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.