Increasingly confident that the sea change I picked up last week wasn't an accident of subjectivity after the second blizzard. The marihuana-smoking greed machines filling the sidewalks and the cafes in the evening are much more vivacious than before (if idiotically so). Very far from the world of Strether's penny chairs on the boulevards of late 19th c Paris. Surely this wasn't the point of general prosperity.
The Turks have the notion of three shocks of springtime: land, water and air (or perhaps the reverse). Perhaps the first one happened here in the warming after the storm. I first encountered the notion in Sarajevo. Sarajevo is the flower of the stem that rises up through Albania and formerly Bulgaria (one historical trace: the green in the tricouleur), twisting past Skoder Lake and southern (non-wreath/wraith) Montenegro. The stem is rooted in Turkey, of course, and like the Turks and the Muslim Bebers of the southern Mediterranean (who survived Sebastian), they look to distant Arabia for their classicism as the Romans might have looked to Athens, or someone in a corrugated tin shack in rural Wisconsin might look to Sheboygan. The charms of Christminster's dreaming spires in the distance.
It is pleasant to wander among the flowers of the garden, and so it is pleasant to walk though Sarajevo, which after the last war began a slow process of moving to a city under the domination of the dominant ethnicity of the state. "We got Sarajevo" was the phrase heard in the hotel corridors of Dayton, if the academic journals I went through at the library of the old Muslim foundation are to be believed. And yet, when I first visited the city and knew even less about it that I do now, one of the first things that I noticed was a massive foundation being laid for a building overlooking the city from the north, from the ground of the adjoining ethnic entity. (Within which a toxic dump sometimes burns, sending a fog over the city, and endangering innocent foreigners out for a quick dawn run.) Claim a victory within history, and the hourglass simply rotates.
As much as I enjoyed Sarajevo, I began to weaken a bit from distance from my own language and books and philosophies. I purchased a one-month subscription to the London theatre tapes service, and listened to an RSC Shakespeare every night, just to keep the λεγειν alive -- the residuum of thought in language, which is the dasein of geist.
So another Persian potentate falls, from a smooth stone of the wadi cast over the waters. I have reservations about these foreign entanglements. And celebrating the death of a cleric, even one who was filled with hatred for my country, seems a bit much. And something that might have to be explained someday at the foot of the throne of the God of Abraham. The hatred that religions feel for each other is understandable, and perhaps even useful, in that they preserve specific virtues against the others. Perhaps one day these virtues, preserved through time in the manner of bloody time, will come together. But for the nonce, it is a demonstration of Girard's principle that conflict and hatred come from (semantic) proximity and similarity, not difference and distance.
When I was in Bosnia -- Mostar and Sarajevo -- I thought of the charmed lives folks were leading in small towns in the American South and Midwest. I understood why some of the Balkan locals wanted a life like that, in countries they likely couldn't even get a travel visa for. Pumpkin spice lattes in the autumn in SUV's driven through forest highways, to grassy lawns and prosperous towns. Material prosperity can be persuasive. And then you imagine, in the manner of the bull in springtime wondering at the distant lowing over the hill, that there might be folks you could relate to and know. But the truth of it is that the children of the prosperity, given the distortions of the religions, and worse, the general notion that religion is inherently wrong, have become something less than paragons of Rousseau's innocent nature. Hume, who saw us as tragically susceptible to the world's shocks, wept when he met Rousseau, who comforted him with a friendly embrace. We must remember the possibility of being good -- actual good, not the idea of good. Righteousness, which the Gospels so often praise, is from δικαι, the power of right judgement. The shocks of the world are not to be the final word.
I'm conscious of being a bit reduced after the last three months (though not physically, given the daily weightlifting that I had been away from during the last couple years of travel). But those outside the charm of the place, those most different from the place, even if it is their home, will most feel the wind and the rain, which is in a way a good thing, though it certainly doesn't seem so at the time. One belief of mine us that at every moment of our lives, no matter how inauspicious the situation, at another moment of our lives, we might be thinking of the present, difficult time and envying it. Bloom looks at Stephen's daily adversities with some nostalgia (they are two shadows of the selfsame man). So internal lines of force begin to develop within a life, and the life begins to grow more strong as it becomes conscious of these lines of force.
Discovering Fichte a few years ago was a bit of a revelation. When we think of ourselves, we tend to think of a finished portrait. But what we are is in action -- if a portrait, then the painting of the portrait. When the LDS temple across from Lincoln Center opened, there was a visitation period in which the public could visit even the holiest rooms. The initiative for the NYC temple apparently came from the Broadway plays that had been a bit critical of the LDS. (I liked the plays, came down from Mount Holyoke on Hawthorne's enchanted railroad one afternoon with some friends and acquaintances from sumerstock and saw one of them in its original run. But I was a bit naive about their role socially.) I was a young seeker in the city, then a bit obsessed with the Shakers, and I made sure to sign up for a visit. The rooms were very interesting. The whole experience had a somewhat masonic flavor, understandably so given the origins of the faith. I remember sitting in the holiest room, everything was white, and the guide was speaking, but I noticed in a back corner that an older gentleman connected with the church had slipped into the room and was standing peacefully and quietly in front of of one of the full-length mirrors in the room, simply examining his reflection. Perhaps happenstance, perhaps a demonstration of the mysteries. But an action. Even in the holiest of the rooms.
What's to come is still unsure, both in the world, and with me, the one not worth the proverbial hill of beans in the scheme of things. But there is to be a final word spoken, and after all this, I'm relatively certain that we, and I, haven't a clue as to what it is to be.
