Coffee made at the Humble Quarters with water from the fountain in the mountains, the cool shade of the apartment very different than the heat and strain of the journey. Difficulty recollected in tranquility.
Some regret at missing the cultural festival, which after further research, seems to be a very important event in this part of the world. But if I had made a beeline for it, walking next to Bulgarian highway traffic for hours, I might have been there, but I wouldn't have found it. The arc through the mountains was the better choice, even if it came up short in the end. Not to make a thing out of the reach perpetually exceeding the grasp, but it is important not only to do the right things, but to do them in the right manner. However important the thing might be. The way we have of doing things is what we are.
There are no regional busses in this area -- I could have booked a ticket for a more distant place and asked the bus to stop, and then walked back, though. Ultimately, you need a car, or access to a car, as with many things in the present world. Which is a bit troubling. It's one thing for a car to be required, but it's quite another for automotive traffic to be the main obstacle on the path.
Utterly exhausted after a day wandering the hills to the west. Oddly, the idyllic mountaintop meadows were the most grueling part, given the August vegetation and mid-day heat. Spectacular views, though.
After the trail up to altitude, there were two options heading away from the hut at the trailhead in the right direction. I took the one less travelled by, which, as it turns out, is not always the best way of finding the right trail in the mountains. After up and down a large hill, beast tracks and beast noises helped me to convince myself that what I had thought was a trail was in fact a trace. So I backtracked and found the right, properly blazed trail. Long walk over the hills. My destination was a small town at the intersection of the mountain ranges that was apparently hosting a well-regarded (and free) traditional music festival. After many hours in the mountains, having set out at dawn, I finally reached the rural road leading to the town. Something shifted in the shadows ahead, and an inner sense told me that finding out what it was would be a matter of the higest priority. The identification then became clear as an enormous bull lumbered onto the road, presumably wandering from a local dairy operation. Having been (I thought) on my way to the traditional music festival, the notion from the Golden Bough of a bull being the sign of danger for the traveller flashed into my mind -- Tauric Diana. (But when there's a large bull in front of you in the road, the cultic resonsance is sort of a second-order consideration.) We looked at each other a long while, as I was sizing up the adjacent woods for safe running paths and climbable trees. He seemed a nice fellow, just a bit lost, and angry about that. A car came up behind me -- I signalled for it to slow and pointed out the obstacle. The car then inched forward, forcing the fellow off the road, and he trundled away.
I headed into what I thought was the town square, and asked a vendor about the concert, but he had heard nothing. (As it turns out, the venue was an additional hour's walk or more down the highway from the trail intersection. Apparently it's more a county than a town.) I would walk the two or three hours on the highway to hear the concert, tbh, like Henry VIII waking before dawn to walk hours to go see a rural theatre performance that he had heard good things about, but there's thunderstorms in the forecast, and I'm an intrepid fellow, not a complete idiot. (Despite appearances.)
[Full disclosure, the beast was polled, but I made a point of looking to see which it was, given the effects on disposition. And I often ran past dairy fields at dawn in the undergrad town in Virginia a few yeas ago -- I know what an angry cow sounds like, and this didn't seem to be one, though, again, I might have misread the identification.]
Piecework well past midnight. The trireme courses onward. Slept in. The intention gives the rule to the event, but the event gives the nature to the intention.
That bit of (running, fresh) water from the fountain yesterday was the dominant note of the afternoon, as Henry James might say. Checked color and scent and had the exploratory sip beforehand, but then drank the bottle quickly, given the thirst. Only in the aftertaste some minutes later did I begin to perceive the soil notes. Makes the coffee all the more desireable, in a way. The wiser course appears to be to sip the first bit and then check the aftertaste. Intuition and knowledge need to be commixed more evenly.
Long walk into the town for dry goods and grocery. Decided to add milk to the list -- 7L of the white stuff can rather dramatically increase the weight of the ruck. There was an old Soviet story about a very highly placed official in Moscow who was on edge every autumn until he had 100 kilos of potatoes safely in his basement. The human spirit still lives by these cycles -- witness the LDS prescription to always have a year of food on hand. Invisible depndencies -- you are otherwise reliant on certain things for life itself. Along the same lines, I have a personal rule to always have at least one pair of shoes/boots that could see me safely across a continent, should the need arise. No need to take on the cult of the "prepper" for doomsday, just try to preserve a basic capacity to survive the unexpected. Some life comes from that. I always try to have at least a fortnight of supplies on hand before vanishing into the books.
Sampled one of the famous roadside/trailside running fountains for the first time on the way back. The lore says to observe the locals, and go to the ones that they go to, and I've frequently seen cars stop for this one, so I tried it. Bit too much of the agriculture of the field for my taste, but perhaps that's a function of streams running low. Will have to try some others.
With the third supply run accomplished (rucking this stuff from town is no small matter) and the environmental hazards of the place seemingly sufficiently evaporated/blocked off ( I heard a roto-rooter going in a nearby unit yesterday, perhaps I was smelling the accumulated chemical attempts at clearing something). At any rate, went from unbreathable air at the beginning to unnoticeable now, so there's less concern for the coming days. In retrospect, I should have been more cautious -- stayed out on the small balcony as much as possible, but sitting next to the window in a room with a sort of background chemical scent for a few days hopefully won't have done too much damage.
The fatigue this morning was odd -- but I do need to reverse the tendency to take the indicated rest, something I (wisely) indulged in rather freely for the first week or two here in the mountains. Only wakefulness will wake us up and keep us awake. I wake by awakening.
When you come to realize that the world is mostly composed of unthinking repetition, imitation and competition, the forms eternally returning because everyone's just playing the game, the prospect of ever resting back into the simplicity of the social forms fades, and you see that the task is to have conscious existence within these forms -- that is life, and we will only have so much of it.
Woke strangely fatigued, so I took an extra couple hours of rest. Many environmental toxins hereabouts, very far from California. Have taken steps to minimize exposure -- windows always open, etc. And there's the constant sound of motors and flamethrowers from the off-season repairs and roofing work in the complex. As always, trying to find the 'sweet spot' of humble quarters that allow me to do what I've come here to do -- and here, that's visit the mountains of Pirin Macedonia. It usually works, as I'm not looking for the things of comfort that other folks seek out. The paradigm was perhaps my first apartment at the conservatory in Cleveland -- humble digs on the second floor of an out-building in Little Italy. Perfect for my use, bought some spice plants and made pasta every night, sometimes then heading out to the orchestra concerts. The point was that I could do what I needed to do, rather than just inhabit the place.
Might have done better to have, like Phillip and Alexander, just pitched a tent on the mountain.
With very few exceptions, including the odd AI rabbit-hole runs, I use computers to write/edit, read books, read the Times, and listen to broadcasts from churches and concert halls and the BBC.
Possibly excpting the churches and concert halls, all of these activities were possible beforehand, though not necessarily in peripatetic and difficult times.
Perhaps the chief virtue of the machine is in the reproduction and dissemination. If you can identify the good things in the digital manifold, they're much easier to access. But absent the icons of things that were known to be worthwhile beforehand, the encounter with the usual content (social media scrolling, etc.) doesn't get you much. One doesn't scroll FB in search of worthwhile bits of knowledge.
With each shift in place comes the task of reacclimating the mind, focussing the eyes again on that which was always still there. With each shift, there's the possbility of losing it all, no longer sensing the edge of things, vanishing into the great gameplaying. Even if it's just a move across town.
When I was acting, I could do this because I had a physical technique of re-centering myself in each new place, and that gave me access to the world again. I suppose if I were a priest, the rituals would serve much the same grounding.
Now that thinking is all I have, thinking itself must find the thought. Takes a few days, on occasion.
That said, I'm in a much better position to think than I was in a few months ago. Deo gratias.
On the last peregrination in these parts, I developed a sort of counter-clockwise rotation through the peninsula (as extended -- geographically the Balkans ends with the Danube across Romania, but I extended this up to Transylvania), and so came to pine for the next stop on the journey. When, as now, I was in the lower mountains, the thoughts of Bucharest and old German and Hungarian Transylvania motivated my travels, and then, usually with a quick day in at Szecheny (rather than a hotel room on the multi-day bus/train trip), I would head across to the northwestern side, (which politically is the Eastern side), and from thence, down to the Adriatic, and then across the lower peninsula again.
As the rentals in Romania have gone up a bit in the interval, though, I'm not going to follow that track this time, but I still have the thoughts of the Bucharest opera house ($6 back-balcony tickets), the old churches in Transylvania, the coffeehouses.
Desire as an anticipation and preparation for necessary action. Interest as turning the attention to the necessary object. I'm beginning to get a handle on these pragmatist/pragmaticist ideas. Which perhaps, extending the logic to the cognition itself, means that I'm turning to engage with them.
I might be wrong about this, but it certainly has seemed at times that the aversion to the Latin church among the Orthodox is more of popular and populist movement, with the structures of power taking a much more ecumenical view than the everyday person, while precisely the opposite obtains in the West, with a genuine interest in the Orthodox worhip by the average person, but a strong political mistrust fomented towards these nations by those wandering the corridors of power.
New humble quarters surprisingly noisy: construction, maintenance, vacationers. The cult of quiet civilization isn't strong here -- the relaxation seems more garrulous, perhaps associating quiet civilization with other, enemy cultures. Vacationers with engines revving, and the workers of the ski resort working hard, industrious in off-season upkeep. Both of which are rational things for humans to be doing. In fairness, windows have been kept wide open given the chemical smell that seemed to be coming from the drains and surfaces. Mostly dissipated now, though it reappears from time to time, which would favor the drain hypothesis. And be sufficient reason for keeping the windows open.
I came here for the proximate mountains, and they're undeniably proximate. The rest can be muddled through, especially on this budget. The present task is mental focus. Which has has different footpaths to it, compared to reading and thinking while attempting to survive the unsurvivable in the city. One has to bring the urgency to the task, rather than there being sufficient surplus urgency from the struggle to survive the day.
Onward.
And yet. In the country to the southwest of here, that's in rather dire straits, seemingly perpetually, though in fairness I didn't experience the capital -- I stayed in the old Roman city on the coast -- the most powerful grocery-type memories are of the small grocers, ubiquitous, scattered among the buildings, shops lit by a few incandescent bulbs, and a few shelves of provisions. I never shopped there, as I had made a rule for myself to keep to the big chains, which are garishly lit and reasonably well-stocked (and I made the rule a bit more strict and went to airtight packages only, after the bits of Italian muselei started swimming around in the bowl one morning).
Similarly, even in the largest cities in the region, I don't eat street food. Actually, anywhere -- including NYC. I've come to mistrust both the hot sauce and the white sauce.
I recognize that the general way of travelling is a bit freer than the ways that I keep to. But the mountains are still there, and I can enjoy them just as well after a meal of vegetables and grains bought whole, inspected and cleaned, rather than some fried dough from a corner stand (the American phenomenon of the donut turns out to be just one species of the larger genus), or packaged and prepared local foods.
I'm a bit of a Califonian manquee, though I've only visited there a few times, mostly for theatre. There's safety in nature. Unlike Kant's (highly offensive) Sachem who loved Paris for its sauces, I'll take the architecture and the opera instead, after a self-prepared meal from scratch.
The cultural cliche from this part of the world is that people tend to flaunt signs of weath, and loudly claim privilege. And this is important for the social bond, and there is some history to it -- in the 19th c. the claim to be part of the enlightenment was the most important thing. Positing this kind of status involved a moral choice, and people recognized that. And centuries later, this turned into expensive cars (even if only rented for the weekend to visit the village) and flashy clothing. Culturally, it's cognate with the early modern commercial theatre in England in the 16th c., when it moved outside of the sponsorship and mansions of the aristocracy and to the town hall -- dressing up for the theatre made a certain kind of cultural claim.
So the glitzy cars on the street of Chicago and Milwaukee, etc. have some logic to them. But the thing is that they also tend to expect this from visitors. As a rather low-key fellow who tends to keep his cards well inside his vest, I'm enjoying the mountains and the natural scenery, but I limit my cultural contacts to a very occasional cup of coffee, and making the weekly grocery run. And the latter is to the German chains -- it's no exaggeration to say that just buying milk, eggs and bread in this part of the world can drag you into a criminal conspiracy, if you're not careful.
Much of modern (yes) life involves putting ourselves into the stream of things and letting the way things are be our instructor. But, said the doubtful one, we have it within us to judge and know the nature of the time and the way things are. Perhaps this is now a historical question, i.e., our choice will bring a change in the way things are.
One element of the situation that should be kept in mind: the character of the present political leadership of my country isn't accidental, or unrealted to the basic social reality. When you think in this way, these are the sorts of things that you get, even if they are contrary to your stated political views.
'We are their parents and original.'
Elected the main road for the walk over, as the back trail was terra incognita, and when carrying the full knapsack, I prefer the better-trod paths. (Though I did walk across a very narrow top of a dam once on Holy Thurday in a park in Budapest, similarly laden, in-between the Szecheny baths and the Basilica for Mass.)
Specatacular scenery hereabouts, but I suspect that vehicle emission standards aren't tooo stringent in these parts.
Shifting Humble Quarters -- the new one is a bit humbler than the last, but has a rather spectacular view of the mountain that I was on the other day. Further out from the town, so hopefully a more productive space. Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth tonight. Last year, I listened to the broadcasts in Belgrade -- magical Rheingold at the Sbux across from the national parliament, as the building lit up as darkness fell. Here's it's been about the mountains -- Walkure after the seven hour return from high on the mountain, absolutely exhausted, just sat in darkness next to open window for a long while. Seek, strive, find, don't yield, &c, &c.
One of my favorite Ring moments was the slight lacuna that I clearly remembered in the rest at the entrance of Fafner. It offers a foothold for notions like the caesura, as I mentioned when attempting to curry favor with the Wagerian on my PhD prelims panel. Just to check it, I ran it by Google AI, and it turns out that there is no rest there -- it was just Levine giving the moment a little extra hold.
So my favorite part of it wasn't in the score, but it came about because of the interpreter's notion of the essence of the piece -- is it part of the work of art, or just a nuance of the interpretation?
Sviatislav Richter once had a retraction printed and distributed when he realized that he had been playing a single wrong note in his recordings -- a Bach piece, I think.
Music, particularly printed music, is a little like a play -- it consists of the instructions for an event. And the nature of the event governs.
Local jazz festival underway. Wandered down to the mainstage, knowing very little about Bulgarian jazz. Interesting band, interesting singers. Perhaps just the act that I caught, but it seemed to be more about standards than the sort of experimental vibe that seems to be part of the tradition in Poland/Serbia (I happened to look through a recent history of Balkan jazz at the Lincoln Center library before I left, and I've found a few Balkan state jazz groups/esembles on Youtube, but that's about it. Basically clueless.) Very few solos, and the solos kept close to the melody. Capapble sidemen.
The old-school standards/songbook vibe was interesting. Balkan jazz works for the same reason that the Macbeth in Belgrade was so effective -- when the actual shadows in the culture are this intense, the art form expresses something almost primal. The gentlemen of the syndicate. And the music.
There's a Turkish-inflected jam going on at a restaurant within earshot as I write this -- that proximity has a lot to do with the culture here, I think. Green over red. Alongside the loyalty to the Orthodox to the east who helped them get free of the Sublime Porte and governance by distant purchased firman, there's also a certain sympathy of cultures, a certain cunning. (cf. "What do you suppose he meant by that?")
Southern Europe. Borderlands.
Lengthy maintenance on the the ragtag-fleet computing machines this afternoon, to keep everything up to spec, and surviving long past service life. Peculiar slew of scam financial emails this afternoon, likely unrelated. Last time that happened, I had just booked an Airbnb in Budapest -- no recent transactions along those lines, though. To take a line from Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of techology.
The difficulty with the mixture of corruption and exogenous forms of industrial prosperity is that there are so many more prizes to award. And prize-winners are historically loath to sue in piedpowder.
Like John Rambo and the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, I take things day by day. Rigor towards the simplicity, and rigorous simplicity.
Perhaps it's to do with the imbalance in relations vis a vis the UK and countries like France and Germany. A way of running society on an island nation with two or three universities and a tenacious squirearchy is difficult to map up to the continental scale. The forms of meritocracy must be more distinct. Despite the fact that a tendentious earnestness is bound to result. (qed)
Took some pride in my thick-weave cotton oxford shirt, jeans, found stick and leather hat amid all of the folks with fancy, or at least synthetic, mountaineering kit and togs. Upholding the nobility of the amateur (amo, amas, amat...) The fellow who simply sets out from his apartment with the simple intention of getting to the top of the hill louring over the city. Apparently, the big hill is a rather big draw. Counted three languages in passing hellos on the way up.
Of course, they were much better than me at most of it, but that's simply because I'm an inexperienced amateur. Simply a question of getting to the hills more often.
Absolutely brilliant and exhausting day wandering the nearby hills. Above the treeline especially, very difficult. In fairness, I've been at sea level for some time now.
Absolutely exhausted. Long maundering through a circular bike trail trying to find the elusive trail head, which took me a good ways orthogonal to the range, and ended up just walking up the access road to the larger hills. Blazes here are a bit spotty. The assumption appears to be that everyone has GPS. Much like the blank stares I get when asking at the cheap stores for compasses -- a few had some toy compasses which were quite an improvement on the traditional compass, as the latter has only one direction for north. Really, any of the usual Chinese bulk-buying websites would be able to get them decent compasses for $4, which they could sell for $20. (They're trying to diversify the tourist approach, but it's still fundamentally a ski town.) But the hills are extraordinary. Macedonian Pirin. Mythic in the Balkan imagination from the time of Phillip and Alexander. Gateway to the region.
After a 4PM turn around rather high up -- well above the nearby ranges, and an excellent view of the glacial lakes and ranges in the distance, made it back to the road before dark, and then walked down, sometimes only turning on the flashlight when a car approached.
Luckily, there was a 24 hour grocery open (at 24 hour grocery prices), so I bought much milk, turned on the tape from last night's first night at the Wagner festival, and some potato paprikash is on the industrial-strength hotplate. I found an enormous bag of it at the discount grocer for less than $2, and it has done me goodly service. Budapest in a bag. Then some Iris Murdoch until I drift off, and the mortal frame can begin its repair job.
Another dawn lost to piecework well past midnight. Slogging onward.
C. Miloscz, in one of his poems, talks about the fate of the poet, always taken for something other than he is, even after his death ~"no sign arriving from the other world to correct the mistake."
Peculiar events yesterday. I think I have the cultural context, and I'm aware that the locals who saw me disputing a receipt would have had little clue as to what I was disputing. But 'here I stand, I can do no other.' Be just in small things. Otherwise, when the small things turn against you, you''ll have no way of stopping the momentum. I'm not offended at all, by the way. My only concern is that the local folks not come to harm.
In my own country, it seems to me at least that many of my struggles of the last decade or so come from being surrounded by unsophisticated people who thought I was an unsophisticated clod for not realizing how much was to be gained from playing another sort of game. And if I was another sort of person, I might have believed them, and believed in them. Many do. There's a lot of bad stuff going on inside the prosperity.
My virtue, my discipline, my ways aren't as against the others. They're some of the only things I have with which to defend my mind and spirit against the others.
Onward.
But, all else aside, if a customer tells you three times that you gave them too much money in change, and appears to take the situation very seriously, it would be best to try to either understand the mistake or unwind the transaction. To folks of a certain cast of mind (I don't claim it's a good one or fortunate to have), a troubling transaction is much more costly than a few days of groceries.
I can understand the contrary view, and why it might be held, but in shopkeeping, if one side invokes the "make this transaction right" rule, particularly when it's not to their advantage, that does need to become the prime objective of the encounter.
Well, that was a peculiar and frustrating experience in balancing diplomacy and paying the right price for groceries to the multinational corporation. Realized as I stepped away from the till that I had the wrong change in hand, but there was a logic to the error, so it took me a sec. Scribbled some numbers in the pad that I thought would make it clear to the cashier, and attempted to subtly fix it, as I didn't want her to come to harm, but she affected (possibly quite genuinely) not to understand the error. Took it to the assistant manager at the back of the store twice, who might have been confused, or might have been trying to resolve the situation without undue trauma to local staffing, but both times shut down, and the Google translate screen at the end said "...It is okay for you to leave."
So, reader, I did.
Will have to figure out how to subtly return it to the local folks, despite my own wing-and-a-prayer budgets on this leg of the trip. I once enriched the poor box at St. Pat's with a twenty when I was in a similar predicament stateside. I don't want anyone local to come to harm, but even though it's less than $25, this runs too close to American Privilege for my comfort.
At any rate, have decided that it won't drive me mad, and now I'm going to focus my mind on the work for the rest of the evening. Insh'allah, and pace the bakshish.
Saturday night adventures in laptop cinema, cont'd: July Rain
I'm not sure what was forcing my mind so insistently in this direction, but the whole film seemed to be about the certainty of death -- the July rain being this brief, chaotic floreat of the flesh. But comes the hour when the springtime rises and washes over the earth, and....
So. We 'keep the door open.'
Along those lines, the constant phone conversations with the fellow who lent her his allegedly waterproof jacket in the storm seemed a bit like contact with the divine, with he who provided us with this garment of flesh. His own, no less.
The new-wave/verismo still works, even after the lapse of the fashion -- one test of a true movement, perhaps. It grounds the film in actual experience.
The rain, then, is our flesh, our life, which is to say the things that we do. But things in the city are constantly carrying the others out of reach and rushing us along -- which makes the night picnic among the white birch such a relief. But the ski-jumper girlfriend who blended so easily into the background in the city parties is revealed in the light of the campfire as an unpleasant sort of person.
Odd double meaning -- the pantograph, both a means of mechanical reproduction of art, and the point of connection between the tram and the wire. Like the typewriter at the beginning, these machines seem to have life, but the real point is that they bear relation to life, and change our lives.
And then, at the end, she is empty-handed. After the rain, walking among the veterans, which apparently was a bit of happenstance during the shoot, but it captured the sense of human relations after our midsummers, after the love and the war, we still have our humanity, though the storm has quieted, and might yet grow more quiet.
If, on a mountain trail, you encounter a family of trees that seems gnarled or misshapen, leaning in a certain direction, the easy logical conclusion is that some force of wind, weather or land has made them that way. Similarly, and this is a bit less commonly thought to be the case, people, communities and even nations can take on a certain misshapen form, relative to some general mean of health and open disposition. And yet, in these situations, we tend to take their disposition as not merely primitive, but itself an irreducible constituent primitive term of humanity.
In truth, and this is where the idea reaches its furthest point from the usual path, people are shaped by the spiritual nature of a place. (Spirit isn't necessarily a glowing, magical thing, it's simply the changes that happen within time. The material thing without a substance of its own, but describable.) In the course of the long logic unfolding within their lives, across the many years, certain types of thoughts persistently occurred to them. And just as the spirit is material but without substance, these thoughts were about everyday things, but the manner of their occurrence was of a certain character. This is how to find the spiritual nature of a place -- examine the character of your own thoughts in that place. And after many years of a certain characteristic pattern of thinking,emotional response and physical action came to shape the organism. The trees along the path took on a certain shape.
These are the sorts of conclusions one should come to after having encountered people of many different ethnicities and nations, not least because if you've only explored a few, each would take these sorts of thoughts as a personal criticism. This is a universal phenomenon, and I'm sure that my own spiritual/arboreal shape, to a dispassionate observer from far away, would reveal some of the storms that I've weathered. Ah well. Like Shelley (I think), I always made an awkward bough.
I don't have wants. I set objectives that will help me to accomplish things. The happiness is from the totality, not the particular circumstance, but it is good to make as many particular circumstances as transparent to that happiness from the totality as possible.
The different view is largely a creature of people trying to sell things.
But in working to achieve the objectives, it can seem that these objectives are desires. A misleading appearance. If you were to sop me on the street and somehow hypnotize me and demand of the most remote reaches of my subconscious what I really wanted at the present time, it would likely be on the order of a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee, or a decent used paperback book. But that's because of the nature of desire. I tend not to associate happiness with the object, or even the objective. That can be dangerous in a prosperous society.
We have a rational mind, but it is up to us as to whether it will govern the beast, or a more Humean sensibility will govern the relationship.
TLS on the cult of Oxbridge donnishness: "The only professors without private incomes who have ever lived a genteel life are those who were once resident fellows of rich colleges."
Much truth to that, even at the far end of the scale. I still remember the summer in summerstock at one of the Seven Sisters. Long afternoons reading in the parlor. And jobbing in as a technician (just after receiving a top conservatory masters in performance) at a theatre based in Edith Wharton's old estate, where I lingered in the library when not figuring out the electric wiring in the horse stables (where Raquel Welch was shortly to do some Bernard Shaw).
The piece closes with a quote from a Wittgenstein disciple. Cantab ascendnt, now that they hold no. 10. Rumor has it that some of the mannerisms in the Philosophers sketch in Beyond the Fringe have their roots in common-room impressions of W.
The notion of a distant Christminster (or two) is useful. In addition to Hardy, I've plowed through C.P. Snow and Iris Murdoch, and still return to them as a sort of ongoing mental frame. But as useful as the distant fiction might be, one hopes that the thing itself doesn't do too much damage.
It has been a good few weeks in the mountain air. In retrospect, I wasn't good for much in the first fortnight, but I kept reading, and held to the discipline, and apparently the innards mended. Things are starting to fall into place, and the focus is beginning to return to the mind. Two times up the hill in the morning last week, had been hoping for three, but an unexpected late night made rest more advisable. Hope to be back to the usual five-day cardio within a fortnight.
I remain more convinced than ever that dispassion is the necessary discipline. We must be the same in fortune and misfortune, principally because we don't know what they really are.
The work of thought requires a life; we're not just creating mental and textual patterns, but these exist as extensional forms of the entirety of the life. The point of a thought is that a soul is having it. Those worried about some ontological singularity with the advent of these artificial electric brains are a bit like those who resisted cultivating animals and crops rather than hunting and gathering. Yes, they're breathing and thinking just like us, but the point of our breathing and thinking is that we're the ones doing it.
So, I appear to have survived, but appearances can be true -- or at any rate be associated with the thing itself. That's one of the bits that the post-Kantians missed. The appearance is of the thing itself. We should think about what we do (bring ourselves as characters into the world of appearances) only enough to make sure we're doing the right thing. Onward.
It's odd that there's some cognitive dissonance in the proposition that a fellow with a few advanced degrees who might have taken a hit or two because he objected to some corruption in the system is also a fairly convinced practicing Catholic. Given the alignment of the culture, that's arguably one of the most likely scenarios.
There is apparently a generational divide in the use of AI. Those of us who witnessed the transition to the ubiquity of verbal machines tend to use it for search, while those new to the thing just dialogue with it and get it to say things. Arguably, the people who understand the nature of the machine have a point.
It's as if there's an immense lawn on which you know there is a single leaf, despite the fact that you've just raked the whole thing. Now, you could go back and rake the whole thing, or you could use your knowledge of where the trees are, and where such a thing might tend to be, or you could call up to the aeronaut hovering in his Montgolfier balloon above the estate, an he can tell you where the leaf is. Now, the utility of such a fellow to me is that he knows where that precise bit of information is, but his actual function is more katascopic, in that he sees the whole lawn. What it does is fundamentally different than what I want from it.
Now, someone who hadn't raked the lawn might not know where the trees are, or where the leaves were likely to be, but they could similarly pick up a pair of semaphore flags and make the same inquiry of the balloonist. In the same way that people who witnessed the transition tend to keep their files in logically structured folders, while the newcomers just use search to find what they need from the fungible mass.
If you only want to know where the single leaf is, the machine will give you an answer. But the logic that surrounds the leaf is no longer the knowledge of the tree and the land. The katascope works by negotiating the logical structure of language, predicting the next word recursively, using the same logic that created the corpus of language that it is ransacking. If you know nothing of the tree and the land, you'll get the full utility of all past words spoken on the matter, and the logical structure of their relationships. If, however, the logic within you is what gives that bit of information meaning, your encounter with the machine presents a logic that differs slightly from the corpus.
But if you just want to think as everyone thinks, it might be a rather useful way of calibrating your logic. Perhaps the generational divide has less to do with different perspectives on the machine, and more to to with people with different degrees of wisdom, which is to say, different relationships to the accumulated logical structures of the past.
Undoubtedly just the usual local for the folks concerned, but the pub that the fellow who was lately first lord of the treasury decamped to is named the Grafton. The graft-on. Perhaps the beginning of the party's reign required a centrist, milquetoast fellow to calm the waters, and then the more central branch of the party could take over. #musings #utterlyuninformed #genuinelyclueless
Have rousted the pigeons from their apparently habitual roost just outside the window, as I was starting to notice some insect life nearby. They're making do on the roof opposite, but it appears to be less comfortable, as there's constant squabbling for position. Occasionally, they'll just stare at the place of which they were so rudely dispossessed. Undoubtedly plotting revenge and a glorious return to their rightful land. #birdsofthebalkans
Feast of the Magdalen. Midsummer now in earnest. The noli me tangere against the ways of the flesh in summertime.
One of Saul Bellow's characters called the undergraduates the noli me tangerines. Also: Fowles' Daniel Martin, when he goes to California and is befuddled by the easygoing ways of the flesh. Currency of the realm in Hollywood, apparently, much more so than in New York, and it's pretty bad there.
In short, there's a lot of it about.
In prosperity, it's easy enough for these things to go on, and life just courses on in the normal manner, with the industrialized comforts. But when adversity comes, either individual or social, having lived like that will present some problems. And adversity does tend to come.
I query the critical response to that Ninth. The furthest the mainstream papers appear to be willing to go is "patchy" (Telegraph). No. That wanted patching, yes, but it was a complete stumble.
Summer music criticism does tend to the feel-good vibe, but there does have to be some basic recognition of the event. I'm all for taking risks, and a Ninth at that pace is possible, but apparently not in that manner. If it doesn't come off, say so.
Zarathustra lulling tonight. Careful, meditative tones after the sunrise.
Shambolic, sort of doing somersaults over itself, and then straightening up and trying to act a bit regal, but too dizzy to stand. It might be different in the hall, but this reading just seems a bit too frayed at the edges.
Flip side, though, only a UK or American orchestra would be this free with it. Though freedom can be unwieldy at times.
New First Lord of the Treasury moves in to feed the cat for a bit. (There's some UK constitutional nuance on the timing of the handle -- it might have to do with privy council, but I can't remember it offhand.)
Interesting that number 11 is now the formerly disaffected defense fellow. There's a lot of weapon-buying going on in Europe these days, partially prompted by the folks running the government of my country.
One of the great merits of democracy is its ability to keep the king from going to war whenever he wants to. Aversion to ships money and a willingness to neither supply nor be confident in made the mother of all Parliaments what she once was. Vox populi, vox pacem.
Vis a vis the relationship between the leader of a country (assuming for the nonce that the executive branch, as head of state, is perceived to be such) and the general climate of interaction: no matter how firmly politically opposed someone is to the present executive, if their way in the world is characterized by the same crass pursuit of wealth and private advantage, it is a contiguous spiritual phenomenon. Their stated political opposition to him is merely the relationship to the scapegoat, and ultimately the nature and intensity of that opposition makes the scapegoat more prominent and popular.
The second-most-important job in any government is that of its chief critic. The specific nature of the opposition to the present executive over the last decade might stand some scrutiny, given the specific actions that ended up characterizing his presidency.
At least with respect to my own nation and culture, I can't be a tabula rasa. The ledgers, of experience and otherwise, mean that I need to maintain my cognizance of the nature of these places, the law schools, the research doctorate programs, the commercial world. I know a lot about the nature of these instruments of power in my own society. But at the same time, I don't bring that determination to my interactions with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker in the towns, no matter how naive their beliefs about the larger world and its instruments of power. 'All things to all people' means that one is wise to the wicked, and truthful to the simple, wisdom being a species of truth, and vice versa. And as the lot of the democracy is cast with the numerical preponderance of the latter, this is important.
This is apparently the lot of honest people in this culture, with such a president, and with such a commercial climate. Time will decide the issue.
This isn't a novel aspect of American society -- reading some early Royce, I see that the two principles of making it in America at the time were energy, and 'playing the game.' So, the words are the same. But perhaps the nature of the game, and the game of the game, which is to say the spiritual condition of gamesmanship, have changed.
In Europe, public discourse operates as a check on power. In America, public discourse tends to effect the purposes of power. So when someone tells you a rational story in Europe, more likely than not, it's an attempt to generate a rational critique of power, possibly in support of the exercise of power, possibly critiquing the exercise of power. In America, though, when someone tells you a rational story, they're likely effecting the purposes of power.
This is the paradox: For the democracy to function, it needs to be able to recognize when the rationality comes from above, and when from below. And especially in the context of populism and mass media, when the discourse that appears to be from below tends to control, it requires an increased awareness of whether it is in fact an exercise of shared rationality. Elevated discernment is required precisely when the broadest-ranging speech from below seems to control.
Interesting. Bookmarking. Possibly in reaction to the 'third entity' shifts in rhetoric there of late.
I'd quibble with one of the fundamental premises of the argument -- the US constitutional order certainly notes differences in rights between foreigners and citizens, citizens of different states, members of traditionally disfavored minority ethnic groups, etc. The difference is that these distinctions weren't equiprimordial with the establishment of the Federal Constitution -- they arose afterwards, even if the distinctions were present at the beginning. And actual adjudications of individual rights, even in the voting and constitutional context, have very little to do with whether these categories are equiprimordial with the constitutional order, or certain protections and rights arose afterwards. Questions of race and ethnicity and voting rights are very much an active area of American constitutional jurisprudence.
I've often thought a sort of electoral college model, with the electors having a free hand to bargain with each other, might be a means of reconciling the present arrangement with the ECHR ruling. The electors could individually pledge to uphold the ethnic balances that would violate the ECHR holding, were they to be imposed as conditions on the election itself, and the people could ratify that arrangement by their votes, vel non.
Caveat: I know absolutely nothing about this. Genuinely clueless. Just keeping an eye on the local legal ontology.
Again, utterly disinterested. I'm just looking for a place to drink coffee and read Henry James while exploring this part of the world. Though, full disclosure, I've been on to Ford Maddox Ford instead recently.
Our knowledge of the world around us comes from two sources -- conceptual knowledge and necessity. Within the circle of daily existence, we develop the necessary knowledge of how things are by encountering things. Beyond this, the notion of how things are comes from conceptual knowledge.
With prosperity, it's easy to make a life within a certain circumscribed area of action, which we come to know very well, both from practical knowledge, and intellectual knowledge; we develop the latter inferentially from actual sensory intuition and our own physical reactions.
So within prosperity, there can be quite a large number of people just doing their thing, and their notions of the world beyond the sphere of actual experience come not from valid inference from the local circumstance, but largely from cultural knowledge -- exogenous suggestion.
And then, as with the invention of the second actor in the Greek tragedy, a messenger appears from afar.
At this point, Hegel might say that we are only that which we are thought to be by the messenger, and vice versa. And that's at least true for the interaction, and the person that each is thought to be, and accorded the right to be, in the conversation.
Perhaps this is the point at which the abstract ideas of honesty, truth and virtue that the person in the circumscribed, or prosperous, existence was able to do without, as they had a direct mastery of the empirical actions necessary for survival -- perhaps at this point they become necessary. They existed before the point of encounter as sort of placeholders for the arguments for the universality of experience that each of the two strangers would attempt to make.
And if one of the two has consciously disregarded truth, virtue, or honesty as false notions, they will have no claim when meeting the messenger, or the local citizen, or perhaps the distant kingdom from which the messenger has come, or the sovereign which the citizen serves.
Proms season starting up. American programming prominent in the first night. The German orchestras also seem to have been doing a fair amount of Gershwin recently.
I'm still trying to fathom how American music seems to Europeans. I was walking through a Christmas fair in Transylvania a year or two ago, and all of the carols playing over the loudspeakers were in English. Beyond the notion that St. Nick (relics at the trading center of Bari) might have been overwhelmed by Jolly Ol' Nick of the U.S.A., there's also the distance between my hearing of the carols and their hearing. What is it to hear a song from America at Christmastime? Or a jazz-classical piece by Gershwin? And what are the outer limits of that idea -- when does it begin to ring false for them? It rings false for us because of over-familiarity and easy sentiment. Perhaps the outer boundary for American music is different overseas; perhaps it rings false when they suspect that it might be some distance from the thing itself.
Dewey was quite taken with Emerson's thought of the long logic of a life. That sense made of things only within the long duration. Perhaps: βιοσ not ζοε.
I would categorize my two levels of struggle as being beneath that long logic. There's the struggle to survive the present and the near term, and separately, the disjoint between degrees and experience and the prospects at hand. Both of these, though, have an endogenous logic to them, and the long logic of the life supervenes both. As to what it means for a single life that these things have happened within it, I think I have yet to understand, as perhaps is appropriate, and perhaps even fortunate. Not in the sense of not yet realizing something, but in not presuming to understand something before its hour.
This looks very Regie. Would still go, though, to hear it in Paris. If I had my druthers, the post-Barenboim one at an der Linden that was on Arte a year or two ago really struck me. Sometimes you get the feeling that you're watching the story of your own life on the stage, which of course is a trick, much like a docent at an art gallery trying to strike any chord in their audience's life in order to establish some connection with the painting.
But the discipline of art that requires and rewards attention might yet prove very useful against the instant-access sensibility of television news (and, for that matter, Broadway shows).
Approaching a fortnight in these Humble Quarters. Still negotiating the transition, of course. Lower entropy to higher entropy, and considerable difficulty to the lack of actual, present physical danger and exertion. Biblical difficulty, survived by the same means. Gave half of the 24 to sleep for the first week, and now am arcing back to the proper five or six.
Hopefully, will be back at full power and function in order to listen in on the Bayreuth opening cycle at month's end with a bit of vino and the local soft cheese. And the mountains are just sitting there, waiting to be walked up.
In one of Neal Stephenson's novels, a ship leaving port is sunk -- unsurprising, as entering and leaving port were the two most perilous times in old sea journeys. But the reason was that it was carrying a cargo of mercury, and the boxes were of a certain length, which caused the periodicity of the waves in the individual crates to break up the ship.
Many's the slip from cup to lip. In addition to keeping an eye on everything, keep an eye on each individual thing. Onward.
I'm fairly sure that I didn't set out to be an academic. I went to conservatory with the plan of making theatre from then on, and then when 'then on' didn't last nearly as long as I expected, I went to law school with the plan of practicing law from then on.
I suppose I made the first tentative steps in that direction when I sensed that I was not of a type with the tyro lawyers taking as few classes as they could and networking furiously (in the Midwest, in midwestern ways, in New York, in the ways of that place), and when I came to understand how far things had drifted from meritocracy. (That's not a controversial claim. It's quite openly discussed. Jobs are for the connected folks.) But I set out to find a place afterward, and came up empty, even after several years. (During which I was frequently reading and briefing every circuit slip opinion in the country).
Then I tried for a research doctorate in the field in which I had worked professionally for many years. Took as many courses across the university as I could, passed a peculiarly grueling week-long set of qualifying exams, and wrote a full dissertation shaped to the interests of the committee, all the while grading up to 4,000 undergraduate papers and projects a year -- and they refused to schedule a defense.
So. I'm left with what I'm able to do -- Now my credentials/charms are overthrown/ And what strength I have's my own... And after all these years of study, I've picked up a few things. Learning things has always made the world more complicated for me, not less. I'll start in a certain area, whether it's Pynchon at his most wide-ranging, or a certain line of modern philosophy, and just pugnaciously plow through the reading, and I find that after a while, sometimes after a long while, I have access to the thoughts, and the world is more complicated. One example -- several years ago, I saw a review in the NYT of a contemporary philosopher's book on Hegel. Went to the main room at NYPL and plowed through pugnaciously. I'm not sure what I thought I took from it, but I certainly didn't have access to the thoughts. Then, over the next several years, I made it a point to read that author's work and listen to his talks and seminars, and now I think I have access to his work, and it's useful.
Arguably the most important thing about life is that it's an ascending series. The box you're in tomorrow needs to be bigger than the box you're in today. Because if you start going in the other direction, everything will start to diminish. And with it, you.
Seek. Strive. Find. Don't yield.
Not the first time I've booked a site specifically for the mountain/sea air and been confronted with upwind second-world construction practices (smells of burning trash, etc.) Minor inconvenience. And a great incentive to get back to the predawn, to have the coffee in the clean air.
I can't fault them -- laws in some of these countries limit construction to the tourist off-season, so they're likely racing the clock.
Gently down the stream.
When one comes back from the front, one doesn't just re-tune the cacophony. That way madness lies. One allows things to come to rest, to settle into the center of the frame. Which often reveals quite a few more rifts in the lute than one had supposed. The danger at this point is that the folding-in takes on a momentum, so the exercises from the center need to keep the immaterial but substantial, unified, and perceptive soul alive. Yoga, not running or lifting. Kant, not Hegel.
Then, outward again.
Philosophy, and this is where the academy might get it wrong in the interests of keeping the game going, isn't about gaining status, or learning a sequence of strategies as if you were studying chess, or even gaining facility with a language game that you could play as if you played no other. It is about attunement to the present, in repairing the lines of code inside you that get in the way of experience and learning. Evey iota of thought works to clarify the basic relation to the world.
W said that he was merely trying to help the fly out of the bottle. So there is this sense that the way that the others think might have some problems to it. Conversely, there is also a care for all of the ideas of the past in a sort of pastoral sense. The second human philosopher was probably motivated, at least in part out of care for the fellow who had been wandering through the marketplace a few days ago shouting that everything was made of water.
The danger is that one can make a profession of this pastoral care for the souls and ideas of the past. The souls of the past were attempting to repair their present minds. To clarify their present relation to all things. As should we.
Always a bit of a discovery that mental and spiritual focus is necessary in places of rest and recovery as they are in the place of the struggle. The abyss is still there -- it's just not making itself present to you in the same manner.
You and the universe are still basically in the same relation, no matter what part of the world you happen to be in, and how it seems to be with that part of the world. It's going to take focus and work.
Part of the reason that I can't ever recall going on vacation. We can't vacate the place we are in, in the larger sense. And the sense in marking out a certain duration within which we will deliberately not care about the most important things eludes me. Even the weekend rest is the rest into the center of things, hence the habit of church.
Also, one of the first things that Russell noticed about him was that he had private money, and that offered him some assurance that W was capable of being an academic.
Even at the state universities in the US, this ethic still lingers. Conference funding is usually only a fraction of the cost. I still recall observing a leading historian inquire eagerly whether a "De" in the name of some mentor of his interlocutor was an aristocratic particle.
Well, with industrialization, we shall eat cake while they browse the Almanac de Gotha. And of course, with industrialization, another dangerous social set pops up, and they're a bit more difficult to handle. Despite the fact that they're occasionally obsessed with owning the cherry orchard of their childhood.
Gently down the stream. Free-minded, like all of us Americans should be. The long months reading Dewey had an effect, I think.
W said at the preface to one of his works that he would dedicate it to the greater glory of God, but he would be afraid of being misunderstood. Tractatus, of course, but I think that, and even the more informed gossipy reading might miss something that his mind hovered over. I'm not at all sure what this German aristocrat was about, but despite the fact that he was doing his best to dislodge Russell's certainty with every element of thought at his command (tracing from Frege to Bohme), Russell saw in him his only hope of a real protegee.
tl;dr: Not at all an expert, I've only begun to read his stuff seriously, but I don't think we can read W apodictically, but in the manner of disputation. And in every disputation, the reason for each engaging in the question might not at first be obvious.
Feast of Kateri Tekakwitha. She (unlike Issac Jogues) made it onto the peculiar mural at the back of the nave at St. Pat's. Subject of a peculiar and somewhat blue biography by Leonard Cohen. Also on the bronze doors of St. Pat's, although memorialized in the "Blessed" state. There are worse things, I suppose.
In the mural, she seems to be missing the disfigurement from smallpox, though there is some texturing. Just as Jogues is often shown without his mutilated hands. The ειδελον omits the wounds. An inevitable aspect of humans picturing humans, perhaps.
About a week ago, I could see the scattered fireworks below, as my
flight to Rome lifted off from New York City. It had been a difficult
winter. Revenues from editing academic journal articles had abruptly
stopped the previous autumn, and I was forced to abandon my nomading
through the Balkans and fly back to the city before the coffers ran down
to nil. It has been a very difficult existence for the last decade or
so, so I had some experience in how to live, and work, and think in the
city when no source of work was to be found. But these experiences are
very far from the usual American life, and the days and nights are very
difficult, particularly in winter. ... As the celebrations in America
continued into the night, I found myself stepping into the clear, cold
light of the morning, as I changed planes in Iceland. To be clear, this
is not a record of that winter and spring, or some picaresque narrative
of survival. These are my thoughts while these events were going on, and
would only be of interest to those who were interested in my thoughts,
rather than my experiences. More, this text was the instrument by which
these thoughts survived. I have divided the book between my journal
entries and my meditations on the readings of the day, but of course,
they were written together.
(Not a commercial endeavor; priced at the Amazon minimum.)
(Not a commercial endeavor; priced at the Amazon minimum.)
An odd experience on the first leg of the flight from New York on Iceland Air. For the first hour or so, the gentleman in the seat directly behind me kept snorting like a pig. Rather loudly, once or twice a minute. Finally, after an hour of it, I turned squarely around and faced him. An otherwise professional presentation, but very impish-seeming. He gave a sort of gleeful smile and was silent the rest of the journey. Perhaps it was just his way of equalizing the pressure in his ears, but if so, it was a strange way of doing it.
From time to time, some Americans do that, in my experience. Someone who appears to be very civilized, but not in a serious manner, more the type of fellow you might think worked in a marketing department, will idly do something malicious, and sort of gleefully smile at it.
Peculiar. Not worthy of further thought, really, by anyone. Just noting the event.
And this anger that rises in me every time I cross the threshold, back into times of more academic work, is certainly a problem. Mediocrity and corruption, yes -- I did challenge myself on that point in situ, and am confident that I'm right in saying that. But raising the ire is also part of the process in these things, and and the point is that it's not supposed to get one's goat, as it were. But usually, this doesn't involve matters of criminal-level corruption and complete disregard of traditional norms.
qed.
At any rate, it would be best not to think of such things any further than the point of resolving myself towards the specific groups of folks that I've encountered. The 19th c. texts are, and should be, strangers to my ire.
Reading some 19th c. criticism on the Greek drama. All immensely interesting and valuable, much more so than the (often radical feminist) tripe that I was asked to purchase and discuss during Ph.D. work. When I arrived, I had a notion of working intensively on an Oresteia, and learning absolutely everything I could about the Greek drama. Several months later, I floated a notion to do a scholarly edition of the masque by Milton in the rare books collection, which hadn't yet had a proper scholarly edition. Both impulses were met with shrugs. They were more interested in building networks of personal domination and influence than the scholarship itself, a fact evident from their scholarship; anyone who manages to locate their CVs would likely agree with that. At one point they did suggest that, since I had managed to get an outdoor Shakespeare festival off the ground in the last Midwestern city I'd studied in, I should try to network and tap my connections to get funding to revive an outdoor ampitheatre on campus. At which I shrugged, and continued to try to do as much work in Philosophy, English, and History as I could. (Freedom to take courses across the university was one of the points that I had insisted on before coming, and unlike the funding guarantees, they didn't welch on that one.)
The difference between what the state universities are and what they seem to be (the Saturday football view) is quite significant. Largest landowner in the state, sometimes. Like some of the most excessive English monasteries before the sack and plunder in reaction. But putting things in plain terms like that can be perilous for one's future job prospects.
This is fascinating. Most outlets are only reporting the black screen, but DW points out it only lasted for four hours, more a stunt than a shutdown. And the semiosis in the resumption time. Media, like the old shortwave (the budget didn't allow for this trip, but I did have one once, in NYC) can always broadcast on side channels at each frequency.
https://www.dw.com/en/hungary-public-media-reform-begins-with-black-screen-apology/a-77880569
Media is now the central mechanism of political legitimization. The ideas spoken by the news readers already existed in the audience, or the news readers wouldn't have said them in an attempt to curry favor with the audience. The people with these notions then gain a collective identity as a particular audience, and can come to agreement on a coherent (vel non) political narrative, which is to say, an understanding of the mechanisms of power that legitimates the exercise of power.
Democracy used to function differently. It was less susceptible to manipulation, because it had more to do with private judgment than discursive rationality.
Some days of work, yes, but the fact of it was rest. Last night, a very clear dream perhaps suggesting the telos of the present place. For an inhabitant, perhaps a dwelling spot; for the traveller, perhaps the point of inflection. And indeed, at the end of it, I had made my way to the bottom of the fire escape. (Though it was a very amiable place; it certainly wasn't an escape from the flames.)
The work is progressing a bit more slowly than I had hoped, but that's due to its careful nature, I think. Will try to speed the plow as I head into the weekend.
I can tell from the tang in the air that the west wind brings the scents of local industry. As I'm here for the ancient mountains, the modern connivances and pollutions are the distinct downside. If you go up the mountains here, you can see the haze frequently hovering over the towns and the clear air over the meadows. This slightly acrid scent is quite common in southern Europe, but I didn't expect to find it in the summertime. The advantages of the developed areas: properties listed on the rental sites, walkable groceries, reliable internet, and safety. The advantages of the remote areas: basically everything else. At least in the summertime -- in the autumn and afterwards, there's theatre and music in the cities. But that list is sufficient for me -- I keep to the pools of electric light, even in summer.
Brilliant encore in an eavesdropped concert: Rachmaninoff after the Rite of Spring. Amelioration.
Today was about washing up from the long journey, and getting the projects underway. The sorts of mindless ground-laying that AI probably could have accomplished almost instantly. But it got me to the desk at the new setup and typing.
Although all of my work in the last several years has been based on the academic structure (law, philosophy, history), my means and manner of doing it has been based on my conservatory training and decade in the professional theatre. I suspect that I'm attempting to vindicate (and find vindication in) the latter much more than the former. But we'll see how it turns out. During this recent swing into action after a very difficult winter, I realized how much it felt like summer Shakespeare repertory work. I suspect that the engine powering everything is still that actor fellow. Onward, then.
Graces will appear, and there's an end.
Amazing. My flight in was delayed past midnight, so the wisest thing to do was to wait in the (24x7) airport terminal until the Metro opened in the morning. I'm walking through the usual cavernous airport lounge, right next to dozens of humans, some in a catastrophic state, sprawled out on benches and the floor, and I'm carrying a package of overpriced crackers that I had just bought at the newsstand, and carrying a mid-sized backpack. A border patrol fellow (Border Patrol apparently is in charge of security in the airport lounge) stops me and questions me. (Literally, "dokumenti") He then takes my passport and radios up the information in military initialisms (side note: apparently folks in this country have trouble pronouncing the word "Romeo") and explains that they need to keep people from just showing up here. (I had arrived on the shuttle from the other terminal, and had explained my reasons for being there at the beginning.)
The reality of it, of course, is that I'm wearing aviators, and milspec boots and cap. Perhaps people in this part of the world learn that they need to actively demonstrate their harmlessness in order to be left alone.
This was a very difficult journey following a very difficult time, and the embarkation day was 100 in the shade in midtown, so at points I likely haven't exactly come off as Phineas Fogg fresh from a rubber or two of whist at the captain's table. Through the course of the three days, I tried to keep some distance when I was at my most run-down, and tried to keep as civilized an appearance as possible. (But again, showering after working out at the discount gym, then a day running around in a 100 degree city, and then three days of flights and layovers -- I'm honestly not sure how I compare, in an olfactory sense, especially against a planeful of folks fresh from their McMansions.) Perhaps I didn't cover myself in glory, but appear to have gotten here. (Though there's still the final leg of it, so I won't post this until I actually get to the mountains.)
An unreasonably difficult life, and unreasonably difficult journey. It teaches one to query the basis of reasonability.
Relatedly, was completely overwhelmed by standing in Iceland for a brief time. The light, the air. If I had my druthers, these perigrinations would be in the north of the continent. Ancestral homelands and points north. Heaven is there, it seems.
But aside from the increasing military scrapping over the Arctic, the world-effective social confluenes remain in the south. (Cf. "Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and burst s into tears")
So, the Fates apparently want the useless and Quixotic fellow in the Balkans. Amor fati.
A warm Sunday afternoon in an airport in Rome, the immense terminals filled with swarms of people, apparently a few days before the official start of the holiday rush. I suppose some would say that this is the material correlative of Kant's kingdom of ends. No grand social purpose, just the assumption that everyone here is able to further their own existence in their own manner. All seem quite placid. There are enormous stores lining the walls of the terminals, filled with expensive goods. A piano player somewhere is doing his or her level best to replicate the effect of Muzak on the mind.
So what right does a dissentient fellow have, against the obvious prosperity, and the fact that the people have obviously become more civilized (if not more cultured) over the last few generations?
Perhaps it's that having the necessary or desirable things at hand is distinct from creating a situation in which it is made plain that abundance is at hand. It is the difference between grocery stores or websites being filled with a wide range of products and inventory, and people actually possessing the things that they desire. Before we even question these desires as desires, there's something else going on above that question.
The monstrance holding the medium-sized dry good is the modern mall, a desire machine. Shopgirls (yes) , video monitors flashing successions of images of fit and attractive folks cavorting in the sunlight, that sort of thing. Making plain that abundance is at hand isn't an abstract intellectual point. That's not how shared ideas work. The material reality of the proof of abundance is the material existence of desire in the people. If we didn't want these things, there would be no point in having them, and more directly, one couldn't prove that the industrial mechanisms were creating abundance.
Which is not to say that we should shift questions of production to centralized bureaucrats or committees. Desire is the reaching-forth of the people not just to the object, but to the object as they understand it, in the manner in which they have come to think about it. And the forces of production tune their production to the objects that the people more intensely desire, desire, again, being the creation of the possibility of the sense of abundance.
Desire then begins to govern the form of the object (the socialists of the east didn't make dungarees, because they thought that they had to condition this desire). The form of bread emerges, not by a scientifically determined process examining how best to use wheat, but because the people desire bread. If the categorial term didn't exist, bread would be simply the action of doing to wheat the thing that resulted in people wanting to have it. And the people, at least in the abstract, are right in this.
Things can imbalance, though. The process of acquiring the goods becomes about accomplishing the satisfaction of desire, rather than acquiring the necessary objects. The sense of abundance comes from the presence of objects of desire -- something that requires both objects and desire. The people then feed on their own sense of abundance in possessing the object that they had desired. That sense gives the object an extra cachet, and the people take satisfaction in having it because it is a sign of that abundance, which they knew as desire. If you paraphrase this sequence more explicitly, the people gain satisfaction in possessing the object that had caused them to desire things, thinking that a need has been resolved. This enters into their comportment. But this pride of possession is of the owner, not of the author. Although the fact of desire was the thing that shaped the object, the possessor imagines that he has taken something of undoubted worth from the outside world and introduced it into his world. But he only possesses it to the degree that and in the manner that he has thought it worthwhile, The idea both determines and negates the experience. And so, his own notion that this specific object would be worthwhile is what gives him satisfaction, as he possess it in the manner of his imagination; having himself imagined the form, he nonetheless values it (independent of his use of it) more for its substance. And so he begins to value the authoring and determining aspects of desire less, and then looks to the mind of industry to give him the best bread.
We need objects in order to live. But we shouldn't feed on the satisfaction of desire, as it necessitates the existence of (at least temporarily un-fulfilled) desire, and when the satisfaction happens, we imagine it a gift from the gods that we had wrenched from them with Promethean force of spending, when in fact we were the authors of the manner and means of the satisfaction of desire, and its object. We sit in the airports, surrounded by expensive goods, and by virtue of the fact that we don't yet possess them, we think ourselves amid abundance. But there is a true form of abundance, and a true form of desire, and a true form of satisfaction; in the last, we recognize our own limitations, and have merely acquired the useful object in order to repair a few of those.
While couched in the language of the Enlightenment, that claim is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person...
There's a ten-thousand mile explanation behind those words. And he's gesturing towards the right place.
Though I query the plural form "forbearers" -- these were not abstemious folks.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/july/documents/20260703-liberty-medal.html
Randomly observed:
The advertising in the New York subways is now incredibly obstreperous. Repeated short phrases incessantly flashing, mixed with images of food and recipes apparently unconnected with the ads. Chocolate Bundt cake, fried pork bellies, etc.
--
Based on the inflight displays, Icelandic oddly appears to have at least three apparently non-cognate words for time. Duration (eftir), clock-time (klukkan), and time-point of the event (arrival: komutami, poss. ---tami.).
AI now tells me that timi is not a suffix but a second word--from Old Norse timi, auspicious time, fragment of time, division, etc. The happy hour of arrival, perhaps, rather than a Cartesian dot of no dimensions. Apparently, eftir is cognate with "after", and has the sense of following or sequence (accusative -- the dative refers to physical relation). And klukkan, unsurprisingly, is from clock, which traces back to bell, as in church bell marking the hours, from late Latin Clocca, by means of Old Norse.
So three fundamental notions of experiencing time: the promesse du bonheur, the sequence of things, one after the other, as experienced, and the abstract notion that the clock will chime for us, and has chimed for us, and some guess as to where we stand in relation to the event.
Also--immensely beautiful, even just standing outside the airport in an unremarkable area geographically -- the light, the clouds, and especially the air.
The lack of food service on the short, multi-transfer discount trips, combined with the duration, is a great incentive to the food arrayed temptingly at inflated prices at the airport. Keeping firmly to the budget. Will likely go 36 hours on a pack of cookies from the vending machine, but oddly, no physical hunger. Panis angelicus.
Odyssey impends
Eight o’clock, Idlewild to Rome.
Strether finds another opening.
Hope to be reliably online by Monday evening.
The 250 celebrations locally are underway, a faint shadows of the bunting and bands of the hundredth and the televised two-hundredth. Of course, it's the celebration of declaring that the states are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, which they're not anymore, since after confederation, the people in the states ceded sovereignty to the Republic in 1789.
But songs, unlike printed words, can't be disputed. One merely doesn't sing along, and remembers with gratitude the fact of the Republic.
The people here are genuinely subhuman. Including their "bosses." And as they are drawn into the social matrix here, they become even more so.
Perhaps Boston has it right in preserving the old asperity, or Chicago in preserving the ways of the old world. But what this place is is not good in itself. It merely raises the immensities and keeps the highways moving.
Heidegger on the "event." My first exposure to it. In the context of the thought of the time, I think what he's doing is responding to the triumphalist industrialist pragmatism of the Anglo-Americans with basically the same sensibility, except in an interior key. And he uses the ontological distinction (being/beings) as the fulcrum -- it long pre-exists this in his thought. Or perhaps there is more in these thoughts than I've yet realized.
Continuing my daily post-breakfast slogs through the novels of Henry James in chronological order. I'm firmly into the second mood, now -- The Tragic Muse.
One of my teachers in conservatory was a playwright in residence at the Guthrie when Tyrone et al. were starting it up. He used to tell stories about how Sir Tyrone would wander the halls during the long first winter, department to department, in each room and hallway raising his arms and calling out "Rise above!"
Mission territory.
Had set aside 2 or 3 classic 19th c. texts on the Greek drama, with the intent to give them the last day before the holiday, but having only recently having become aware of the free scanner, I instead continued to add to my files. Avoiding the popular and accessible stuff -- mostly things on the penumbra. I can buy the Bertrand Russell complete works (those in the public domain) for a dollar or two, but the output of FCS Schelling is a bit harder to find. At any rate, after a long day of work, I had only about a half hour for my Elysian corpus of 19th c. (largely German) criticism in translation. Fortunately, having foreseen this, I had gone into the deeper databases and found some electronic copies that hadn't been listed in the main card catalog.
So I have all of the necessary knowledge, even if I haven't read all of it yet.
The library at Alexandria was one of the wonders of the world, because they forced each ship that passed through to allow them to copy any books on board. In an ideal world, the ships would have done the same. (And it's considerably easier now, at least compared to wax tablets.)
Got irked at a few things during the day, and a gentle remonstration sort of came upon me in the early afternoon as to that sort of thing. I have to pretend to be under monastic discipline in order to keep the right frame of mind -- which, as long as I keep it sub pectore, at least when not blogging, that seems practicible. Like the worker-priests in Simone Weil, in the world, but not of the world. The recent season of adversity has given some remarkable gifts, and I certainly don't want to lose hold of them.
Spent a couple hours scanning the good bits of Ralph Barton Perry's 2 vol. book on James (which, unlike the 1 vol version, isn't online, I think). Shelf copy at a major research library, written almost a century ago, and yet I still had to trek back and forth to the staff desk a half-dozen times to cut some uncut pages. Amazing. Apparently no one reads anymore. Last of the Gutenberg minds.
Brilliant short note from Chas. Peirce to Wm. James -- Peirce was at his place far in the country, where he worked and thought in absolutely penniless monastic seclusion with his French wife, near Port Jervis, I think. He mentions to James that he remembered that James's brother "Harry" had talked about writing novels, and asked James to send him one. James's reply: " I will send you a copy of my brother's Golden Bowl, which is the most elaborate thing in his "third manner."" (Also to be sent: H.G. Wells's Tono Bungay)
Midsummer in the city of the power of evil. Had hoped to have left here long before now, and the stoppage time, as it were, feels a bit perilous. A certain type of person is filled with passionate intensity at times like these. Neither a good nor a safe place for the son of man.
Gently down the stream, which is to say, as if there were a stream, and the times were noble enough to permit gentility.
Live nobly. Onward.
Had been looking forward to spending a few hours with a 19th c. printing of an important book by an Old Bostonian, but when it arrived at the library table, it was obvious that I would destroy it by attempting to read it, so I opted to retain a digital version. Which is not the same, but it is sufficient for the task at hand. They'll probably just discard the old book, (New Yorkers) but at least it won't have perished by my hands.
I see the digital edition is a photostat of a printing held in California. Have been reading some of Royce's early histories of law and order there. An almost mythical place of abundance and the flowering of humanity, but the experience of Tom Joad et al. is instructive.
I daydreamed on occasion about going to LA and working as an actor, and possibly an acting teacher there, but if they didn't like me in New York, they'll certainly not like me in Los Angeles. And things are much farther apart there. Very easy to vanish into the space between.
It seems sometimes that there is a ruthless leveling downward in the froth of industrial production and consumer desire on these shores. Those who understand, or who seem to understand, or who seem to make an effort to understand face a very difficult life. The mimetic fury of desire becomes the only litmus of social encounter. An indolence, and a refusal to think.
------------------------
Separately: I realized rather suddenly an ominous implication of the historical mistake of celebrating the present year as the 250th of the country. (It is the anniversary of independence of the colonies. Confederation resulted, and then fell apart. Then, much later, came union.)
But if you celebrate the 250th of "America", you might as well be celebrating the America of some future republic -- or other form of government.
Still bedeviled by computer problems. Hopefully, the parts will arrive in the next few days.
Midsummer in the city. Gym (new record on the Hammerstrength supine press), church for a bit of meditation, then walking through the neighborhoods with many people indistinguishable from medieval demons and thick clouds of marihuana, then a bit of breakfast amid the wealthy soccer fans and clouds of vodka fumes in the park nearby, and now to the books. Managing to take notes on the broken machine, but that's about the limit of it.
Midsummer -- the social forms, the animal nature. Commemorated by the feast of the Baptist, none born of women greater than he.
A land of prosperity, and corruption within the prosperity. Play it true, and your life will be a test of the soul. Play it false, with the others, and you'll be quite comfortable, materially speaking.
Onward.
[And As I write this, I discover a quick fix (on the order of tapping a certain point, or holding it at a certain angle, that makes the problems with the machine considerably less. For graces received.]
Bit of difficulty with the computing machines. Thought I could finish some work outside in a light misting rain, but the hinges on the laptop and associated wiring apparently thought otherwise. Expect sharply reduced verbiage in the coming days, hopefully not weeks.
Have seen the surrounding culture with almost startling clarity in recent days. The sort of frothing insolence and mimetic anger one might expect from lifting a lot of people into economic comfort without imparting virtue. And it's been many generations now. The democracy will rise or fall on the strength of the single soul.
In retrospect, the park next to the library was not the best place to work vis-a-vis the ongoing goal of avoiding the marihuana-smoking over-entitled greed machines. Bit woozy, and a bit mad about that.
Genuinely the worst people on earth, precisely because of their position in the civilization. I'll leave this city (hopefully before the thunderbolt) with absolutely no regrets.
There is a world elsewhere. Next year in a holy country.
So, explain how the rhinoceros thing is even remotely plausible.
Okay, think of it this way. If someone says that there is not a rhinoceros in the room, you might look around the room, ascertain the lack of an immense horned beast, and then agree. This is verification, and it's what you consider to be truth itself.
Steady on.
Well, okay, in fairness, if someone said that, in the larger sense of the term, there is no rhinoceros in the room, you might think about the ways in which this might be true, but you'd likely feel a duty towards your habit of verification, and these would be only slight forays into that other territory, and you'd likely say that, when it comes down to brass tacks, and given the obvious reality of things, it would be more logical to conclude that the room was rhinoceros-free.
But how is it false to say that there is not a rhinoceros in the room?
It's not false, it's simply nonsense. First, there was never any possibility of a rhinoceros being in the room, so in a Hegelian sense, there is no specific lack of a rhinoceros.
But it suggests an absence, not a thing lacking.
Precisely. It only suggests an absence in a situation where there was never a possibility of a presence. It's like saying that time isn't running backwards, or that a giraffe isn't π. The statement cannot be agreed to because it's simply nonsense, despite the fact that this one offers a foothold of attempted verification. I might similarly say that running off the edge of the Grand Canyon doesn't cause the river below to turn into the Napoleonic Code, but the person who tried to verify it would be a fool, and if they tried to verify it conceptually, they'd have nothing to grab onto. The possibility of verification doesn't mean that the claim makes sense.
But its not theoretically impossible for there to be a rhinoceros in the room.
Well, that depends on the kind of theories that you have.
I mean, some undergraduates could have, as a prank, gone to the zoo, brought a small one back and tossed it in the window.
Legitimate, but the question is if that's enough to create the genuine possibility of the event. Genuine doubt is as difficult as genuine belief, as Peirce said to dispel the Cartesian demon. And so the expression in language at best might reduce to the claim that the situation that no rational person would think to be the case is in fact not the case. Which for W, might be precisely the same as the stronger form.
So we can never know if there is a rhinoceros in the room?
No, we just can't make the claim that there isn't one coherently, if there was never a possibility of the event. It's about how we think and talk, not what's going on in the world outside. Knowledge is understanding that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad.
Bit trite.
Indeed. And perhaps entirely wrong. Just wiseacring and procrastinating.
#notexpert #dontrely
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