Again in the center of the underventilated balcony for a very interesting play ($6).  Spent most of the second half of it leaning forward to try to find the center of my airspace.  A play staged about life under a certain social system within living memory -- these were the figurations of life then.  Farce, yes, but even in high relief, very meaningful.  And the situations apparently still involve the local mind -- audience quite involved once they got into the scheme of things.  (People tend to be livelier with more oxygen -- a fact well known to actors and long-distance bus drivers.)

Interesting story in the news on ambitious plans for another supercollider on a vast scale.  I really have a hard time believing that, if they listed every experiment they planned to do, and then thought up every possible outcome, it still wouldn't be cheaper just to run subsequent technological streams in parallel, and then, whatever works, represented the outcome of the experiment.  Joking.  Mostly.  This sort of thing does awaken the Luddite in me.  Generating unpredictable entities vis a vis time, space, catching the planet on fire, etc. would seem to have to offer extraordinary rewards in order to make the game worth the candle.  Perhaps humanity is simply an ignition device of the planet.

Local realities, as always, are more worth my attention, but sometimes I see these sorts of things on the news and wonder if there might be a moral obligation to raise the point that more people ought to be focusing on their local realities.  Sputnik logic, Heidegger called it.

 

 In another set of circumstances, remote Bulgarian mountain villages where I could work in healthful surroundings according the higher ways inculcated over many years would clearly be the order of the day.  But not knowing how far off-piste it might be safe to wander in the present world, I stick to the cities of appearances.  

Even though I can see fairly clearly that the truth-determinations and questions hereabouts are directed to the elements of my own place that I know to have fallen under a bit of a shadow.  Surviving in the context of others' worlds of appearances.

With an occasional glance at the hills.

The only-as-secure-as-your-own-phone encrypted chat in all the news:  the reality of civilian control of the military within a corporate mindset.  The worse option might be a military-focused decision protocol.  For one thing, it preserves the language against whatever it is that afflicts it within that five-sided building.  If it's sound enough to run a bank in NYC, it's sound enough for decision making in other contexts.  Or at least the thought runs that way among those so inclined.

In Our Time fleshes out an interesting bit of the collective episteme this week.  MM-P, like the rest of the phenomenology-based folks (who were actually my own gateway to understanding the truth in these philosophical claims, even after scattered graduate coursework) rely on the legitimacy of Kant's transcendent encounter with the world, and there is a rift at the heart of that story -- in fairness, well painted-over by those with a bit of Kant in their ruck.

Live nobly.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002974s 

Sometimes it seems a bit like the righteous foundling type in Henry James' Princess Casamassima -- his guardians sacrifice to send him for a fortnight to Paris, and he frequents the theatres and the cafe -- James' point being that he's not urbane enough to have the adventures that Strether thinks he's having in Paris in The Ambassadors, meeting and penetrating social circles.  But this is perhaps Henry's own ways and vices clouding the issue.  In the event, foundling types with peculiar notions of the right are best off avoiding his types of social circles.  The city is still there.

One of the more useful uses of adversity is being able to negotiate subsequent adversities in a bit more of a civilized manner.  The present ludicrously central and inexpensive rooms required some adjustments -- ($6) chinos instead of denim, to accommodate the daily hand-wash, dinners shifted from sautee to slow-boil, etc.  Had good practice in these modes during a comparable run in Bucharest several months back.  

As I look at it, the inability to shift back to the early runs might have been justified by a few factors beyond sloth, but time will tell.  There are some indications that it was the reasonable course.

Could have done without the politically interesting times and the cancelled performances, but it's a small price paid by a random visitor, and a society forming itself has the precedent claim -- saw what I could from out of the corner of the eye while reading at the coffeehouse.  Careful to preserve neutrality, as there would be several points of personal decision that would need to be crossed before I would sign on with any of these armies of the night/day. But the basic stated purposes of this bit of the stay seem to have been accomplished.  Gently down the stream.

Interesting.

 

 

As an American, it seems increasingly clear that to think like one thinks as an American these days would be a mistake.  And one great thing about being American is that you don't have to think as the others think.  Perhaps the generally disastrous mode of thought prevailing in the country now is somehow mysteriously trying to teach us this.

From the beginning of this Greenland thing, I've been wondering if they're trying to thread the crown protectorate/OTAN republic needle, but apparently that's not borne out by the political status.  Interesting well documented back-story on past strategic efforts there, occasionally involving notes on napkins.

Adaptation of War and Peace at the national theatre.  Noticed for the first time that the gilded bas-relief above the proscenium has a violin on one side and a balalaika on the other.  East and West.  I have a peculiar fondness for this city, as it was the first that Strether escaped to a few years ago after the crescendo in difficulties states-side.  Much has changed in the interval, and it's no longer the brief, blissful freedom in a mysterious place in the short period after an absolutely random jump, but it's still a great place to be.

 One of the clarion moments of the past year: at the theatre festival in German Transylvania, the morning performance by the visiting Noh troupe in the courtyard of the most prominent house of the city, now a museum.  The light shifted during the performance, I stayed standing in the sunlight.  With the first blast of the flute, in perfect synchronicity, the bells of the 18th c. Jesuit church across the way began a long, loud peal before the Mass for the feast of Peter and Paul, and continued through the action.

The situs before this was a bit of a visit to the underworld, geographically in der nahne of Odysseus' journey to the same.  A bit outside of the tourist district, in a place which in February is no one's idea of a tourist destination.  The plan was the sea, but the place was developed in such a way that I could hardly tell it was nearby.

Then, here, to very modest digs in the capital city of the old republic (and older nation), filled with crowds of hundreds of thousands of shouting people, and as much $6 theatre as I could manage, though given recent events, I only briefly visited the churches. Nonetheless.

Gently down the stream.

 

Sometimes truth is more approachable by distant analogy.  Contrast two authoritarian systems, neither of which I know particularly well, and both of which I know primarily by the fiction written under them.  In East Germany, a well-educated person who simply didn't go along with the corruption wouldn't find himself sleeping on a park bench.  There was a social order to be preserved.  Contrastingly, in Albania, if someone was reluctant to go along with things, they might find themselves demoted to a low municipal administration -- also not on the proverbial park-bench, but then, given the personality-based character of rule under the postwar dictatorship, you were then a target for others looking to trace another stencil on their aircraft.  Eventually, you might find yourself sent to the mines, and as social structures continued to be subordinated to personal power, in the mixed population of criminals and political prisoners, might be killed by one of the former.   Two oppressive systems of authoritarianism, perhaps of fundamentally different character, despite their doctrinal similarities.

Now, the US is currently not an oppressive totalitarian regime, pace the intemperate howls from the McMansions, but in the most recent political shift, it has become more like one of these two worlds than the other.  True national socialism is rightly inconceivable, because subordinating the power of the state to corporatism leads to very, very bad things.  True socialism as a path to communism has also rightly been determined to be much too dangerous in the context of large states and industrialization. But it is possible for societies, whatever their point on the political spectrum, to have greater and lesser notions of general social order.  The key is to recognize where the social order works to preserve the society against the excesses of right and left, and to preserve it in itself.

The intelligentsia park-bench metric.  A new Benthamite calculus, perhaps.

Significant night in Islam, the night designated as the time the Koran was received, some traditions say the night when the angels were created.  I recall walking through the Muslim side of Mostar on this night last year--very festive and meaningful.  Quite powerful as well.

By the tradition, the one who received the Koran was asked on what night he received it, and as he was going to answer, saw two people fighting, and was caused to forget the exact date.  (Let those with ears to hear, hear.)

These stories, remember, exist first as ideas.  When golden plates were found in upstate New York, inaugurating a new religion, with its texts resembling the apocrypha turning up in archeological finds and rites closely resembling those of the fraternal lodges, the first significance of the event was this: the true nature of the object, in itself, is such that it would be found buried in the earth, and written on golden plates.  As an ordinary empirical description gives meaning in ordinary ways to the world, a religious belief sometimes gives meaning to the spiritual aspects of the experience.  The insistence of the modern fundamentalists that a religious belief must be true in the ordinary sense is perhaps to distinguish their own religion, which consists precisely of events with ordinary meanings.  Someone with a rich array of polytheistic narratives would understand that the value of these narratives wasn't in saying that a certain thing was the case at a certain point in time. Contrastingly, if the ordinary description of events is not true in the Christian narratives, then the faith has been in vain.  And this is a living balance -- mythology-based meaning tends to be associated with any culture of religion.  Hence the need for simplicity.

And yet, it must not silence the imagination.  Christianity isn't a religion of Bollandism and such, but Bollandism and such helps to keep the mind focused on its essential work.  Which is somehow both spiritual and ordinary.  Ordinary can include many things.  If you believe in angels, angels are ordinary, however rarely encountered.

"It is required that you do awake your faith."

Arguably, the critique has been rather constant, at least since Orwell.  In the age of reason, the danger is the loss of reason itself, as it is used for the Procrustean purposes of power.

Also - the Robert Redford character in Three Days of the Condor: "Community.  Jeez, you guys are kind to yourselves."  The pragmatic approach preserves an existing functional network as a good in itself.  The question of whether they, in themselves, are good tends not to arise. 

 

I don't know the platform, but from the outlines of the messaging app story, my concern would be that when the others saw someone flying slightly outside the lines (mysterious stranger invited to the meeting), they didn't squawk.  Laws of the flock.

 

Postprandial web noodling is clearly the next target of the efficiency drive.  Fixed texts, not bright shiny things on scrolling feeds. You end up reading think-pieces about people who composed the shiny scrolling things a couple of decades ago.

If there is an important novel to be written, it's likely about what happened to the minds of this generation as they encountered electronic things.  This seems to have been the big shift.  Perhaps even in a chiliastic sense.  Or perhaps through some miracle, we'll tire of the bright shiny things, and all of the nefarious machines that have been built using the population-wide economic scale of technological development won't end up in the hands of an evil few.

But addressing the norms will get you little good.  Scourging the sea has no more effect than marrying it.  You must go right to the root, and explain the ways in which people think now.

It is said that a biography is the history of what people thought about you at any given point in time.  I agree, with the proviso that said people need not actually have existed. The distant model, as Girard calls it.

On, Sancho.

 Anniversary of the NATO bombing locally.  Seemed wise to keep a low profile today.  One never knows what associations one has for others.

Wilfrid Sellars takes a lot of flak, principally from his proponents, for having a sort of roundabout writing style.  But in his article-length intellectual biography, which has more than a few fascinating turns of phrase, he seems to show regret about his time at Oxford, seeking out the scientifically-oriented, plain-writing minds, as opposed to the writers (later better vindicated in time) who were writing a bit obliquely.  

Anything that can be stated plainly can be discussed in a more careful manner.  And if the thought itself is correct, a sea-green statement of pure intellectual objectivity does it no additional favors.  Let it arise in its time.

Relatedly, in Ph.D. work, I took a lot of flak in the home department (though not in the other areas I studied) for being too theory-oriented.  An American state university -- according to at least one etymological resource, the name originally meant "plain-speakers."  As a result, when I did write a 400-page project for the committee, it was as plain as I could make it, and I shifted the complexity to the architectonic.

 

 

 Incidentally, the eerie bursts of low-frequency sound have been confirmed to be remnants of the tram noise sound spectrum floating up to the windows and through the building.  On an especially still evening, heard a bit more of the noise and felt the rumble.  Genuinely eerie phenomenon--it's a new apartment, apparently.  Perhaps right at the harmonic of the wavelength.

Sunday night mens sana: Interesting talk on Mansfield rescued from my long list of "watch later" on YT.  Mansfield was to the UK economic law what Earl Warren was to American anti-discrimination law.  Law is merely politics by other mean people.

 

Ibsenite drama at the national theatre.  Instead of holding up their passports, the cast held up an enormous code to scan on the cell phone, perhaps more related to the concerns of the play, rather than the politics of the moment.  (As I don't speak the language or carry a pocket device, both were Greek (second aorist) to me. There actually is a way to parse these codes manually, but you have to memorize a series of overlays first, and then work out the sequence.)  Also an interesting moment with Torvald's knitting/embroidering tips.

Many notes, but the most interesting moment was the door closing -- entirely unstaged, but unforgettable from my standing-view angle of sight.  Long applause from the house after Nora's last line, with house lights at half--peculiar, perhaps a European stage tradition?  Then, in the blackout, the actor walked to the nearest exit, lit by the accidental light from outside against the deep red of the carpet, and a click from the modern door behind her.  The romantic, progressive theatre of Ibsen, but there is a world elsewhere -- this was just a brief framing of it.