Two useful advantages of the present adversity:

1.  I will no longer, even slightly, pine for this place, despite the fact that I've lived here for many years.

2. Should I be able to get back to the nomad scheme abroad or find a sufficient place and means stateside, I need to be always writing.  I had that sense, and some interesting promptings towards it, but there were countervailing factors.  I see now that those factors are outweighed, and that I would be best off using as many breaths and heartbeats to shape words and texts as possible.  Even if all is writ in water, it must be written.

 At the beginning of my most recent visit to Belgrade, I had a very peculiar dream shortly after I arrived.  I was staying in a very small studio just down the block from St. Mark's church, near the Parliament.  (During this visit, there was an immense protest march one weekend, so it was a very interesting location -- on that day, I made it a point to stay in, though I walked around the city the night before.)

A day or two after I arrived, I dreamed that I was inside the upper reaches of a very tall tower, facing an angel, who was standing slightly above me on the stairs.  The angel had an immense countenance.  He threw some salt in my face.  Like any graduate of an American law school, I took umbrage at the tort. I demanded to know who was in charge.  Surprised, and apparently a bit confused at the question, the angel indicated some figures standing far below, whom I understood to be the clerics of the local national church.  That's all I remember of it -- the memory is keyed to the authentic reaction of the angel, taking the question and answering it.

A very peculiar dream.  

I have a theory of long standing that when I remember some detail of a dream, the reason is that it indicates something that I need to pay attention to, possibly to repair.  

So, acting a bit less like a graduate of an American law school, especially when abroad, is perhaps the takeaway there.

 

There is, of course always the danger, as Ben Kenobi warned Luke, that wearing one's heart on one's sleeve makes you vulnerable to others, and my professed understanding that, to quote Pynchon, "Reckon yo tengo que get el --- out of aquí," might allow others to take advantage, having some insight into my personal hierarchy of needs and desires.  

On the other hand, I think it's rather obvious.  The fellow being kept in the basement of the colisseum with the animals and aquatic machinery should probably, in every world in which he appears, be rather energetically seeking pastures new.

Mentally, on Brankov Most over the Sava, looking over at the Danube, and the silt island at the river's mouth.  For some reason, the bridge somehow connects to an apartment in Skopje -- and the chain Western coffeehouses in Cluj are on the far side, not to mention the Bulgarian mountains beyond...

 

  

I should focus my objective: Belgrade.  A simple escape, not a long-term plan -- as in the first visit some years ago, when I had enough on hand for a month or two, and found a job (in India) when I got there.  If I aim at the Balkans in general for an indeterminate time, I might miss it entirely.

But I know that if I can get to Belgrade, I can think clearly and get a few things in order.  Read Henry James and the Strugatsky bros. in Studentski park, haunt the balconies of the national theatre and JDP at $5/ticket. Write.

Or I might veer to Sarajevo at the last second.  But I do have to get there, wherever there might be. 

I would vanish to Valaam Monastery or somewhere on Athos to chant the Orthodox liturgy all day in a heartbeat.  Likely the same, if an opportunity came up to be an Anglican cleric in minor orders at some cathedral in the cold north of Britain.  This despite not knowing Russian, having only yeoman's koine Greek, and being rather firmly on the Catholic side of the Catholic/Anglican split in the English-speaking world.

It's the possible and likely things that prove difficult. 

Many of the incongruities of my present daily work come from the fact that I'm simultaneously attempting to secure a position that will allow me to do useful work, secure a basic and sustainable means of sustenance, and accomplish worthwhile things on the assumption that one or both for the first two objectives will come up empty. 

The third task is what I've begun to focus on, after the last ten years or so.  

So, it is what it is. 

 Focusing the attention and work on getting back to the Balkans somehow.  Belgrade, Sarajevo, Cluj, etc.

Not an exaggeration to say that this going to ground in the city is almost like a loss of life, followed by a lower and more difficult condition of existence.  I suppose you could call it a bardo,  One strains to reorganize the energy to restore the sufficiency in past existence.

Absolute discipline (teetotal, gym, daily Mass, etc.) and not trying to soften the situation by passing the hat or sending out rogations and petitions.  

 

 Septuagesima.

Let us "give glory to the Lord our God, before He cause darkness, and before our feet stumble upon the dark mountains;" [Jer. xiii. 16.] and, having turned to Him, let us see that our goodness be not "as the morning cloud, and as the early dew which passeth away." The end is the proof of the matter. When the sun shines, this earth pleases; but let us look towards that eventide and the cool of the day, when the Lord of the vineyard will walk amid the trees of His garden, and say unto His steward, "Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first." That evening will be the trial: when the heat, and fever, and noise of the noon-tide are over, and the light fades, and the prospect saddens, and the shades lengthen, and the busy world is still, and "the door shall be shut in the streets, and the daughters of music shall be brought low, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond-tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail," and "the pitcher shall be broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern;" then, when it is "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," and the Lord shall come, "who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts,"—then shall we "discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not." [Mal. iii. 18.]   

(Cardinal Newman) 

http://www.lectionarycentral.com/septuag/NewmanGospel.html 

 Interesting piece on the Persia conflict in the Times from an Oxon. prof.  It's all of a piece with the ongoing agenda in the Levant, of course, but I have some misgivings.  In conflicts between nations, intelligence and tact are usually only in play because of institutional factors, and those are precisely the forces that have been sidelined in the present politics.  While right and wrong becomes a difficult question when dealing with vastly different national cultures, it is still very possible to make a mistake, as was observed of Napoleon's avenging acts on campaign.

Further upstream, I wonder if there are two realities -- the day to day reality of national existence, and then the more abstract or general view that strategy creates around this quotidian existence.  The sort of politics we have now, based on narrative and theme, emphasizes the second type of thinking.  And it's important to note that this second type of thinking is  entirely contingent - it's something we made up for its explanatory and predictive value. It makes no claim to say what these things are.  What's needed, and what America was created to achieve, is a political reality that is based ion the first type of existence, the quotidian life of the countries.  Warriors for the working day.

But then came the televisions. 

 

Wandered back to the Jumbotron last night to give the Strauss suite another listen, and was a couple of paragraphs into writing a decent essay on Dewey and democracy, but then the warm, airless room, not to mention the fact that they had turned out all the lights (why?) worked its magical force, and I did a decent impression of a board member by dozing behind the shades for the duration.  As my hands were on the keyboard at the time, I lost even that much to erasure by random keystrokes.

Apparently, Dewey never revised or edited piecemeal.  He would rewrite the whole paper or chapter instead.  Vaguely Kraznahorkian.

Bit of a chill in the air last night.  One difficulty with slogging through extreme cold is that it  can inspire a certain docility.  And what needs to be retained is the laser beam inside the ice.  One of the lessons of Tamino's trials, perhaps.

I do need to find something elsewhere.  Frankly, the only reason I went to ground in the city after dis-astre struck in the Balkans was that it was the most familiar briar patch (as my home for more than two decades).  But there's nothing for me here.  I see the greed-machines inside the daily life of the people, and I had already seem the mechanisms of the city fairly clearly when I left before.  Not Zion, or even Oz.  Just a point where a very large number of people gather in order to not think clearly together.   I can understand why people see it as sort of an apex experience, and retire here or squander their trust funds, since for a pragmatic mind, one that gets its truth from getting along with other people and gaining power over other people, this would indeed be the heavenly Jerusalem.  For someone who believes that the truth is to be found in ideas, the path is long, and the way is steep, and people generally don't understand why you're chasing abstractions.  Admittedly the cathedrals and coffeehouses are amiable.  But the apartment in North Dakota overlooking the transcontinental rail line would serve my present purposes much better.

I suppose there were two sorts of Soviet dissidents.  One moved to the small villages that sprang up a set distance from the city in which they were prohibited from living, and the other set out with Tolstoy.  Through him, with him, and in him.  He who died excommunicated from the communion of his youth, I think, in addition to having set out from his home to destinations unknown just before the end.  Perhaps the 'long walk' familiar in the animal kingdom, or perhaps something human, and higher.  His last words were asking for the ladder, I think -- presumably Climacus, The Divine Ascent, or perhaps there was another referent.  An animal docility, the sort of sensibility that sets in in the cold, keeps us at a home at the city limits, straining to reach the familiar places.  But there is a world elsewhere.

Another paradigm for current difficulties is the Eldar Ryzanov film Train Station for Two.  The plot is that a concert pianist from the city has been sentenced to a term in a remote northern prison colony after a traffic accident.  There is some question as to whether his wife, a beautiful television meteorologist was actually at the wheel at the time, but you'd need some Vailhinger to prise apart the meaning of that part of the plot.  The underlying anagogical thought is perhaps that he has been caught up in the political mechanism, the purification of the people on the march towards communism, the obscurantism and egotism of classical piano needing to be transformed to music from the people, e.g. perhaps Khachaturian.  He stops at a train station on the way, and meets a waitress.  The truth, perhaps isn't in our Moscow lives, or in the remote northern places that serve as seven storey mountains of political or economic exile, but in the places between, places that we didn't already know about in the meaningful journey of our lives.  After setting out from his home when the end was near, Tolstoy died in an obscure village railway station.  Perhaps that place, the place outside of the ponderous and political meaning of his life, was the place for which he was searching in the journey outward.  An animal, on its long walk, merely walks to the horizon. A human, and here for some reason Emily Dickinson's testamentary mandate that her pallbearers carry her coffin barefoot through the springtime flowers comes to mind, the human walks through the world.