When you come to understand the nature of a place, you need to amend your life to reflect that understanding.  

It is important to be antifascist, and also to be conscious of the authoritarian dangers of an overly socialist mindset -- while at the same time, one does need to be as ruthless as a commissar or a private-sector-military type.  In a broad sense, my country has deployed one sensibility against one, and another against another, but the dangers of not thinking at all have no inherent adversary.  Indeed, there are many who seem very much in favor of it as a collective strategy (e.g., perhaps, the dope-the-ghetto clouds of marihuana vapors on the streetcorners).  

The differences between right Hegelianism and left Hegelianism were finally settled, as Rorty was fond of saying, at a six month long academic seminar entitled the Battle of Stalingrad.  Society has a right to guard itself against the dangers of collective beliefs.  But the guards against collective belief should not necessarily give the rule in matters of private understanding.

To enter into the errors of ether side would indeed be error.  But you must become conscious of your own existence (classically, that presence which is not quiddity: freedom), and its meaning, and its morality -- or it will be taken from you, and then done away with.

It's not just that films like The Matrix (Baudrillard/hyperreality) reveal aspects of present-day life in this society -- it's that they are a more clear way of understanding the actual event than the normative, intuitive, unexamined view that most people generally think with.

There's much more going on around you than your general mindset might indicate, and the things that you're caught up in likely mostly serve to generate revenue for someone else.  Every Eastern tradition in contact with the West has the same message for Westerners: dispassion and mental clarity.

And as for the locals, as absurd as the precepts of Scientology might be, the general notion that the highest good is the clarity of the mind is admirable.  But to reach this, people first have to try to be good, and second, have to try to be good in the right way, and I don't think the culture generally is even to first base on that one anymore. 

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

A minimally sufficient life in a place of real culture.  This has been my aim when means were sufficient, and when they have been insufficient.  Witness the Wittgensteinian camp bed, table and chair, with the addition of stacks of books.  And a kitchen and WC, of course.  (Dining in college not being an option.)

W never visited Oxford during the war.  Enemy alien, perhaps.  And, more dangerously, one who stood outside the world of appearances.

 I should make clear that there is no logical reason for me to have been fighting for my life, and fighting to do real work, on the streets are of my country all of these years.   I have no bad habits, lead a very clean life, keep in intellectual, physical and spiritual shape.  No mendicancy ever, strict daily disciplune.  My degrees were strong (first tier) and my experience in theatre significant and wide ranging.  And yet, decades of fighting to survive in impossible situations, almost invisible.

Perhaps it has so something to do with my family's work (not mine) or perhaps I stepped on the toes of some soi-disant  master if the universe.  

There's been a string of these notes in the blog with springtime--the mind thaws.  But I do need to make this clear -- there is no logic or reason to the excruciatingly difficult position I've been in.  See the note attached to my online CV for details on the slog.

I entered the Temple of St. Sava reverently.  It had been a long journey.  Some months ago, I had found myself in rural Virginia, near my undergraduate university, almost tapped out, as I had been unable to find an apartment using the last of the Covid savings, and I realized that I could last longer abroad.  I then checked the airline prices and the rental costs, and with a day, I was flying to Belgrade, in order to spend the days looking for work online.  Of course, since the standing room tickets to the national theatre were less than $5, I was frequently there.  And I spent many hours walking around the city and reading in the park.  I found a job, but it required a Windows machine, and I only had a Chromebook, so I pressed "pause" on that, and kept looking.  I was living in a rental in an old outdoor mall from the days of the Republic -- Kumecivo Sochache (sp?), inside one of the stores that had been converted to tourist rental.  I kept to myself, drank coffee, baked bread, read Henry James in the park, and looked for work.

Finally, I found a position in India as an Assistant Dean and professor, teaching American constitutional law and international public law.  I had extended the stay by a few weeks, as I had been unable to bring myself to abandon the quest before I found something.  Unfortunately, Turkish Air and I didn't see eye to eye on the rebooking, which cost me the price of a new ticket, hastily rebooked after being turned away at the airport on the day of departure and then booking an extra night at the rental and a second ticket.  

The rental was actually my second place there.  I had initially found a place in New Belgrade, right across from a small university, apparently rented by a local government official, perhaps now retired.  A 24-hour chain bakery two blocks away.  Michael, the government official, was a bit more savvy than he let on.  We were using Google Translate to communicate, passing the laptop back and forth -- on the first pass, he made a befuddled face and punched some keys apparently at random, bringing up my entire (innocuous) search history.  It had been difficult to find him at the airport -- I think he might have had second thoughts when I showed up in an old winter coat and with a BW knapsack, as opposed to the usual American attire and rumble suitcase.  We talked a bit on the drive over; I mentioned that I had wandered through the temple during renovations on an earlier visit in 2002.  I was with a theatre troupe, and we had an excellent Italian dinner with our hosts on King Michael street, just across from the JDP.  They indicated the structure on the hill, and I mentally decided to explore it later on.  Luckily, the gate was open, as the small chapel and gift shop was open.   I wandered into the main church, finding a few candlelit icons on the back wall.  The floor was dirt, and the stones around me were rough-hewn ("when building a great dome, one does not use finished stone" Hegel, I think).  I purchased an icon and kept it with me for some time.  When I described my visit during the renovations to Michael on the drive in, he gave me a bit of inquiring side-eye, as the temple had been under construction, not renovation, something that had escaped my perception, being considerably more intrepid than knowlegable.

At any rate, the van to the airport departed from the traffic circle at the bottom of the hill.  I asked the driver to wait a moment, got out, and had a brief colloquy with the distant Temple, mentally resolving to return to that particular place.

After the confusion with the airlines, I had lost my deposit on the planned rental in Cleveland, and the indolent fellow from whom I had rented before refused to proceed without it.  I put out a call to a fellow who I knew rented inexpensive rooms near the university in Illinois, and he agreed to rent me one for a few months, so that I could prepare the courses for India.  India proved to be chimerical.  They sent the wrong paperwork twice, and the third batch was mysteriously held up for over a week with the courier, arriving the day after I would have had to file it in Chicago.  Now inarguably completely tapped out, I returned to NYC for what proved to be a difficult winter, which broke in spring when I returned to the Balkans, first heading to Bucharest, and then Sibiu.  But now I was back in the temple where I had been for the previous year's easter night liturgy, and many Sundays reading the psalter after Catholic Mass at the tiny cathedral near the Parliament.  

A guard approached and told me that I would have to leave, as there was a liturgy with the Patriarch about to start, and only Serbians were allowed to be within the building.  I was taken aback, but reasoned that a church without walls would have a hard time building a ceiling, so it would be best to go quietly.  (The walls and ceiling, incidentally are covered with brilliant mosaics and pietra dura paid for by Gazprom.)  I asked if I could stand outside the doors on the porch and look in, and he agreed, but later came back to say that this was to be prohibited as well, and asked me to stand some distance off on the grass.  I obeyed, peering at the small bit of the inside I could see, until the Patriarch and his party arrived on the porch, and then I headed off to Starbucks.  

It had been a bit jarring, but also inspiring.  The Christian place of worship was meaningful enough to them that they felt they had to defend it against all other peoples (Americans understandably not being high on the list).   It was a rare inhospitable moment in a country famous for its strict rules of hospitality, and that made it even more meaningful.  I felt a bit like a missionary playing pickup baseball with a remote tribe who suddenly find the game so meaningful that they keep all the equipment for themselves, and make it a part of the tribe's life.  I don't think I've ever seen a more clear demonstration of the conquering power of Christ.

I returned to the city some months later, as part of the extended Balkans travels.  First, a tiny studio across the street from St. Mark's, the parish church near the Parliament built in the 1940's, and I visited it a few times, but I respected the discipline of the church, and kept away from both the temple and the patriarchal cathedral closer to the old city.  I had a peculiar dream one night connected with an angel -- he cast salt in my face for some reason, and I shifted into lawyer mode, demanding to know who was in charge there.  Shrugging, he pointed to some small figures far below, clearly prelates of the national church.  The angel had an immense face.

Although I visited the parish a few times, that stay much more often found me at the Starbucks across from the Parliament ($2 Americanos) and the JDP and the national theatre down the street, tickets at both well under $10, as culture is thought a necessity there, rather than a luxury good.  I had a small wooden table in the rental, which was good for reading, and the strong hotplate made for some savory dinners.  (When I am forced back to the city for these difficult winters, the coffeehouses and the dinners abroad tend to come into sharp relief in memory.)  One night at the Starbucks, I listened to the live broadcast of Rheingold from the season opening at Bayreuth -- at the end of the evening, the parliament building was brilliantly lit across the street, filing the windows, just as Valhalla is revealed.  (An uneasy cultural synthesis, of course, as the Germanic horde and Belgrade aren't on the easiest of terms historically.)  

After the month or so across from St. Mark's, I decamped to Zemun, to a apartment rented from a local musician and scholar -- the bombed out air defense building was visible from the window, and on the other side, there was the distant strobe of Usce Mall, which had been an excellent place for necessities until I figured out the markets.  I spent my time there writing, gratefully.  Walking into the city from time to time, across Brankov Most for a bit of theatre or some coffee, and then the long walk back at night.  And the full kitchen and the nearby Lidls made for many healthy repasts.  I was able to see theatre, read, think, and write.  Belgrade has offered this to me on occasion, and it has come to stand for the proposition of a safe station on the road, where I can stop off and write or explore for a month.  

But it is one of two countries in the world whose constitutions begin by declaring it the home of the dominant ethnic group, and those others who live with them.  

It has its mystery, and its discretion.  But when I've occasionally visited for a bit of respite from an inexplicably difficult life in my own country, I've been grateful even for its reticence and defensiveness.  Such things are real, and indicate realities.

 Anniversary of the birth of Ovid, who figures in the Balkan consciousness thanks to exile in Varna.  Just discovered Andric had an early collectiuon if poetry/prose based on the letters.  (If it is in English, nypl doesn't have it.)

Have considered learning Serbo-Croat for the sole purpose of reading the Andric sign in front of JDP.  A quest.

 In sum, a rather difficult winter.  Blog notes such as 'bit of a nip in the air' were more bread crumb than unmediated description.

I'm of two minds in the alleged Saxe+Coburg motto 'Never cuomplain, never explain.' On one hand, it works out rather well for the sovereign if everyone does it. On the other hand, it does help keep mental focus.  At munimum, it's good to note when to mend.

At the heart of it, perhaps the key claim is that a minimally sufficient life should be attainable without signing on with the CIA, or playing along with various Midwestern con artists.

These examples have not been selected at random.

 Surrounded by the sorts of things one would expect in a place like this, I continue to work determinedly to return to a place of basic sufficiency, living culture, and discovery.  Belgrade.  Sarajevo.  Cluj.  Mostar.  Bucharest.  Sibiu.  Pirin mountains.  Bar.    

And yet, to get to the place where I could work, and be incapable of work, would get me nothing.  So I focus on what work I can do here, knowing that I'll be reaching to the same sources in the distant, more neutral countries.  God willin' and the crick don't rise.

 Despising, for you, this city...

There is a world elsewhere.

Finally realizing that nothing within the world of appearances within your culture and civilization will ever be of use to you, or even sufficient to preserve your existence, is oddly quite liberating.  

To the hidden, which is to say (in the full meaning of the term), the actual world.

 This can be a difficult place, not least because of the clouds of marihuana fumes and the surprisingly large percentage of folks who seem interested on copulating with a fellow (and the corresponding number who seem to think that a fellow wants to copulate with them).  These and other troubles will likely increase with springtime in the coming weeks, the difficulty and trial shifting from phusis to geist. 

Historically, a difficult time for a son of man.

To will to stand before God is an ontic resolution.

To be against the erasure is an ontological axiom.

To resist the corruption is a pragmatic (Kant) determination.

The world of appearances is the confluence of these levels.  Be wary of those who appear powerful. What seems simple requires differences and distinctions.

 Twice now, the Alleluia has been unseasonably intoned at the cathedral at morning mass, without recognition or apology.  As if it were unimportamt. Not exactly a minor See.  Interesting.  

 Hm, okay -- it's not the tourist swarm that causes the loss of energy.  Apparently, it's sitting down in a firm chair in a climate-controlled room after the evening and morning.  Understandable.  Just need to catch it on the swoop downward, do some breathing, and caffeinate a bit at the right moment. #science

 I appear to have taken on Peirce's fortunes, at least as to the financial aspect.  We share a simple befuddlement at not being able to get on when doing important things that you're supposed to be doing, and that you trained a rather long time to do.  His relationship with Wm. James (and possibly Henry) must have been interesting -- the famous prolific philosopher, a Bostonian of private means, patrician son of a Swedebourgian industrialist, who never claimed much depth academically, in contrast to the ever-swotting, completely unrecognized, penniless, greatest American philosopher of the time, who was completely blacklisted from the academy generally, and more importantly, Harvard.  

(And who, in fairness, also had an unwise love affair and risked a grand gesture of purchasing certain real estate.)   

 Bit of a nip in the air last night.

I'm not making the argument that those who resist corruption in my society are hived off from the rest, given a hard time and perhaps even done away with, as that would invite a very broad debate touching very large social questions.  Frankly, my society doesn't have the social mechanism for addressing these types of concerns.  At most, they would be addressed as a claim by an individual, and so my energies are best devoted to surviving the situation, whatever the larger social resonance, and however many others might be in the same position.  

Things do look a bit dark at present, and these sorts of notes are the kind of thing I would want to have said, were the time of saying things to come to a close.  I'm certain that, at minimum, it will be mined for sentence structure and word choice by some AI bots trawling the web and perhaps used to build a bot to sell cosmetics or luxury time-shares on a website, so, you know, at least some good came of it.

 Still mystified by the peculiarities of starting the day in the libraries.  After the workout, Mass, breakfast, and about an hour of reading, I go through the security search, get into the building, find a place, and then a swarm of tourists descends for a little over an hour.  In the middle of which, almost invariably, all of the energy vanishes from my body rather quickly.  Still can't fathom that.  

I could delay the library for an hour, but then finding a place would be difficult.  I could go to the other side of the room, but they apparently have the vents on double there (and nil on the better side, which leads to some thin air late in the afternoons) which makes for a drafty day.  

And to top it all off, they're staging some incredibly misconceived immersive theatre performance twice a day when a lounge singer comes in and belts out "People who need people..." twice a day for twenty minutes apiece.  I abscond for the duration, but can still hear it in the distance.

The collections are really the only useful thing about the city for me at present, but getting to them is starting to drive me a bit mad.  Onward -- steady as she goes.

Interesting time getting to Mass -- finally found out that it was in the Lady Chapel, and managed to get through the security for the patrocina grand event.  This is a complicated city; I've recorded many of the complications in this blog.  But the church manages to still provide a window, a windowed monad, perhaps, on the reality of the faith.  The difficulty is that almost everyone is caught up in rhythms of habituation, imitation. and competition -- the thing itself is obscured, and it would take some doing to point out that there is grail there to be uncovered, let alone the disposition and work involved in bringing the inner truth of the event to light in the present time.  Never let the world teach you about unworldly things.  At most, it provides a window.  

The church is a ladder supply warehouse, not a ladder machine.  I prefer this metaphor to the analogy of a  hospital (apparently one with a peculiarly ineffective psych ward).

---

Standard daily paean to southern Europe -- the desire to return to a minimally sufficient existence, interesting cultures and art, and the dignity of civilizational context.  I'm remaining calm and carrying on, but this departure and return really does need to happen rather soon.  

Was doing some private devotions on the walk from the gym to the cathedral, and encountered a father talking to his very young son in what I suppose he thought to be a normal voice, but one which any sufficiently well-grounded observer could tell was primarily an instrument used to attack a hostile world.  

Contrary to the received view in the New World (Prospero: "Tis new to thee...")  civilization can also preserve innocence.

Eventually, all of the notions that you projected onto the City wear away.  This takes time -- decades, sometimes.  Then you see its actual nature.  And you vow never to return.

Really, the only reason I moved here many years ago was to work in the theatre -- that was why I kept to midtown and the west side, when the east side was clearly the better part.  Now that all of those doors are not only closed, but obstructed by vegetation that's grown in the interval, I look at the place in considerable disbelief.  Midtown has become what was, even a couple decades ago, only found in the raciest parts of Chelsea and the East Village.  And the old bohemian areas are simply wealth-extraction points via the rent.  Between the enthusiastic young epicures and the money-raking owners, there's not really a place for a serious artist, writer or thinker to stand.  

Homo, fuge!

Dangerous times, with the Machiavel with certain distinct foreign entanglements leading the armies into battle.  But the democracy is usually right -- and its (highly mediated) judgment was that the dangers of the corrupt Republic were greater than the dangers of the mercurial Machiavel.  

Frankly, I'm just attempting to survive and understand things.  (At times, I'm not sure which is more difficult, or necessary.)

My writing about the corruption I've encountered is not merely reflexive or purposeless.  At the Berlin Wall, the guards were convinced to fire on their fellow citizens by being told that the folks trying to get out of the country were stealing the value of their education from the socialist republic.  In that there are potential countervailing claims of right, I do need to be absolutely clear about the corruption that I've encountered, and the dispositive effects of these incidences of corruption.  

'nuff said, perhaps.

 Still very struck by the fact that what seemed a difficult exile, scratch  level existence in a distant country, now seems an unapproachable ideal. Dispassion. Dispassion. Dispassion.

 "Walk around the city, examine its ramparts..."   The right to roam is one of the things I admire about the UK, though, to my understanding, it has been a bit curtailed in recent years.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/royal-family/article/king-charles-england-coast-path-dqwmvxp2j

 There is a recent Russian film. I can't recall the title, set in a small town by an industrial port.  One of the workers has come there with the secret plan of swimming to one of the American freighters and defecting.  He befriends a local youth, and there's some Bildung -- the space race is on, and there's the cult of the astronaut -- while the fellow is relentlessly training in the gym, planning his bid for freedom.  Long story short, he misses the timing, and swims after the departing freighter, presumably perishing in the attempt, and the young boy finds himself in Moscow, randomly face to face with an astronaut at a victory parade, and hands him a bouquet of flowers.

There is more space than one might think between nations, and it's easy to be lost in the space between.  From this, in a pragmatic sense, I take the lesson that I need to be a bit more tenacious if I manage to make it back across to the more neutral European countries. Heretofore, I had thought of it as a bit of a temporary refuge while nomading, and was grateful for the minimally sufficient life and culture that I was able to secure.  And I tried to return the gift by writing as much cultural criticism as I could.  But life is more serious than one might think at first, and given the inexplicable, extraordinary difficulties that I am facing in my own country, I need to become more interested in the other lands that I visit.  There is only one life to be had, and I need to be alert to every possible path to an existence that could support worthwhile work, whether in the arts, or the law, or just writing and reading.  

I've taken up the habit of the occasional predawn psaltery of the liturgy of the hours.  An old form -- the text is hard to find for free in Latin in the right format.  Originally, I was using a 16th c. version, but the source website shifted to an early 20th c. version, so I followed along.  It is valuable, in that it clears the channel.  When one awakens in the city, one doesn't necessarily awaken in one's true capacities.  Like good animals. we learn what comportment to have in order to survive, and we default to that.  But the true capacities of the human, including the sheer effrontery of addressing heaven before sunrise, isn't necessarily in the urban worker's skillset.  People have been pointing this out at least since Plato, but the city has a distorting effect on us political animals.  I think industrialization has deepened the problem in two dimensions.  First, the worst of the grotesques, and there are many of them, seem to be barely human.  Second, proximity to the center of the civilization doesn't seem to have a humanizing effect.  The wealthy, as far as I can tell from occasional conversations and reading their sorts of news sources, seem completely lost in a more genteel fashion.  In the early 20th c.  many of the anti-soviet cultures had, perhaps in response to the humanism at the center of socialist revolutionary thought, a cult of the ideal human.  You see this in the art in the figures of steely determination -- not the carefully rendered musculature of Bernini's monumental Roman sculpture or its inspirations in the sketeches of the renaissance, but looming, iron figures of human-scale strength.  I noticed this phenomenon clearly in the Croatian churches of Bosnia.  

Perhaps to blunt these twin dangers of the idealized human, modern industrial civilization in the West seems increasingly to encourage a sort of blurry incapacity in its citizens.  The focus is on personal contentment in a more Epicurean sense.  The political and economic calculus is explicitly based on happiness, and while the absence of pain is a good thing, once this metric moves into a more positivist scale, the search for happiness can become a bit manipulable and meretricious.

My country does have its own spiritual resources, as far as they might be from the culture of the present, and I've sought them out.  There is a distinctly American way of hearing the different drummer, and one can use this cultural space to set up a Walden of one's own in which to live as deliberately as possible.  But again, this is very far from the present state of the culture collectively, so even though this path is distinctly American in provenance, those taking the path become hostem humanes generis in the hyper-real corporatist culture of the age.  

As a consequence, one does need to imagine oneself into a place of sufficient freedom -- but what distinguishes this from madness, or swimming out to sea in blind faith, is that the imagined space becomes a place in which it is possible to exercise the powers of reason in freedom.  That is both the desideratum and the place of finding it -- the capacity of thinking, the possibility of thinking, and the place of the possibility of thinking are, in a pragmatic sense, the same.  The dancer, the dance, the music and the stage are a mereological unity, a single phenomenon of capacity of expression and its proper place in the world.

 Hm.  Given the special military operation, the yearly day of protest, the half-marathon in the city, and the ides of March, if I had a country house, I'd likely be weekending there.  As it is, I'll plod on in the streets with no names alongside the proles and hope for the best.

 rip. J. Habermas.  One of the last minds with the golden thread of post WW2 philosophy.

 Perhaps it comes down to this: there are people who understand the things themselves, and those who only know things as part of a larger game.  The latter attack and destroy the distracted former as part of their game.

Even so, the only objective error is the claim of right, the thought that the notion of the things themselves is the great error to be solved by the game.

 No matter the care and generosity of previous generations, never underestimate the ability of folks from my country to make any given place a thoroughly unpleasant place to read a book.

Thinking of one apartment I had in Bucharest -- located off of the oldest street in the city, broad, tree-lined, many businesses, few tourists (like Belgrade's King Alexander as opposed to Mihail).  Easy walk to both the opera house and the mall, plenty of bakeries in a short walk, famous municipal theatre around the corner near the embassy district towards Piata Romana -- I saw an interesting and authentic Measure there -- among the more expensive tickets of the peregrination, almost $20.  Large German grocery easily walkable.  In sum, convenient and interesting.  The name of the national 19th c. poet was written autograph-style across the electrical feeder box in front.  Obviously not by him, but one of his descendants was a minor poet under the regime, and on investigation, I found that he had lived not far away.  I broke my rule of keeping low key around the neighbors of the short-term rental, and asked a few folks in front about it, who professed no knowledge, and considerable doubt as to the minor-poet-theory.

But the fact that it was there opened my eyes to the neighborhood, one of the more prestigious areas under the regime, interesting modernist architecture now gone slightly to seed.  A bit like the two old socialist shopping centers that I lived nearby at various times in Belgrade, (Kumikevo Sochache?) and a very large concrete arcade in New Belgrade.  Especially to a Westerner, it's odd to see these high-status places from socialist times.  The general notion here was that it was all Brutalism and true puritan believers in the road to socialism --  and the dissentients, who were relegated to poverty.  Apparently not the case -- the times had their proper grandeur, no matter the economic/social system.

From time, I wonder if I might have been more able to work under societies like those.  Times and places with a stronger civilizational context, as opposed to people getting away with whatever they could, and as much money as they could (e.g., our current Leader).  Even now, I would jump in a heartbeat at the chance for some Brutalist concrete rooms that I could fill with philosophy paperbacks, a camp bed, and a table and chair.  And a kitchen.  From time to time, I've been able to have that, and it has been productive.

Hope springs eternal.  (Even among folks with a few graduate degrees and decades of experience -- in the free-for-all fairground money-grab of present times.)

Hm.  CPAC is meeting in Budapest next week.  Perhaps I can cobble together a wobbly aggrieved-and-entitled angry manifesto on social media and sneak into the tribe, and then sneak off at the Nepliget station for points south, after a day at the Szecheny baths.  (Excellent strategy for long trips, much less than a cheap hotel room, and even if you don't doze off, you feel like you've had a good rest.)  

When I was less familiar with southern European bus routes, I once accidentally got off at the wrong Budapest station in the middle of the night, completely deserted.  Saw a map in an adjacent rail station, went over to look, and hopped on the first train in blind faith.  Turned out to be the last train of the night, went right to my destination, after a scenic trip over the river.  Magyar luck.

Hungary would be near the top of my daydream list, were it not for the firm social divisions.  Centuries ago, a cool tribe from Asia took a walk west, and found a great place at a bend in the Danube, and stayed there -- in the middle of people of completely different genetic ethnicities and languages.  (Most linguistic borders in that part of the world are slightly blurry -- not that one.)  But to keep their identity, they've had very firm social rules -- e.g., the balcony at the opera house.  So, a very likeable people, and Catholic as well, but I think I'd always be a Slavic/American stranger.   

Perhaps not -- apparently there has been a split between the Buda gardens sensibility and the Cafe New York folks dating to the early 20th c.  I've only stayed there for several weeks, given the rental costs.  (Sort of my respite from the stranger countries to the south.)  So, hardly an expert.

I remember performing in the Molnar festival there as an undergraduate -- my first taste of freedom from the bonds of home.  And the literature -- I discovered Kraznahorkai many years ago by keeping an eye on the window of a good bookshop, frequently when walking around in the middle of the night -- and now, the Nobel, as well as an upcoming tribute at Lincoln Center for Bela Tarr.  If you keep on keeping on, folks will come to you in search of the better mousetrap.  

Especially the New Yorkers -- the greatest concentration of actors and artists on the planet, but everything (correctly) thought worthwhile comes from the outside.  So keep an eye on the display windows.

 

In business, when someone says that they'll make a decision critical for the future of the business based on their own instinct and the 'feelings in my bones', it usually means that they're taking advice/direction from outside the company.

 This week was a bit of a muddle, tbh.  Bright side: not yet mad, which might have been the chief achievement of the week.  

Tried to focus on a certain philosopher, but for some reason found his stuff absolutely impenetrable on the first read, and simple/straightforward on the second.  Every day.  Odd.  The reading isn't a detour\frolic--ramping up to the philosophy readings for the current project. Cranking out CVs daily.

Oddly, recently, I had two contacts for law jobs, asking for interview availability times, and then never heard back.  I have some guesses.

Resupply run -- had to swap out the knapsack, as the straps had worn to threads.  Found good deals on Amaxon, and was able to resupply $300 of kit (msrp) for about $100.  Mixed feelings areas tempted to plow through with rags and threads and get on a plane sooner.

Sorry to decommission the old knap -- BW, nylon, saw me safely back & forth across the Balkans for a few years.  If I had storage space, certainly would have kept it for sentiment/spare parts. 

Milocsz once described the sense of relief that commuters on a highway feel, spying a family of ducks waddling to their lake alongside the road.  I have much the same feeling reading the email blasts from Romanian Starbucks.  There is a decaf Americano elsewhere.

 Recognizing that the problems of one person in a world like this don't amount to half of a hill of beans, there are enough strange things about my misadventures of the last few decades to warrant a bit of a general hullabaloo along the lines of mores, tempore, etc.  Or perhaps these sorts of things are less rare than I think.

If my family had been farmers in Nebraska, I'd have a fairly good idea of how to play things.  But, things being as they are, it's a little like escaping from a hypnotist and then being mugged seriatum by three roving gangs of psychologists.  The framing of the event becomes a bit wobbly.

---

Increasing thoughts of Orthodox spirituality as a path that might offer a bit of space from the usual suspects while still heading the right direction up the mountain.  Probably a wiser course than jumping to another Abrahamic channel entirely.

 

 "I must make some money every day."  (Peirce)

 While I've never been remotely tempted to mendicancy (there was actually one stretch several years ago in which I could only do laundry because I kept my eyes on the path at night and would find spare change presumably fallen from bicyclists), I have of course thought about the conventional forms of funding via websites.  But someone in the midst of social divisions shouldn't post online asking for donations or investment (e.g., funding to write books), not least because it would implicate the donors in the conflict at hand (e.g., the waves of prosecutions in Russia over website donations).  

I've made a principled stand from time to time, almost always because of things I've been asked to do, or things that have been done to me, but it puts too much weight on the Kantian dictum that I must be able to will the moral law I follow to be a universal one to assume that everyone on my email list would support such a move, or should be asked to.  I evidently have my own struggle, and I'll struggle through it.

"You don't ask for mercy while you're still on the stand."  (Leonard Cohen)

This is a fairly normal blog, with a fairly normal tone.  Given the events against which the discourse is unfolding, I count that a remarkable achievement.

A cunning plan: I shall read Ivo Andric so intently that I either find myself magically transported to Belgrade, or go mad and think myself to have been magically transported to Belgrade.  (If the latter, I would actually save money on airfare, rent, $6 theatre tickets, $2 coffees, etc.)

Likely not Sarajevo, as he's not that popular there these days, at least gauging from the condition of his books in the (foundation) library, and the amount of pigeon commentary on the statue.  Puzzling, as Tito seems to still be quite popular, cult of Walter, etc.  But the elephant himself appears to have angered the beys.

 

Over a decade ago, when these extraordinary and inexplicable troubles began, I imagined that it was an interlude or caesura in the narrative in which a bit of heroism would be required, and I did try to rise to the event in the manner of an intrepid hero.  At least to my own mind, I pulled it off rather well -- despite sometimes going 4-5 days without sleep, ill-fitting shoes, thin nutrition, etc.

Now, after all of these years, it's clear that the event is not an interlude or a caesura.  I've kept to the heroism -- no vices, no mendicancy, firm physical, spiritual, and mental discipline.  But it's clear that the original narrative, the one in which I grew up and received my education, and made a solid go at three professions, is no longer the story.  

It must be a new story, then, or nothing at all.  I've set the task of getting back to southern Europe, and I will make that happen, despite the fact that circumstances seem to be conspiring to keep me just shy of the resources required to do it responsibly.  The event becomes the story, and the narrative was a simply a dream of childhood.  Onward.

 It's a bit like being a prisoner in a Russian gulag of a little over a century ago, but thanks to some VIPs in the local Party, the gulag has an astounding library with every title he could possibly need.  Nonetheless, he plots his escape, all the while trying to figure out how to continue the work outside of the gulag, and without the providential library.

--

 Train Station for Two is a very good film, not least because it enunciates a complex political reality within the framework of a popular film.  The protagonist is a concert pianist from Moscow, and it's an open question as to whether he or his television weather reporter wife was behind the wheel when they struck someone on the road, so he's been sent off to the work camp prison in the north.  Long story short, he meets a waitress in a railroad station restaurant, and the happenstance encounter works well for both.

Translation: elitist, obscurantist artist enduring a purgatory, one that that he can't quite understand, or know whether it is justified, in the people's state on its path to socialism.  Some explicit contrasts to more Katchatourian-like music favored by the ethnic types and melon sellers.  In fairness, Katchatourian is a lifesaver for second-world orchestras on hard times.  Jaunty.

 Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cluj, Bucharest, Sibiu, Skopje, Mostar, Bar, Razlog, Bansko, Sofia, Budapest...

And yet -- the command, the superscription, or perhaps just the benign deception of the place, so that no more days will be lost: 

HIC RHODUS -- HIC SALTA.

These three or four preternaturally warm days arrived just in time.  The wind tempered.  For graces received.  It was beginning to be a bit difficult to stand up and walk.  #draw...your...sword #princessbride

---

At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that I must decamp abroad soon, or else.  Not the hysteria of a moment -- I've been dealing with this level of inexplicable adversity for more than a decade now, and I'm inclined to trust my judgment in distinguishing trade winds from the edges of a distant storm. 

Not really a discretionary calculus; income has been highly attenuated for several years now, and being able to have, for extended periods of time, a life that isn't inherently destructive of body and mind becomes increasingly important over the long haul.

Among the frothy lives of the prosperous middle class here, individuals' situations such as mine don't even register, except as a salutary warning not to challenge the prevailing corruption.  But if there is a way to find a minimally sufficient life that will allow me to do the honest work of the mind and implicitly testify against such things, it is incumbent on me to find it.  Being attacked by robbers in the road doesn't release the crusader from his vow.

Most people would describe the situation as a bit desperate, and would be at their wits end, willing to make any deal  necessary to extricate themselves from being the focus of such things.  But I'm sort of taking the very long view, and merely cabling  objective descriptions of the situation back to the Home Office, keeping to the Officers Mess, and occasionally whistling "Men of Harlech" as I scan the horizon for puffs of smoke.

In short, "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it."

 tl;dr:

Many (20+) years of adversity, encountering corruption in large institutions when trying for three careers: theatre, law, and the academy.  Everything documented, and a brief overview linked to online CV.  Degrees and experience in hand, and the work continuing as an independent scholar.  Barely surviving the present situation (not exaggeration), and trying to get back to digital nomading in the Balkans, which offers the double attraction of a minimally sufficient life and cultural encounters and development in my fields (see my latest, a self-published compendium of reviews, available on Amazon).

And... what's to come is still unsure.  But we are definitely at the stage in which marbles are being played for keeps (and perhaps occasionally lost).  

So, tune in next time, when you'll hear our hero say...

 Springtime.  Historically, an inauspicious time for the son of man.

Two lessons from the experience:

-- Never think that the present condition is inherently a derogation of the necessary things.  You have to work wherever and however you find yourself.  I had thought the nomading uncongenial for the work, as it was an exile of sorts, going from one Humble Quarters to another, and keeping a very close watch on the discretionary spending, even in the least developed areas of the Second World.  When the sustaining factors unexpectedly vanished, and I was launched into the present existence, the ability to function in the world immediately previous suddenly became plain.  Always the case, I suppose.  The grass is always greener in memory.

-- Be ruthless about rooting out any quiet pining for some times in the past.  In Macedonia, I might have mused about the research libraries, cheap gyms, and relatively inexpensive high-protein foods in the city, and although I was careful to add the caveat that having such things at present would also likely involve immense hardship, I can't be absolutely sure that the spirit catches all of our caveats.  Fleshpots of Egypt.  Nostalgie de la boue.

 I understand now why Shakespeare named the fellow in Measure and from the Inns "Master Froth" -- surrounded by this bubbling, unfocused energy upon which the culture has come to rely.  

A teacher of mine (although never formally so), a Czech scenographer and director, staged a piece one in which each death (and there were several) was depicted by the popping of a balloon (thin, like a bubble) and tossing a bit of dust in the air -- each happening as the character left stage, so, just out of the audience's view.  Similarly, I remember a bit of law school banter in the Midwest, a fellow talking about his grandfather from Indiana, whose request was that there be a popcorn machine at the service, and that the guests partake.  

Froth is the small bubbles.  The abortive rises.  The point is the longer, deeper lines of force and expansion.  Where a culture insists on the former, doubt the culture.

A very warm day in the city, it has the feeling of a holiday.  Had to check the interwebs to see which holiday it was that I had missed remembering.  Everyone seems filled with an energy, although it all feels just a bit off.  Most concretely in some of the rough sleepers wandering the streets shouting insane things.  Saw two between the cathedral and the breakfast cafe.  The Greek is εκρασια, and if memory serves, it comes from the sound of the ice in the rivers breaking in springtime.

Gently down the stream.  And to foreign shores, as quickly as God will allow.

As the reading has been interrupted for a moment, a few quick thoughts:

The ability to get to southern Europe in the next few months for an extended nomad trek is shaping up to be an existential objective, as they say.  Given where I stand after past events, I can’t hold this position.  The adversities are likely pushing me towards a simple throwing the hands up, dropping all work, and seeking animal survival in the city, but that simply won’t happen.  It would no longer recognizably be me, and the obligation to preserve the self is higher than the obligation to play the option with the highest percentage of animal survival.

Running through the events of the last three months, I can honestly say that only a handful of the people I’ve ever met could have survived that sequence of days, while continuing to work and think.  This is a very different country when you’re placed outside the charm of things.  And it has been over ten years since that reality began in force.  Iron discipline, of course.  Teetotal as always when I don't have a place of my own.  Daily physical and spiritual exercise.  Never mendicancy.  Respect all laws.  Christmas chocs allowed when 75% off in January.  (Seriously, chocolate is a survival food, not a luxury.  It is good fuel.)  

So, I must get there.  And I will be able to work there, and provide a minimally sufficient life.  And there will be time enough, and pocket-change enough for theatre, music, and coffee. And I will continue to discover the place, whichever one of the likely half -dozen it turns out to be.

The critical point is that although the primary motive in selecting that region is that, even in these circumstances, I can have a minimally sufficient material existence, material sustenance and housing are not the highest ideals. 

The work must continue, because that is what I am, and if I were to surrender it, the thing that would surrender it would no longer recognizably be me.   The Samurai must survive as Samurai.  The thinker must survive as thinker.

Constantly haunted by thoughts of Belgrade, Skopje, the mountains of Bulgaria.  These are not entirely adventitious plans and thoughts.  My own country is veering too far away from anything I can recognize as good, both in its larger acts and in the commonplace interactions with the people here.  There is a seamless link between the sort of sensibility that did in my family, and the corruption that I encountered at the state universities, and the stories in the newspapers, and the craven people I walk past every day.  There's no longer a sense that one should try to be good, or pursue inherently worthwhile things.  All is craven imitation and competition, and the pursuit of money.  Omnis homo mendax, as the Psalmist has it.

Southern Europe is the one bit of Europe I could afford, on an absolute baseline income, and there is theatre and music, and I can get the texts I need electronically. So there is a path, and I shouldn't fault my own mind for ceaselessly glancing towards it.  

Difficulties, yes, but with the barrier of an iconostasis comes the possibility of the holy doors.

The careful foreign policy of the UK as to the present special military operation is laudable in its attention to principles of international law, but it's likely not to be read that way by the participants in the conflict, who will be more inclined to see pro-Arab forces within Whitehall and institutional forces as the culprit, rather than the Sherswood?  Sharwood? principles about conformance to law and independent advice. (Apparently it took the ministry four or five days to realize that it might be wise to deploy the carrier.)  There is a sense among some at the highest levels under the blue flag of the Levant that if the WW2 holocaust hadn't happened in Germany, it would have happened in England.  And the grain of truth for these musings is the genuine intransigence inside Whitehall, likely from the cultural transmission that occurred in Protectorate and oil development days.  An episode of Yes Minister makes some reference to the phenomenon.

But I'm inclined to allow the person who does the right thing the best possible explanation of their actions, given how rarely those in power seem to do the right thing.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/simon-armitage-weather-rain-poem-reading-university-gnvj9vx09 

"Who knows which way the wind bloweth," he asked, and did not wait for an answer.

The depths of the winter seem to have passed.  It's lighter in the mornings now, and the nighttime cold is starting to become less onerous.  The boots proved to be a problematic purchase.  It's a good brand, so they're strong, but they're associated more with law enforcement than military, and the lasts are clearly not top-notch.  Extremely difficult break-in, but hopefully they'll endure more than the three months the last (milspec jungle) ones gave me.  Bit of congestion as well, as I shed an inner fleece layer perhaps a week too early.  But after a week or two of a rare cold with difficult shoes, hopefully everything's on the mend.

Perhaps these difficulties were useful.  Many cultures fast in springtime.  In winter, we fed on the fats and slept when we could, and pressed forward as firmly as we could through the cold.  With springtime, we need to re-tune the engines.  Perhaps, in the pressing-forward of the wintertime, we've lost a bit of mental acuity.  We need to awaken from our own strength, and so we fast, and think, and rub the feet a bit.

 

 Feast of the Angelic Doctor.  

Henry James said that we were as if riding a horse at night, and couldn't see whether it was black or white.  ("It's grey until dawn," mutters the German farmer in the next field.)  

My devised thought is a bit more optimistic.  We are on a mountain, and can't know how high we have managed to climb.  We might be meters from a mountaintop grove, we might be only a few feet up the path.  Choosing to climb, or choosing to fall, therefore, have unknowable consequences.  But we can know what it is to climb -- as well as the other thing.  

One might write a compendium of the faith and only have advanced a few steps on the mountain.  One might have had a single thought and found him or herself on the mountaintop.  Grace is what we have to lose, unknowing.

When your family has been fragmented and dissipated by their work in confidential areas for the government, and you've encountered some rather spectacular corruption in the (large) institutions you've studied at, leaving you with degrees and experience, but virtually no chance of a basically sufficient life or career in the society, the only possible thing to do is to do work of undoubted worth every day, and attempt to get to a place (almost certainly, abroad) where it would be possible to do real work and have a minimally sufficient life.  This is my present task.

 The feeling of exhaustion that sets in in the morning (after workout, Mass and breakfast) when I sit down to work in the library, particularly when the ventilation is low, or the tourists are ubiquitous, or I move around a bit to avoid the coughing/contagion is very, very strong.  Almost a paralyzing physical incapacity.  Without a doubt, the last few months have been the most physically trying in my life -- and between the years of outdoor drama and the years of prior adversities, that's saying something.  We're certainly into the marble-keeping (or for that matter, losing) stage of the game, and it's not necessarily clear that this one will end in triumph and glory.  To the event.

 If language is the dasein of geist, Henry James is a gymnasium of the spirit.

------------

Peculiar, at Mass today -- stood near a fellow who recited all of the responses correctly, but in a bored, sing-song tone.  The Mass as revised by the last Vatican Council brings everything into the language, and shares the language with everyone -- almost no secret prayers, or mumbling behind an iconostasis -- but we have yet to reckon collectively with the dangers of identical repetition and irony.

I'm very fond of iconostases, but they do have a certain historical role.  I was speaking with an Orthodox priest in Transylvania about the glass painted icons that were characteristic of the region, and he was quite dismissive of the iconography/theology, saying they were just for the simple people, like the images on the iconostasis.  

In the Latin church, everyone's now at the table -- there's no distance, no wall.  But it can very easily turn into idle banter.  And where there is no wall, there can be no holy door.

The phrase I seized upon to express the difference between the people in my own country and the people in the countries that I had been visiting was "civilizational context."  Unlike the US, even when just buying a cup of coffee, it happens within a shared understanding of a certain culture, and everyone involved considers themselves moral participants in the exercise.    It's not unusual to see the "rights" of the customers and employees posted near bank tellers and railroad ticket offices, specifying the whole social contract down to uniforms and break times.  Of course, "right" has a different inflection in these contexts, as it is synonymous with "law," as opposed to a carve-out from the general social procedure, or a specific protection within it.   

Although my country is very prosperous, it is a continental prosperity generated by some fraction of the population for a second, slightly non-coterminous fraction of the population.  And there is no general claim of right, and cups of coffee are not served within the general sensibility of the civilization.  And many are not included in these engines of industrial prosperity set up after the war, and the decision on inclusion or admission frequently has nothing to do with merit.  No one is inherently smart or hard-working enough to think that he or she won't be set aside.  The machine needs no additional genius.

Much of this has to do with the loss of religion.  And its falsification beforehand.  

----------------------------

I listened to the live broadcasts from the beginning of the Bayreuth season this year in Belgrade.  For Rheingold, I hopped on a tram (this was the first visit in which I relaxed the rule to always walk) and went to the sbux across from the parliament building, which was visible through the panoramic windows.  As darkness fell and the lights came on, it made quite a scene for the completion of Valhalla.

I also recall going there after visiting the House of Flowers (now, technically the House of Small Pebbles) and reading Pynchon for a bit, and becoming conscious of the two extremes of the earnest socialist and the confabulating Westerner.  Each needs the other, of course.   The real danger is in attempting to avoid them both.

Would very much like to get back to that world of eight months ago or so, sleeping on a couch in a small studio across from St. Mark's and cooking on a hotplate, with a small wooden table and chair under the window, but it will take some doing.  For now, when I remember these times of basic sufficiency in desirable places, I try to remember what I was angling towards there, and try to set my course to those same stars in these surroundings.  Hence the days entirely at the libraries, and the nights with the e-readers until the danger of sudden sleep becomes too great, and I stow them in the bag.

 A first acquaintance with Blaga's philosophy -- I had only read secondary sources before, but apparently the research collections here are stronger on Blaga in English than the Cluj research library, which is peculiar.  I encountered this phenomenon often in Balkan wanderings -- in Skopje, for example, you find an abundance of works in English (including entire bookstores), but you will not find a single Macedonian work translated into English (unless you're better at that sort of thing than I am.)

At any rate Blaga seems, unfortunately, to have come under the spell of Spengler, and writes with a similar freedom.  That said, there are some very interesting ideas.  The notion of negative knowledge, called "Luciferian knowledge" after the conceit of the angel, together with the "abyssal categories" that define it (reasoned from a deduction?  what are they?); the notion of characteristic style, presumably after Schopenhauer (who I'm almost completely unfamiliar with); and of course, the section on mioritic space, which he's most famous for and possibly the most resonant of his ideas.  (Possibly, in the notion of fictional space, we are going back to the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience, and re-making a world in which, contrary to the present one, it is possible to live.)

There are etexts of the trilogies, and I suppose it would be the work of a moment to AI translate them and then go through them, but I can't handle that now.  After a few hours, my best understanding of him is as a sort of correlative to Ivo Andric -- both, retired diplomats, one a sober novelist with perhaps a few keys hidden in the stories, and the other a cultural philosopher of Spenglerian freedom (whose work I likely don't yet understand), and in this, in their styles and metiers, they reflect something essential about the two countries which they represented to the world. 

---------------------

Thinking about the apartment in Zemun that I rented after a month across from St. Mark's during the big protests.  That was an excellent place to write -- bells of the Franciscan church and the small chapels in the park, the distant flashing lights on top of the Usce mall, and the city beyond.  My one disappointment during that time was the injury that kept me from running, as the quay is excellent for that.

----------------

In sum, I'm presently dividing the day between trying to ameliorate my condition (cranking out CV's, applying to content writing gigs that I'm vastly overqualified for), and doing the actual work, on the assumption that I will never get past the locked doors, and will have to reach my own understandings and make my own work.  A bit like the Shaker precept of Mother Anne -- live each day as if you were to live a thousand years, and as if it would be your last.  The second type of work is the last-day scenario, only the essential philosophy, art, literature.  While still trying to land a gig, or a career, preferably one that can get me to a country in which I can do some real work.  Not being able to change my condition, and not being able to finish some real work is not a thought I'd like to have.

-----

Interesting, a Western-leaning news portal in a Western-leaning Islamic country runs a piece on an important night of Ramadan, the battle of Bed'r (?).  Oddly, though, the Quran was revealed on the same night of (a different year), and that's how the night is usually marked -- including at this portal in past years, if memory serves.  The present Persian campaign has likely made a lot of people very angry, and I still haven't seen the justification for it.  And the Ides of March upcoming.

Some of the things one notices when attempting to slog out the winter in a northern city under very difficult circumstances.  Onward.

 Another reason I am looking to the Eastern sections of southern Europe is the difficulties I've encountered in my own country due to ethic origin, tbh.  Being a large fellow of Slavic ancestry, I'm conscious of the fact that some folks, and folks from some ethnic groups, treat me a bit differently.  (A few anecdotes there.)  There is no cognitive dissonance for them in thinking that a large Pole should be facing the sort of difficulties I've been facing, regardless of the degrees, experience, and work ethic.  

Not a proximate cause, but certainly a but/for cause.  

The ideal would of course be a Jeffersonian democracy blind to ethnicity, but as that doesn't yet exist (despite my best, usually unconscious and ingenuous efforts), when I steer my ship, I should steer it to familiar nations.

It is a sign of an overly circumscribed life to pine for the familiar.  And yet.  To generally hope to be in a better place doesn't get you much when lost in the woods.  Best to set out for the known bivouac, and places where you could work -- hence, I set my face to countries of tall mountains, woodsy violin sections in the orchestras, generally accessible coffee and theatre, and Cyrillic grocery receipts.

The difficulty last time was the books, mostly.  But I'm shifting everything to ebooks now, and I'm going to compel myself to like it.  Getting sufficient vegetarian protein might have been more of an issue than I thought -- will have to budget a bit extra for eggs and nuts.  Smoking is another difficulty.  I/m sure half of Sarajevo thinks me a rude and uncultivated person for getting up and moving away whenever someone lights up, or worse, puts a vape to their mouth.  

But these are minor difficulties, and I am facing major difficulties here, so... 

The trick, of course, even with the degrees and experience, is to find a way of paying for the worldly goods.  Which is frustrating, as many of the folks who studied law with me, and who unlike me, went along with everything placed before them, are making millions of dollars per year after this many years out of school.  And even those at the immense, corrupt and mediocre state university who went along with things are likely almost reaching the six-figure mark.  

Money is the dung of the Devil, as a recent pope observed.  Which means, among other things, that it's occasionally very rare and difficult to find.

 After reading the LRB piece on Romanian politics, I had a run at Cioran -- luminous threads, and I am back in Sibiu and Cluj in my mind, and alive, if only for a minute or two.  On the day I took the bus to the resort and walked back through the mountains, the path ended at Rasinari (resin, from the lumber industry), from which there was a long walk back to my humble quarters in Sibiu (which were actually quite nice on that visit, a garret 1BR in a very old 18th/19th c. building -- I was the first rental, and the monthly rental is now well above what it was -- and I was there during the big theatre festival, to boot).  Cioran's father was on the faculty at the Orthodox seminary in Sibiu, which is right across from the cathedral, ran past it many mornings.  Long commute from their home in Rasinari (I think) especially in the early 20th c.  And then his stories about the paralyzing fear he felt from the Hungarian policemen.  The SJ church in Sibiu is quite remarkable -- the Jesuits and Franciscans left a considerable amount of infrastructure in this part of the world.  One curiosity in Sibiu: the number-puzzles in the inscriptions, in which some letters that double as Roman numerals are slightly larger than the rest of the lettering, and can be summed or taken severally to give meaningful dates or numbers.  I never managed to solve any of them, but I think you would have to know a lot about the place to so.

"a drowning man clinging to the idea of shipwreck"  (Cioran)

Today, New Gods, the title essay of which is a sort of distilled Bogomilism -- praise of the demiurge, as a perfect God could never have made such a world.  Whenever you visit a place and St. Michael is very prominent in the ritual or the imagery, you can be assured that there are a few folks thereabouts who have some profound reservations about the essential goodness of the world.  He's quite prominent in Transylvania.

Hm.  Okay, I'll trust that at this point the universe is aware that I'd much rather be back in the world of six months ago, reliably nomading through the Balkans.  And, not to overdo the Touchstone-in-the-forest soliloquy, it was clearly a mistake to think that I could simply crash back into the city and slog out the winter when the academic publishing house reduced my freelancing daily bread-source.  

But, as there really wasn't any other choice, it's more of a mistaken belief without an effect in the world than anything else.  (Even in my travails, I argue against philosophical pragmatism.)

The classic doctrine holds that in tragedy, everyone needs to be acting sive necessitatis, according to their beliefs and in such a way that they could do no other.  And neither side is right or wrong.  If Antigone is the hero and Creon is simply a blockhead, you're watching a bad production of the play.  The point of tragedy is that when people do the right thing by their own lights, bad things are inevitable.  This is why poverty was (pre Arthur Miller) generally held not to be a tragic condition, as it could easily be ameliorated.  The depth of commitment to the necessity of the situation on both (all) sides needs to be strong.  

So if this is tragedy, it's not because the winter has been an amazingly difficult, death-defying slog, buoyed by memories of Bulgarian mountains, Balkan coffees, and Transylvanian theatre.  It's because this slog was made inevitable by my past difficulties in the academy.  And it's very important to realize that the other side of things had a claim of right, one rooted not in moral right, but in pragmatic right, despite the corrupt practices.  And part of the reason that I'm spending so much time working on Dewey et al. (other than the Rorty/Brandom recommendation) is that this pragmatic claim of right against the claims of morality is actually a deeply running stream in the American mind.

One afternoon at Illinois, I wandered over to the law school to hear a talk by one of the long-time advocates at the SG's office in DC.  Afterwards, in the Q&A, I asked him what the biggest mistake novice advocates usually made was.  His answer: not taking their opponents' arguments seriously enough.  It would be easy, in the current difficulties just to, in the manner of a G&S captain, "d-mme all" and say that everyone else was simply a blockhead.  But then your difficulties and pain are simply meaningless.  The point is that the blockheads had a point -- and part of my present work is about beginning to argue against it.

 "Only thorns bloom in God."

(Cioran)

Also:

Van Gogh is like El Greco without God, nothing tending upwards, just the diffusion across the canvas.

Irony as the slow diminution of the self, ending in the tragedy.

----

Cioran is important, one of the few modern writers who can go to the depths of Beckett without the characters on the page being erased.

 

The present need to get back to nomading through southern Europe is as strong and urgent as anything I've ever felt--perhaps it's because it was the last scenario of basic sufficiency before the recent setbacks, perhaps because there is a certain spiritual need there--and the inability to put something into place is both frustrating and perplexing.  

There are societies in which someone with a doctorate in law from a top-tier school with strong grades, and a decade of experience in the arts with a degree from a globally ranked conservatory is able to find a position or livelihood in one of these professions, or at least a stopgap minimally sufficient job in a field requiring a basic competency in something or other.

But things states-side appear to be a bit more free-form than that.  

Ergo: a very, very difficult winter in a northern city.  

Once you realize the difficulties with the prevailing ways of thinking, those who live forcefully according to those ways of thinking become very difficult to be around.

I suppose this is what drove folks in the past to climb pillars or run off into the desert.

It's a bit difficult to surmount, particularly when the society is making a claim of right for it.  In the past, kings and minor aristocrats were proud not to think as the common person thinks.  Judaica me, Domine... It also became a way of thinking about God ("As far as the heavens are above the earth...").

But in this culture, the conversational median carries the claim of right -- ostensibly because in a pragmatic sense, it allows people to honestly communicate while the sub-linguistic logics of encounter work to make a prosperous society.  The American via negativa.  Omnis determinatio est negatio, so leave as much as possible undetermined.

And while the industrial prosperity is undeniable (though how much of it is from continental resources and how much from the social order is an open question), the people are sometimes very, very difficult to be around.

Qed, perhaps.

Sorely tempted to simply fly over to southern Europe, and just make it as far as I can on the present bank-book and figure out an answer when the means run out.  Oddly, I think that's what Dewey might have done.  Unless he could find a wealthy spinster Yankee aunt.

But the rule is firm: even though it's the only way to a minimally sufficient existence in the near term, I won't leave the homeland without sufficient means for normal living and safe return.  

It's a bit like a fellow condemned to hang in a corrupt oil town who has the file and the rope ready for the escape, but holds off until an advisory opinion from his home (& honest) county, or perhaps the federal court, quashes the sentence.  Injustice is no cause for intemperance.  Socrates was wrong to stay, but not wrong to make the decision deliberately.  

Gently down the stream.

Stopped in downstairs for a quick peek at the recent Weekly Readers.  Perplexing piece in the LRB on the Romanian election fiasco that I tried manfully to avoid wisearcing about when I was in Bucharest/Sibiu/Cluj last year.  Utterly frustrating reading.  It doesn't suss out what the locals were actually thinking, and it doesn't offer any insight into the event from a dispassionate outsider -- not to be too much of an anti/fink type, but it just seemed as if the author was trying to seem to be urbane enough to be capable of actual commentary, but without offering any actual understanding.  Macarons with the LSE types in Sector 2, and coffee with a Roma single parent from Sector 4/5, and let the comfortable readers savor the atmosphere.

Name-day.  My favorite name-day was one year, seeing the Stratford Festival Lear at Lincoln Center, after reading the Mabinogion at Sbux.  The city seemed made of gold in the afternoon light.  

--------------------

In the year or so since I wrote this at a kitchen table in Albania, the nomadry continued until the work dropped off precipitously, and without notice.  I had sufficient funds to get back to the city from the mountains of Bulgaria (having at least that much in reserve has always been a firm rule), but that was about it, so the winter has been very, very difficult.

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/02/15/a-discreet-word/

Perhaps I'm the only one struck by the incongruity of my degrees and experience and the way in which I seem to have been completely excluded from work (and even a basic, sufficient existence).  The family has their own intrigues and derangements, most of which seem to arise from their long years of confidential government work.  After several years of not being able to find work in the theatre, that social connection fell away, and as for law and the academic world, in both instances, I was met by some very corrupt folks at the door, and never really managed to get past them.

So, without being too melodramatic, after over a decade of this, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to last.  But being able to work, write and think is more important than anything else.  I was able to have a basic existence in the digital nomad context -- both as to physical things and the work of writing and reading.  In recent years, I've developed about as strong a competence as one can have in certain areas of philosophy without a formal degree.  But the winter nights are life-threatening, and the long stretch of experience is life threatening.  My only task is to preserve the life of the life being threatened, I think.  Onward.

Increasingly confident that the sea change I picked up last week wasn't an accident of subjectivity after the second blizzard. The marihuana-smoking greed machines filling the sidewalks and the cafes in the evening are much more vivacious than before (if idiotically so).  Very far from the world of Strether's penny chairs on the boulevards of late 19th c Paris.  Surely this wasn't the point of general prosperity. 

The Turks have the notion of three shocks of springtime: land, water and air (or perhaps the reverse).  Perhaps the first one happened here in the warming after the storm.  I first encountered the notion in Sarajevo.  Sarajevo is the flower of the stem that rises up through Albania and formerly Bulgaria (one historical trace: the green in the tricouleur), twisting past Skoder Lake and southern (non-wreath/wraith) Montenegro.  The stem is rooted in Turkey, of course, and like the Turks and the Muslim Bebers of the southern Mediterranean (who survived Sebastian), they look to distant Arabia for their classicism as the Romans might have looked to Athens, or someone in a corrugated tin shack in rural Wisconsin might look to Sheboygan.  The charms of Christminster's dreaming spires in the distance. 

It is pleasant to wander among the flowers of the garden, and so it is pleasant to walk though Sarajevo, which after the last war began a slow process of moving to a city under the domination of the dominant ethnicity of the state.  "We got Sarajevo" was the phrase heard in the hotel corridors of Dayton, if the academic journals I went through at the library of the old Muslim foundation are to be believed.  And yet, when I first visited the city and knew even less about it that I do now, one of the first things that I noticed was a massive foundation being laid for a building overlooking the city from the north, from the ground of the adjoining ethnic entity.  (Within which a toxic dump sometimes burns, sending a fog over the city, and endangering innocent foreigners out for a quick dawn run.)  Claim a victory within history, and the hourglass simply rotates.

As much as I enjoyed Sarajevo, I began to weaken a bit from distance from my own language and books and philosophies.  I purchased a one-month subscription to the London theatre tapes service, and listened to an RSC Shakespeare every night, just to keep the λεγειν alive -- the residuum of thought in language, which is the dasein of geist.

So another Persian potentate falls, from a smooth stone of the wadi cast over the waters.  I have reservations about these foreign entanglements.  And celebrating the death of a cleric, even one who was filled with hatred for my country, seems a bit much.  And something that might have to be explained someday at the foot of the throne of the God of Abraham.  The hatred that religions feel for each other is understandable, and perhaps even useful, in that they preserve specific virtues against the others.  Perhaps one day these virtues, preserved through time in the manner of bloody time, will come together.  But for the nonce, it is a demonstration of Girard's principle that conflict and hatred come from (semantic) proximity and similarity, not difference and distance.  

When I was in Bosnia -- Mostar and Sarajevo -- I thought of the charmed lives folks were leading in small towns in the American South and Midwest.  I understood why some of the Balkan locals wanted a life like that, in countries they likely couldn't even get a travel visa for.  Pumpkin spice lattes in the autumn in SUV's driven through forest highways, to grassy lawns and prosperous towns.  Material prosperity can be persuasive.  And then you imagine, in the manner of the bull in springtime wondering at the distant lowing over the hill, that there might be folks you could relate to and know.  But the truth of it is that the children of the prosperity, given the distortions of the religions, and worse, the general notion that religion is inherently wrong, have become something less than paragons of Rousseau's innocent nature.  Hume, who saw us as tragically susceptible to the world's shocks, wept when he met Rousseau, who comforted him with a friendly embrace.  We must remember the possibility of being good -- actual good, not the idea of good.  Righteousness, which the Gospels so often praise, is from δικαι, the power of right judgement.  The shocks of the world are not to be the final word.

I'm conscious of being a bit reduced after the last three months (though not physically, given the daily weightlifting that I had been away from during the last couple years of travel).  But those outside the charm of the place, those most different from the place, even if it is their home, will most feel the wind and the rain, which is in a way a good thing, though it certainly doesn't seem so at the time.  One belief of mine us that at every moment of our lives, no matter how inauspicious the situation, at another moment of our lives, we might be thinking of the present, difficult time and envying it.  Bloom looks at Stephen's daily adversities with some nostalgia (they are two shadows of the selfsame man).  So internal lines of force begin to develop within a life, and the life begins to grow more strong as it becomes conscious of these lines of force.

Discovering Fichte a few years ago was a bit of a revelation.  When we think of ourselves, we tend to think of a finished portrait.  But what we are is in action -- if a portrait, then the painting of the portrait.  When the LDS temple across from Lincoln Center opened, there was a visitation period in which the public could visit even the holiest rooms.  The initiative for the NYC temple apparently came from the Broadway plays that had been a bit critical of the LDS.  (I liked the plays, came down from Mount Holyoke on Hawthorne's enchanted railroad one afternoon with some friends and acquaintances from sumerstock and saw one of them in its original run.  But I was a bit naive about their role socially.)  I was a young seeker in the city, then a bit obsessed with the Shakers, and I made sure to sign up for a visit.  The rooms were very interesting.  The whole experience had a somewhat masonic flavor, understandably so given the origins of the faith.  I remember sitting in the holiest room, everything was white, and the guide was speaking, but I noticed in a back corner that an older gentleman connected with the church had slipped into the room and was standing peacefully and quietly in front of of one of the full-length mirrors in the room, simply examining his reflection.  Perhaps happenstance, perhaps a demonstration of the mysteries.  But an action.  Even in the holiest of the rooms.

What's to come is still unsure, both in the world, and with me, the one not worth the proverbial hill of beans in the scheme of things.  But there is to be a final word spoken, and after all this, I'm relatively certain that we, and I, haven't a clue as to what it is to be.

"They did not despair of the Republic."  (Epitaph of Roman generals.)

But they were generals.  And if one is completely powerless in the scheme of things, and has been surrounded for a very, very long time by questionable people doing questionable things, the question of saving the Republic or finding a Walden in which to read and think and write takes on a different aspect.  The generation after Jason and Medea, or perhaps Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, should feel no compunction in seeking out pastures new. Else, you know, things get a bit Oresteia, and the Eumenides show up.

I am increasingly sensing that I should head back abroad to neutral countries--if at all possible, rather quickly.  But I'm not going to leave without sufficient funds for the proper stay and return.  As demonstrated in the Odyssey, just running after the departing ships makes for the gate to the underworld.

Gently down the stream.  

But I recognize that things are very bad, and that there's no good way to secure a place and a sufficiency here, so I'm looking for a way to get to a place where I can try to do some proper work, and I'm determined to find it.

 "Why does God need a starship?"

("Capt. James T. Kirk," Star Trek V)

 I haven't seen all of the films that claim to be Star Wars films, and I don't really have a clear recollection of any of them other than the three actual Star Wars films, but one moment from one of the others comes to my mind.  The "young Obi-Wan" is in the middle of a pitched battle, when suddenly a door, or at any rate, a glass barrier between chambers, descends.  "Young Obi-Wan" looks around, ascertains the situation, and then drops to one knee and bows his head, calming his spirit and waiting for the interposition to be lifted.  A fiction attempting to convinced us of its own verisimilitude might show an element of frustration, so we would believe he is actually a fighter in a battle, but either the film declines to demonstrate this, or it seeks to demonstrate that he is a different type of fighter.  When I first saw this, as I recall, I was very much in the sword training dojo, so I took that lesson to heart.

---

The uncanny feeling of the sea change that set in a couple of days ago, perhaps partially a phenomenon of my own consciousness after the difficulties of the last blizzard, does invite a certain ease of comportment.  This morning, though, I had a very different sense.  For some reason, one of the national churches that I encountered on the recent travels was very present to me when I awakened.  I recalled the holy places that I had visited, and seemed to have a peculiar access to the memories in my own mind.

A small springtime in the local weather today, almost 50 degrees.

When the slog grows long, and the mind perhaps begins to play tricks (or is being buoyed along by things that have nothing to do with you as an individual), life becomes like a recurrent walk through a village, a task that can seem either easy or difficult -- but we forget that access to the things of the village (the church, the tavern, the scholars' library) is the point, and then the day, even for those working at their utmost, becomes simply a long tread through the place without seeking access to the things of the place themselves.  

During a period of adversity perhaps ten years ago, I made a point to walk, every morning, past a shop with a front window filled with bags and barrels of spices.  There are two elements here: the continued force of the journey, and the desire to have access to the thing itself.  If I had simply continued to walk to the window each morning as a point of discipline, I would have lost.  At any rate, this sense of access, that which I had rather powerfully tis morning in another context, is very, very important.  Particularly in reading and writing.  Else the eyes just glide over the page, or we file the abstract arguments of the text away in our mind.  For things to be worthwhile, for the game to be worth the candle, even the most abtruse philosophy must have a real relevance to the living questions that you have always felt, even before and beneath language.  

A final danger: this last sensibility of essence can also be a powerful means of deception.  But the mental discipline of scholarship exists to guard against such things.  It is not just that there is always a duality -- the second reality is there to guard and protect you against the first, immanent sensibility by ensuring its validity.

One example.  Rights, in the American tradition, are said to be self-evident.  What might this mean?  Well, if you look at the things the Framers were reading, specifically Locke's second Treatise, you'll see that truths are divided between self-evident truths and essential truths, and that the second type of truth is thought to be very dangerous, as it is easily the tool of the tyrant, urging his people to believe in the things that elude rational understanding.

We value things, and we know things.  And valuing things and knowing things have to do with each other, and are essential to each other.

-----------------------

"Gently down the stream."  (Star Trek V) 

Bit of peculiar brain-cloud today.  (The good thing about constant drudge work is that one can use it to gauge the health of the mechanism at a given point.)

 One frustration is that, if you keep doing the right thing, and grounding your work in genuinely legitimate thought, the folks who ground their experience in the pragmatic game will always dismiss you out of hand -- this is why there always needs to be a bit of the "know thyself" command in the writing.  You must always be gently reminding the others that their understanding might be a bit less grounded than they think.

Nietzsche coined the term 'amor fati,' I think.  Appropriate, as he was among the first to see where the collective project of thought was heading in Western civilization.  If you understand the event, you can come to understand as well that your position within it, however inauspicious, is a necessary one.

A country that considers itself intellectually superior to a faith in an omnipotent God will invariably be caught up in the cycle of enchantments, which is to say, history, as it falls under the spell of specific subordinate principalities and powers.

Agamben's piece on the evolution of spiritual hierarchy is interesting -- it mirrored the church hierarchy of the time.  If you look at the medieval cults, the angel cults are usually from the East, outside the local national church, and even the Roman offices and orders.  The inherent paradox of an ordered hierarchy of the numinous, perhaps.  Perhaps it is primarily an indication that there are always distinctions to be made, even in things completely outside the context of our experience.

Very peculiar, a sea change in my surroundings over the last two days.  If there weren't discrete indicia, I would think that the second blizzard had altered my perceptions of things.  

At the discount gym, for example, the sketchy NYC characters usually populating the floor have been replaced by folks clearly of a higher tax bracket.  My guess is that they did a membership discount on a more upscale website or mailing list.  Overnight change, though.  Very stark.  And they're actually cleaning out the locker rooms and the showers, which does make for a much more pleasant early morning.

Absolutely exhausted, to a depth I can't remember ever feeling, even given the extraordinary times of the last decade or so.  

I think it's safe to say that I have barely survived the recent events, specifically, the abortive crash back into the city from the Balkans three months ago.  I look forward to describing recent times in that manner for many years to come.  

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate.  No point in going half-measures vis a vis the speranza, you know.  Must grasp the golden, nettled fleece and do what you can.

Incidentally, from a random Romanian scholar: fleece was used for panning for gold in mountain streams.

The fleecing of America: where sheep can safely graze, perhaps.

 At the same time, I do recall doing a lot of reading in the roof cafe of the grocery store in Sarajevo across from the parliament,  Philosophy can be read with either kefir or coffee.  Arguably some health benefits to the former.

Serbia presently the focus of my mind.  Not necessarily because of the nature of the place, though it's a very noble (yes) and hospitable country.  I just know that I can get away from precisely these shadows and difficulties by going there, as I've done so twice now.  Though the fact of the strong local orthodox church is also very much in my mind.

But there's nothing political in this pining.  Prometheus is just eyeing the cave a bit further down the mountain, where, assuming he can get free of the chains and the bird, he might be able to find a decent place, do a bit of reading and writing, morning runs, and perhaps some $2 coffees and $6 theatre.

Hope springs eternal.

 

 

 

 And the planes departing overhead, over the river at night.  To Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia...  

The Chums of Chance (hear the icthyian reading of the first term) from Pynchon's ATD are a good model for recent times.  In the novel, they appear to stand for the pre-disillusionment hale and hearty fellows on the bounding main, serving unknown, or at least undescribed, masters with alacrity, cheer and bonhomie.  Then, some buildings fall and everything gets a bit dark, signal-carrying light is split, &c, &c.

But, you know, that's me.  I've never really wandered to the dark side of things, I've been too busy reading. (Condor: "I just read books.")  And even the colossal and inexplicable adversities occasionally elicit an utterly ingenuous "oh heck" or "gosh darnit".  

One can take these things too far, but when the adversities keep getting bigger and bigger and I keep reading Henry James and going to morning Mass, it does seem a bit like a 1950s superhero serial whose ratings are so bad that the writers have decided to just let the fellow have it with both bores every week.

 Internal clock apparently running a bit slow after a few days of cancellations and late openings.  The wobble after sticking the landing, perhaps.  No simple highway.

The objective for today was, of course, to return to the possibility of thought, after the two days of blizzard.  This is a very real thing, and I have to think that folks in the Siberian camps faced this as well, since bearing with extraordinary physical and social difficulty makes it hard to hold the Fourth Paralogism of Kant in the mind long enough to figure out how things stand with respect to it.

Thinking with unconcealed envy of all those months I had in southern Europe in which once the mind-numbing work of the day was done, I had a place to work and write and think, and possibly even head out to the theatre or a coffeehouse.  Not having been able to do proper writing then was the big mistake.  I wasn't yet ruthless enough.

To be absolutely clear: my claim is that this existence, which has gone on for many years, is the physical equivalent of the gulag, and the causation for it is my politics (or lack thereof) and religion (but/for cause) and my refusal to go along with corrupt things (proximate cause).

Dostoevsky apparently wept when he read Hegel's opinion that he, being in Siberia, was outside of history.  While I do consider myself a Hegelian, I don't consider effective history to be an effective notion anymore.  There are simply many people telling stories.  The machines they are using to tell stories have a peculiar hold over the mind.  History, as a description of present events,  has become the means of placing its listeners outside history.   It is much more important to focus the mind, and 19 c. books and private thought will suffice for that.  In the days to come, history will vindicate its own deprecation.

You have to get free of them -- and for this, one of their early slogans will suffice: 

Cultivate your own garden.