Quiet day. The goal was to sit quietly and read. Restoring a bit of the focus that was lost last month in the inner-city rooms. Quite successful for most of the day.
To be productive, occasionally you need to think of yourself as an animal, and cause the animal to do the useful things by manipulating surroundings and habits. While always reserving the capacity of free will that could accomplish everything in an un-caused and spontaneous fell swoop of success.
Gently down the stream.
Postprandial cinema: Trial and Error (The Dock Brief), 1962. John Mortimer play, on Broadway the previous year, adapted for film with Peter Sellars. The Proto-Rumpole. Very mid-century UK, a bit like a J.B. Priestley, with morals and apercus of a masonic tincture scattered in among the macarizing. Worthwhile.
Pisistratus is still the classical paradigm, perhaps. Some of the details are almost eerily on-point. A tyranny brought to power by the people over the oligarchs. His supporters wearing characteristic garments that one historian said kept them on the farm because they looked ridiculous in the cities. Reaching out to the conventionally highly-regarded poets and writers, so long as they wrote in service of his golden age.
I have to wonder if part of the chaos in the country now is from no one explaining the different thories of power, how they relate, and which of them (after a pragmatic alliance with the right-wing think tanks), has suddenly come into almost unchecked power.
These are the corporate types of New Netherlands. This is a specific theory of power, and virtue (Weber, Gierke, etc.). Instead of voting for their own representatives, the people voted for their neighbors' boss, in the hope that their neighbors would get what was coming to them. And now, at least for the nonce, it's America, Inc.
That's the dark view. There's another way of seeing it, in that very old forms of statecraft are being used in the manner of free-enterprise corporations, and there's an outside chance that new forms of statecraft might result.
It's a vertiginous moment, and one that could still go either way, but very few people seem to realize the nature of the event, and the history of these forms. Or how far we might be from the ground.
I see that India is trying to get a handle on the stray dog problem, interestingly through judicial means. When the poor neighborhoods are marked by hungry, roaming, suffering carnivorous animals, civilization needs to adjust a few things. Those in the neighborhoods come to symbiosis with them, of course (with lapses and exceptions), but I can vouch for the fact that they have a different approach to the stranger.
The northern countries have solved the problem admirably by sterilizing them and leaving them in place, but the root of it is that people bring them into the place and then cast them out.
Local strays I've encountered have seemed quite docile. Much more like the country to the west in that respect than the one to the southwest.
I'm not exaggerating the noxiousness of Balkan smoking and vaping. Part of the culture, so you just have to accept that the air will be a bit poisoned in the polis. One reason the morning runs are always calculated to hit the point between the dogs and the first waves of smoking/vaping humans on the sidewalk. Inter canem et lupem.
Walked through an absolutely noxious cloud on the way to the grocery. It's a bit like biking through Harlem -- once you have the first indication of the scent, you try to figue out the vapor trail and pick another vector. Thought I might need a month of detox afterwards. And then, in the evening, to the old market on the apparently largely Muslim side of the river, though in fairness the constant mild tincture of sweetness in the air from the vapes was likely coming from the crowds of visitors. Walked to the mosque at the top of the hill, with the path ending in a sort of parking lot. Perhaps the wrong approach. Walked back down the other side of the hill, past a sort of WSQ 5-on-5 halfcout setup. Some decent shooting, but defense is not an emphasized skill here, nor apparently is rebounding -- the latter ceded by common consent to the tallest fellow underneath. Perhaps a hesitancy from politeness.
Admittedly, a vegetarian nonsmoking actor from the city would always have some difficulties in this part of the world. On the other hand, the ubiquity of smoke in the American downtowns now is one reason why I think it would be unlikely that I would head back to a big city. Dope the ghetto. Interesting times.
When in a difficult situation, the most important thing is to keep the situation clear. The international law of armed conflicts began by forcing the warmakers to make clear the beginning and end of the conflict, who and what was involved, and what they were seeking. This took centuries.
Present ways are different than this -- think the John Houseman character in Three Days of the Condor: "I miss the clarity."
Some difficulties arise when not all of the secrets belong to you, of course. But making the the situation clear out of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind can be accomplished with the necessary discretion. Whether it will be at all effective, or really, if anyone will notice, is a secondary concern. Always ensure that your derring-do is under the right flag, nailed to the mast if necessary.
Feast of the Assumption.
In which I remember arriving in a new city to begin graduate study, not having secured an apartment in advance. (Such things were possible, once.) Walking through the carnival for the feast in the old Italian neighborhood, asking at the raffle table where there might be listings for apartments. They pointed me to the rectory next to the old brick church. I knocked at the door and asked if they knew of anyone looking to rent an apartment. They went back into the kitchen for a moment and came back with a typed list, using which which I found an upstairs one-bedroom in an old wooden building a few blocks away.
One of the first things I bought were some small basil and oregano plants, kept on the old kitchen counters. The orchestra was a short walk away, and the tickets were inexpensive. The brand-new university library wasn't immense, but it was sufficient. The artistic studios were the same rooms that were in use in the 1920s and 1930s, in the first popular flourishing of the modern American arts. It was a beginning.
Commemoration is memory. Remembering is an action; it can either be the case or not be the case. Simply speaking the word "memory" isn't some sort of a spell that can provoke the condition. You must do these things, however small and insignificant they might seem.
Interesting, one detail that I missed in the last country: the derisive name of the youth coalition supporting the government is a malapropism suggesting a spelling error in Cyrillic when trying to write "students". Basically the "skollers".
The academic structure is taken much more seriously in this part of the world. Having a degree effects a qualitative change; you become an "academic citizen." Professional actors list their professors in their bios throughout their career. Random choruses of the Gaudeamus break out at bus stops and lunch-counters... [no]
The "unfinished solution" approach the protest groups have been taking there is interesting. Still not quite sure what to think of it.
In fairness, the title "students" isn't a name without negative connotations, when it comes to political groups -- cf. Afghanistan.
Never expect vindication. They're using that stick for other things now.
By all means, if you know a particularly worthwhile circle and want to attempt to convince them, that might be a good idea. But don't launch yourself into the world with a lantern in the expectation that the great and the good yet unknown will recognize the truth in your reasoning.
Contrary to much of the prevailing philosophy, it is possible to observe, and to reason, and to understand within private experience. Kant never left his city; Socrates left only to serve in the foreign wars. The ability to think the critical thought, and the ability to speak to others about it are equally necessary things -- neither can substitute for the other, and both must be the case.
Also, they're not the same thing.
Feast of Maximilian Kolbe. Travelled the world, became an influential scholar using the latest means of the mass media of the time, and yet even within his cult, largely only remembered for the manner of his death.
Perils of not getting a decent autobiography to an influential publisher before the deluge, perhaps. Though arguably that's not the best use of the brief candle.
No special knowledge or insight on this, but -- if you look at the projections on most European maps of the Crimean area, Sevastapol seems to be just an enclave off to the side. About a year ago, I noticed an old Russian naval map that put the port at the center, and it makes a very big difference. The mineral resources and ethnic populations are of course factors as well, but if you look at the land taken in the present conflict, there seems to be a good chance that the incentive to do so came from trying to protect the place where they keep all the boats.
Another 19th c. view:
The highlight of recent months was undoubtedly the Comedie Francaise performance in Budapest. Back balcony, about $7. Amplified, but still, the Alexandrines -- the verse. (Marred slightly in one scene by the older woman a few rows down pulling open a beer tab to the general amusement of the section. I imagined her to be an anarchic former actress of the company.) Not a touring production, a cultural exchange of a recent show. A brief glance at the distant homelands of the spirit -- 'but to whet thy almost-blunted purpose.' Looking further back, the Normandy Moliere piece and the Noh pieces at the Transylvanian theatre festival brought similar, and similarly brief, illuminations.
In the depth of the winter in the Jedi city, I survived by purchasing a month's access to the London stage tapes web channel -- just listened to (and occasionally watched) the tapes from the last two RSC seasons: the λεγειν. And Wodehouse adaptations from time to time. Preserving the ability to reach into experience with the mind. We weren't put here just to survive the experience.
The mind keeps returning to the beginning of charging admission in the early modern English travelling theatre. Something happened there, perhaps, when the (already divided) Reformation met the empiricism prevailing on that island, especially in the colder and cloudy northern bits.
There is an epistemological argument for the apotheosis of the currency, and it traces to the beginning of the last century. Basically it runs something like this -- we are inculturated with old habits of mind that have become unproductive, and led to things like war, papistry, etc., and the best way to live is to do what works, and the gaining of the dollar is therefore the objective indication that you're doing the right thing. A very darksome view would see this at the root of much of the know-nothingism, the explicit anti-Catholicism prevailing at the land grant universities of the 19th c., etc. A kingdom of moral ends, that first light of the enlightenment, actually confounds this worship of wealth, so having a moral center is made identical with conceptual and ethical notions about the physical body.
And this epistemological sense is at the root of the actual glee that some have when seeing others without money. Avarice has its reasons. It's just that they're not very good ones.
There's no easy answer. These truth-seekers and fellow travellers who have been fighting each other, over the last couple of centuries especially, have distilled various necessary elements of larger truths within their fenced-off private domains, and you do have to try to understand everything in order to get anywhere.
No simple highway.
When landing on a market-based, advantage-seeking planet, you have to know how to get where you're going, while losing as little as you can. The exchange rates at the bus terminal were actually fair, a small spread between the buy and sell points. Bypassing the half-dozen invites for taxi rides on the way out, I went up to the only licensed vehicle I could see, and he quoted ~$12 USD for a 2 mile ride. I left without comment, but checked the other entrances, as it was after dark, and I wasn't exactly sure of the way. Unfortunately, the line of licensed cabs at the doner kebab were all out of service, so I shouldered my bags, checked my compass, and headed off into the night.
As it turned out, everything was safely lit, and I was walking through the town center on a summer evening, so it was quite pleasant. Got a first orientation (I had looked at online maps before arriving, and sketched out a rough plan of the town) about a third of the way there from a tourist map, and then got my bearings from the Catholic cathedral. I checked en route, but since I had written down the second name of the street rather than the first, the polite elderly fellow taking out his trash merely gave a friendly shrug, which I returned with a knowing smile and wave. After 2/3 of the journey, I was reasonably sure I was on the correct road, but had no idea how to mark the right cross-street, so I asked a cab driver at another doner restaurant, who good naturedly gave directions (which were undoubtedly logical for a cab mindset, but pointing back to the main road and saying that it was the next big intersection would have worked as well). I thanked him, but just before setting out, decided to take the cab instead, at the quoted rate of ~$6, as the evening was growing late.
Then a quick walk around. ~$8 for 2L of milk, two packages of crackers, three liters of water, 100g of coffee at the convenience store found on Google Maps, then walking about discovered a proper box of health cookies that would serve for cereal (~0.90) and a loaf of sliced bread (~0.50).
In the end, the destination was reached with sufficient nutrition. The costs were unreasonable, but landing in a place is the journey from unreasonableness to reasonableness. Not to be forced, but to be determinedly advanced towards.
There's a sort of latitudinal line that you cross when travelling south, when the bus changes from noisy passengers with loud conversations and music and a dour crew, to noisy conversations and loud music from the bus crew, while the passengers grow quiet. I noticed this in Bosnia/Croatia as well -- and when the bus travels closely to politically contested ground, the music changes, the conversations seem to change in character. Defining their relationship to the place, perhaps.
From the plain governed by the country to the north, the contested region here is bordered by mountains, so I understand the almost mythic sense of gazing longfully at the mountains from the flatlands. On the other hand, even the cities governed by the northern country on the border seem mostly to be marked by minarets.
Several large fires visible along the route -- midsummer in the Balkans.
Absolutely exhausted. Walked around a bit, combining Google Maps with commonsense wandering to secure enough food for the next few meals, which is no mean feat in an ex-Yugoslav city on a Sunday night. Between a few convenience stores and a late-night fried-things bakery that sold bread as well, sufficient grub secured, at around half the cost of a couple meals sourced from a proper grocery.
Very strong contrast, not only with the average American city (which, in fairness would me much less walkable) but also with the more Western countries to the east and the north. It's basically the same logic as going to Wal-Mart all the time when I was working in outdoor dramas in Kentucky -- going to the distant places is much easier when you can handle support and supply issues quickly and efficiently. The German hypermarkets were my base in the country to the east -- even in the largest cities. When the means of securing necessities are clear and direct, the complexity can shift to where it's more profitable -- the thinking, the making, the reading, the exploring, etc.
