I never did solve the mystery of the news about Plato's final hours, listening to (and correcting the measure) of a Thracian servant girl playing the flute.  It was announced as a discovery from a carbonized scroll at Pompeii about a year ago, but as soon as I read that, I knew that I had heard the story before.  Canvassing the web, I see some scattered mentions well antedating the Pompeii news, but nothing citing to source.  Peculiar.  I have a clear memory of talking about it in a seminar during the MFA.  But every source reporting the news reports it as a discovery.

 

--

 

Update, apparently there are six classical sources for the historical life, but tracking them down doesn't look easy/possible at the moment.   To be continued.

 Notion for a short story -- a time when AI has become so advanced and quick that every connection to the internet is mediated, but after a certain snapshot date, the user ceases to modify remote data at all, and the mediating AI simply spins out their world in relation to the rest of the world on the basis of that snapshot date, creating a totally individual but comprehensive timeline.  Eventually, every connection to the internet serves up an entirely different universe. 

With scattered exceptions, mainly on entries years ago, my entire conservatory MFA class appears to have vanished from the internet.  In my mind, they've found the other levels of America, those entire universes lurking between interstate highway exits, and are living out lives of mystery and accomplishment in the small towns that you might find in a John Crowley novel. 

Odd, apparently a Reddit account was created with my email.  Got a privacy policies email blast, and deleted it.  Doesn't appear ever to have posted.  Perhaps there's no confirmation step.

Hegel's notion of the cunning of reason in history comes to mind when realizing that the public identification of the Magna Carta at Harvard happened a fortnight or so before the folks in D.C. started asking if any knights might relieve them of this troublesome university.  

"The Magna Carta of xxxxxxx" is a trope of American English, perhaps elsewhere as well, standing for the representative document (though usually not in a performative sense, like the Declaration and the Constitution) of a certain hard-won right or liberty.   Though its my understanding the Charter of the Forest was the stronger medicine at John's initial concession (subsequently repudiated by Rome).

I do sense the necessity for a clear break with respect to certain communities that I've worked with on the journey.  Speaking freely, as someone who came into Ph.D. work with a three-year conservatory degree in the field, a decade of work in the art and the industry in New York, and a perfect GRE Verbal, while staying deferential and respectful (I think I was known for that), I could see that mediocre scholarship was being covered by rather extraordinary corruption (I've retained sufficient documents to prove the latter, should the need arise).  I could see this much more clearly than the Midwestern college students just setting forth into graduate school, and the reality is that the political corruption means that only the mediocre ones who enthusiastically go along with things are permitted to get jobs in which real work is possible.  (Making the de facto condition that only those who refrain from real work, or who aren't capapble of it, secure these posts.)  But it is still possible to work, apart from the academy -- the politically disfavored of two generations ago, the Jewish scholars wandering to the West, and folks like Peirce are becoming patron saints.  And folks like Maximilian Kolbe (a significant scholar, though that's not really part of the cult's narrative, given the dramatic final act) and some of the German theologians.    

But to set that path means a more clear break, and I'm not sure how to make that break more clear.  There are certainly people in my position, especially after the last couple of years, who are still committed to the political systems governing the academy.  

But as for me and my house, I'm lightin' out for the territories ahead of the rest. 

This has happened to me before.  Just as I think I've gone as far as I possibly could go, and lasted as long as I possibly could last, I see a decent piece of theatre that reminds me that there's still work to be done.

Polish farce, in translation at the local Hungarian state theatre.  Written in the 60's, and with Bora the Tailor still fresh in my mind, I was wondering how it would have played on the JDP stage when it premiered there.  Likely a very different production from this, which updated the context from the alienation on the path to socialism to the alienation on path out of decadence.  Still very effective, but the dialectical logic of the script seemed out of place.  "Life is synthesis!"  And this sort of thing needs to be winking and nudging at the audience throughout, pointing to the real world and saying impermissible things about it.  I think the term in this country used to be "lizards" -- political references that appear and vanish instantly.  This production actually reminded me very much of the O'Toole film The Ruling Class.  Front row, studio scale, so I was back in scene-study class watching people do their work, which was frankly the invigorating bit.  I still have the keys to that work.  

Very good to witness it for a bit.  Reckon I'll push on.

 The two law schools I attended must have had very different ideas about me.  I began at Indiana, a tier-one school, and perhaps the reddest of the red schools.  (This color scheme is distinct from the political one.) But after some faculty shennanigans that went beyond the pale, combined with being a stranger in a strange land in the Midwest after a decade as a professional actor in the city, I transferred to Cardozo, also tier-one then (subsequently to precipitously decline), in NYC.  The latter actually under two flags, American and Israeli, a conservative Jewish university.  Honestly, until I travelled a bit in Europe many years down the road, I didn't have the faintest sense why it might not have been a good idea for a Roman Catholic fellow of Slavic ethnic origin to do that.  

But these considerations are valuable only insofar as they give me a vantage on the culture, and having picked the minds of the constitional and legal scholars of both schools, and especially the public international law scholars at the second, I have a rather unique vantage on things.  Though, in a battle, a stranger with a good vantage on things is at times hostis humanis generis. 

The real work was in the texts though, and very atypically for the usual JD, I took as many courses as I could, and briefed virtually every case in full myself.  (Combined with longhand notes in fountain pen, typed up at night afterwards.  Walking into the first-year contracts final with a fountain pen and some packets of ink perhaps marked me as a true colonial.)  As a result, I had the knowledge, though I was past the pale of both houses, in the meadows beyond.

It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, whiel still standing outside of the social forms.  The great use of my time working on the research doctorate was finding the resources left over from the last century and presently left to gather dust in the enormous library.  (The correlative might be discovering the old basketball gyms at Indiana.  Many a point of common law was memorized while perfecting three-pointers from the top of the key.)  

It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, while still standing outside of the social forms.  When I was in the academy, I made the academic pieces as academic pieces, and I'd like to think that using the vocabulary and methods of the time, I was able to do something wothwhile.  But having the knowledge is a different thing.  I suspect that such a path is the only honest path now (witness the precipitous decline in adacemic admissions over the last few years), and in the years to come, having the knowledge while not being governed by the social forms, which is to say the world, might be the key task. 

Theory: Revolutionary social change happens when the prevailing social norm itself becomes the only way to take hold of the bad things going on inside that social norm (and which may be conceptually unrelated to the concepts of the norm).

Especially now, since the Powers that Be have algorithms at hand, be alert to apparently unrelated things going wrong at the same time.  No need to suppose a vast conspiracy when there's this much consumer data to be gained.  When 'sorrows come not single spies, but in battalions,' there's always a possibility that nefarious types might be using psychological conditioning on a rather large scale to increase their power in certain situations.  

You'll rarely find an attorney who walks into the room and tells you what a bad day they're having.  Shows the gaps in the armor.

Postprandial yesterday: Listened to a tape of an interesting talk by an OP on phenomenology. Criticism included lack of unifying doctrines and authorities.  Of course, a phenomenologist might reply that Thomists face precisely the same dangers--while using the same words and citing identical authorities.  

"What's Hecuba to him?"

(Cunningly constructed as an encounter in potentia, perhaps?) 

Birthday of Patrick Henry, American patron saint of the axiom of the excluded middle.  Often walked past the church where he gave that speech when I was growing up.

 Interesting -- the Times on the King of Canada's throne speech:

 "While the speech was drafted by government officials, the Palace cast a constitutional lens over the address."

 

 

 Ascension.  And now the Days Between.  Interestingly, the local Memorial Day commemorations are linked to the Orthodox observance, shifting the honoring of the fallen heroes to the lunar calendar.

  

 Difficult sleep, no dawn run.  Tempus fugit, non me fugio.

 

 

 

Things are seldom what they seem;
Skim milk masquerades as cream. 

Which is really to say that, given certain historical conditions, the craven and mediocre seem to rise quite quickly in the present world, and quite often, they run the show.  

(And just wait until they really learn to use the LLMs.)  

But one must gild the philosophic pill.  Human knowlege, human virtue, in the single soul.  And the humility to realize that the humans are, by design, never much more than incidental singers of comic songs.

Gently on.

The big picture, like all notions of the totality, is worse than you think.  Make the small things near you right and true.

 

 I'm of at least two minds on the present international unilateral trade rebalancing.  On the one hand, just like the immigration issue, reasonable people have been saying for some time that a disproportionate amount of the wealth of the new world was going to the powers of the old world (which, in fairness, was how the whole thing started off), but the abrupt and unilateral nature of the rebalancing doesn't inspire much faith in the concert of nations that was supposed to have been achieved after the the last great war.

On a different level of the question, I'm a bit concerned that all the nations and powers of the earth are now coming to a particular person, hat in hand.  And the present executive doesn't exactly see himself  as primarily being an officer of the republic.  Power gained can then be used in the world, both domestically and internationally.  I continue to think that the Framwers' vision for the Senate might have been a more useful counterbalance in times such as these.

 Late night with meaningless things, so no dawn run.  The time will slip away, if you let it.

 In the widest possible view (at least given current notions of the possible), I continue to think that the West is generally prosperous due to the industrial structures constructed after the war, combined with the tenfold increase in global populaiton over the last 100 years.  The difficulty is that this prosperity is largely unrelated to the political games and potential corruption inside that (largely idiot-proof) prosperity, and these practices can legitimate themselves by pointing to the prosperity and suggesting that we had better keep doing the things that we're doing.  Surely the politics of the last half-decade or so is enoungh to establish that the general notion that everything's normal is an insufficient basis for the shared life.  It is necessary to actually understand the world -- not in the manner of the sociologists, revolutionaries, or reactionaries, but in a genuine attempt by each soul to come to terms with what it is that surrounds them.  Else, the first person with an answer to come along gets to build his monorail.

This is interesting.  UK declaratory judgment action by homeowners against some sort of parks authority, on the question of whether the public had a right of access -- and the court says that it was error not to join the attorney general as a necessary party, as otherwise the general public wouldn't be bound by the decision.  (Presumably, if it had gone the other way.)

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/why-wild-camping-is-not-prohibited-on-dartmoor-6tn7ms2wk 

 

Occasionally, one drops a breadcrumb, devoutly hoping that it will scroll down into the timeline without leaving a ripple in real time.  At times, I've been proximate to folks who did some confidental work for the government, and I've had some differences with them.   But I have no anger towards them, as I can see the kind of people that they were before the more important types of folks who do confidential work for the government decided to take advantage of their lives.  There's a lot of unseemly stuff going on in the world, and sometimes, the people who are a bit off-balance in life (whether from troubles or sudden good fortune) are drawn, for entirely noble motives, into a frame of living in which they're at some distance from reality.  Be wary of those doors, and when they open, politely finish the lunch, thank them, and don't follow up afterwards.  Live true days.

 I briefly watched a folk-song group in the main piazza early on Sunaday afternoon.  The municipality has (or rents) the universal girder festival stage, control booth, etc.  Impressive scale.  Oddly, everyone seemed at ease with this folk group surrounded by this immense tech scheme. We have perhaps become conditioned to seeing the true image in the machine.  It's the usual form.

At the beginning of this peregrination, I saw a street-theatre piece in the national capital.  Similarly, each performance station was equipped with a large loudpeaker and stage lights.  I was conscious of a certain legitimizing effect.

You have to look for the stangeness in distant cultures these days, as we're all so far into the guitar-band and television-news world that there's an easy symbolic lingua franca, at least in the trade latitudes of the northern hemisphere.  But the strangeness is still there, counterweighting things from below.  The need for legitimating things is perhaps akin to the shift in the Greeks from the jolly travelling performances of the red men, to the wooden and earth theatres, and then to the stone theatres like that built at Athens by Lycurgus.  This elevates the the event, so long as it's not taken for granted.   

And yet, it still must conduct the people to the same mystery.  The reason that there's a very large building with a large cross on top is that there's a rather small book inside that is as important as the building is large.  But the largeness won't help you read it.

Peculiar changes in the geist over the last few days.  Friday, as I was working, I was watching a massive storm shroud the mountain behind the city in darkness for a few hours.  Odd dreams, the usual.  But over the last day or so, the mind when reading has been, not distracted, precisely, but focused in different ways.  Large festival in the city over the weekend, apparently coinciding with a set of commencement exercises at the centuries-old (and seriously royalist) university.  Missed the big concert in the piazza this evening, as it was a small paragraph in a 30 pp. PDF schedule, starting at noon, and omitted from the website schedule, but actually a slate of national singers whose songs were so well known that I could hear the massive crowds singing them from my rooms in a completely different part of the city, the concert going well into the night.  Oddness.   

Given the exorbitant prices for the tall Americanos in these parts (almost $5), I've strictly limited my consumption.  (Well under $3 in Belgrade.)  Had the first this afternoon, after making it to Mass just in time for the closing blessing.  (Technically, there is no binding church law on the amount of the Mass that must be heard in terms of the obligation, to my knowledge, though historically most confessors' manuals require the bit between the bells.  But, not wishing to rest my defenses against condemnation on casuistry, stayed for a good bit of quiet meditation, including a visit to the baptistry to gawk at the medieval mural of the two swords.)

Very, very peculiar few days in terms of inner experience.  The reading especially.  Lightened the load today and just read a CS Lewis novel.  (Incipit of the sci-fi trilogy.  Rewarding if you imagine the chapters being read to the Inklings, and try to suss out what really might have been being said.)  

Odd shifts in the Force.  As if a considerably deeper river were crossing the stream at a certain point.  

"I am not for all waters."  Nor, for that matter, against any given one of them.  Carefully, jovially, and gently on.