these ideas, and the vocabulary simply isn't at hand to express why a good number of people (and specifically these people) are in extraordinary difficulty in a country where a significant preponderance are rather well off.

Every political situation arrives in advance of its aesthetic.  And if you don't know the world that you're in, absolute virtue is the only way.  With Thoreau to the woods.  With Tolstoy to the fields.  With Merton to the texts and study.  There's a subtle but important difference between a fictional world and a false one.

Roughing out a general view: The structures of industrial prosperity built after the world war were idiot-proofed (the greatest generation having some notion of their children), so the social forms of the present could be completely incompetent, and the trucks of frozen hamburgers would still roll in every week.  These social forms degrade, then, and become something less than meritocratic, as the prosperity is on rather firm rails. There are still selection mechanisms, and signs of status, but they're increasingly centered on the social forms themselves, rather than the facility to actually do things in the world.  

All well and good, but this industrial prosperity is based on the corporate form, so to invigorate itself it does more things, the companies build, and drill, and sell. This keeps the organizational form of the companies healthy and lean.  But as a program for society, it poses a few problems, as we might realize over the next few years.  The logic of the New-Netherlands traders can do things in the world (e.g., Goldman, Grey's Papaya), but it doesn't claim to be a basis for the organization of society as a whole.

So the social elites have become distracted with odd notions of liberty and governance, and the remedy at hand is the corporate form  

Difficult days for the publicists, those old-fashioned folks who think of the state as something more than an idea and something less than a sentiment.  The res publicae  is now the rem, or perhaps the rem line of code, the other words being the operative ones.

 

Big strategic changes in Europe.  Haven't read any details, but the Germans are edging in under the French umbrella, and the tightly wound umbrellas of Whitehall enjoying an I-told-you-so fortnight over the independent deterrent.  PM to ramp up defense spending, following the German increase earlier.  Seems like people are buying rather a lot of guns lately.

I wouldn't worry, the British are far off enough from Crimea -- hard to imagine that they'd ever go to war over something that far away.

I've had this notion.  After the second world war, international forces shaped both an organization of states, and a state.  The second is an example of particularity, the first an instance of principles. Inevitably, conflict is the result of such an opposition.

It is right for me to say that the political order of the world should perish before I am destroyed.  It is not right for me to say that the political order of the world should perish before my nation perishes.  The political order of the world is the ground of the possibility of the individual state, and the individual state exists to protect the individual soul.

Beginning the several-day process of raising anchors and leaving this place. When I arrived, the first impulse I had was to run to the mountains of Bulgaria.  It's famously a difficult place, the citizens flee to other nations, sometimes on the scale of an actual invasion.  Legally, you have to have a certain amount of money to leave the country.  Yet it is Europe.  I've been careful not to wander past those bounds.  

If I had to remain, I would remain, but as far apart from the society as I could be. The thing about prosperity is that the people who were once huddled together from necessity sometimes stay huddled together.  Instead, use the modicum of prosperity to put some distance between yourself and the world, use the tools of the mind to perfect yourself, and don't look for truth in the streets of the city, even the clean streets of the cities of the future; cities are always only a tool, though the rich use them as an end (and tend to get in the way).

This city was on the great Roman road on the peninsula, but centuries ago, someone upset that apple-cart.  Interestingly, the modern nation which is the successor to that country would benefit significantly from a bright, clean  east--west avenue in this place.  Run to the hills.  Pursue private perfections. Open the roads.  Just giving myself some good advice.  Onward. 

My guess is that the five things done last week is much less important than the cc field, i.e., generating a map of direct reports across the government.  This bit that provokes you is usually not the bit they're after.

Thanks to the wireless (that word still works), the evening after the walk into the old city was remarkable.  Live Gotterdammerung, followed (within moments) by a major American orchestra with a quasi-semi-staged Carmen.  But these things over the wireless (except for the news) are of value only to the degree they crystallize something in the texts at hand.  Still slogging though the neo-Kantians, and have taken a break from reading the Pittsburgh philosophers of the last century to listen to a few series of Locke Lectures in the evenings.

Controversial use of a tablet as a score by one of the performers in the Carmen.  Having done many staged readings, I thought it was fair, though risky for entirely metatheatrical reasons best left to agents and producers.  (It struck me that the others were likely taking visual prompts from something on the back wall, actually.)  Carmen stands for poetry, incidentally.  He has to kill it to make theatre. Finita la commedia.

To fall into the usual course of thinking and working would be to fall.  Especially on these coasts. Teetering onward.

Walked the hour or so into the city center for Mass.  Universe seemed to be falling over itself to tell me things, so like a Quaker sitting silent on a good day, tried to take in as much of it as I could.  Peculiar place. The town square is perhaps the great Valhalla of elderly men playing dominoes, cards, and chess, complete with scattered evergreen trees from the migrating birds.  Remarkable picture of humanity at peace in dozens of quiet conclaves.

The old Roman forum is partially unearthed, the pillars in surprisingly good shape.  It's in the middle of things, surrounded by streets.  A large sign across the street for the local chamber of commerce, several decades old, is dwarfed by an even larger sign for the call-center operation apparently occupying the building.  On the other side, a small zoo with children screaming at the monkeys.  Civilization eternally presents basically the same proposition to the same types of doubtful minds.

When I got here, I saw that given the location of the rooms, the best thing to do would be to sit at the kitchen table and work all day, and I have done that.  Real inroads.  But I had been hoping for ocean.  It's a catastrophically developed place.  The town center has charm, and there's a resort area further south, but in between, massive concrete buildings facing the artificial shore, and behind them, avenues lacking in basic sanitation, even for the region.  Notably, the development money for the buildings appears not to come from either the public purse or the banks, per the local press. The dogs seem placid; the only times they were barking angrily around me, the subject of their ire seemed to be invisible (but moving).  But I wasn't going to risk the run in the morning.  Lunar colony mode.  Compose in the lander, suit up for rare explorations, and clean off on return.

But this stretch of the Adriatic was the workers' summer retreat, under socialist rule, and that's continued to some extent.  In season, there's a Mass in Polish in the city.  There might be old ghosts here of the Slavic ancestry.  They do come to mind on occasion. Et lux perpetua.