Ducked out to the Chrism Mass at St. Pat's.  Found an out of the way bench in the quasi-transept under an image of O.L. of Guadalupe.  Was thinking about the historicity of the church, and what it meant that the Christian sacraments were being celebrated in a post-Enlightenment city.  Amid the rabid fundamentalism found in dark, primitive places like the television national news and the Pentagon.  

It just seems that the society is increasingly dominated by imitation and repetition, and there's very little serious thought about the way things are.  We are in the midst of the technological and civilizational fruits of the Enlightenment, which had a lot to do with Christian notions.  Hospitals, skyscrapers, planned suburbs.  Very different from some other nations and cultures.  Christian nations are generally more economically developed, all else being equal.  (Oil wealth makes for some exceptions.)  Part of that is the historical accident of being in Europe and America, but still.

And yet, there are some rather bad things going on in these Western cities.

Thoughts that went through my head as I sat under the image of the BVM, remembering hearing the calls to prayer as I sipped kefir and read philosophy in Bosnia.  

Part of acknowledging the historical reality is keeping the door open to the other world.  Repeated ritual can become rote, or just matter for comforting repetition.  But this is where the rift is for us.  And if, even in the churches, we begin to think that the present reality is all there is, we've lost.

Heidegger was walking with Arendt in the mountains.  They stopped in to a small Catholic chapel.  As they left, Heidegger genuflected.  Arendt turned to him, very surprised, and asked why.  (He had long been lapsed from the faith.)  He thought for a moment, and then said deprecatingly, "Well, one must take the historical view of things."

These are events extending far through time.  Mind-independent realities that have shaped nations and millions of individual souls.  If it seems humdrum in the worship multipurpose room, look out the window (the one that John XXIII cracked open) at the centuries of the past, and the strange and sometimes deeply problematic forms that have resulted from them.   

This is what we would be in the midst of, if we attempted to ground ourselves in a true understanding of the time.  But it's much easier to watch television.

Midtown does seem at times a de facto gulag panopticon.  Ubiquitous surveillance, glowering private security folks, etc.  A wealthy city, and all have the freedom of the city, but only some have the freedom of the wealth.

But the difficulty isn't in the structure of things, or the economic system.  It's in the way things are thought about.  That's what's gone bad.  Without religion, the spirit has faltered.  

Without a vision, the people perish.  A vision is an understanding of things -- cf. the beginning of the Metaphysics.  Without a way of thinking about the way things are, individual people lose their existence.

 By analogy: the dissident has survived the winter, walking the streets of Moscow.  But he knows that even though it is easier to survive when the days are warmer, in the same manner, the society around him is coming back to life, and if he isn't able to make it out of the country, he might not survive the hostile culture in its floreat.  The extraordinary challenge that he survived was a physical one.  The danger that impends is rooted in the spirit of the place.

 A meddlesome, yet surprisingly well connected family (now completely disintegrated), and many years surrounded by very corrupt people and institutions.

It becomes difficult to fashion even a very basic existence.

 “Holy Mary, woman of the third day, grant us the certainty that, in spite of all, death will no longer hold sway over us; that the injustices of peoples are numbered; that the flashes of war are fading into the twilight; that the sufferings of the poor are breathing their last. And grant, finally, that the tears of all the victims of violence and pain will soon be dried up like frost beneath the spring sun” (Maria, donna dei nostri giorni).

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2026/documents/20260329-palme.html

During Mass, I heard a strange bell of a distinct tone.  Letting my imagination run, I associated it with the Chrism rites later in the day, imagining that the bell was to be sounded when the oils were received in the manner of the French coronation oils.

One must allow the mind to run like this, while reserving belief.  Vailhinger.  The what if.  Cf. the film They Might Be Giants, starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward.

As it turns out, it was the grizzled, venerable fellow who sometimes sounds the bell while pacing Fifth avenue, wearing holy icons like a sandwich board.  He was standing up outside the entrance of the cathedral, sounding his bell and apparently blessing it with the cross in his hand.  I uncovered as I passed and made the sign of the cross, hoping he wouldn't notice that I was doing it the wrong way.

 I've never prayed for my own good fortune.  God & I have our own view on the merits of worldly prosperity.

Notice, in the parable of Lazarus and Dives, Lazarus is silent.  I suspect his interior monologue was something along the lines of "Oh, thank God that's all over with."  Woe, rich ones.

And at the same time, we now have a society in which, like the 16th c. English theatre audience, signs of wealth are signs of favor, displacing aristocratic or royal claims.  And, in the fullness if time, it did happen.  People pragmatically defined the ultimate good as that which brought empirical wealth, claiming the other notions of good were illusions of the mind.  It happened.  The writings of the philosophers, like glowing trails in a particle chamber, are evidence of this.

And now I find myself in a position in which the position far less remunerative than I might reasonably expect, given my degrees and experience, but which almost allowed me to read and think and write and discover the world appears to have for some reason suddenly decided become much less remunerative.  In such a position, one would be expected to scrounge for money, or at least pray for it.

Nonetheless.  Like Rambo and the Prime Minister of Italy, I take things day by day.  Keeping in mind that the days are numbered, I try to do the necessary work, whatever the situation.

 Random thought -- the ethnarchy in Judea was about to be abolished, after its diminution at the death of Herod. Presumably, the Powers that Be were privy to the political rumblings from Rome.  Perhaps the procurator conceived INRI as a political symbol.  

Two years ago, Holy week was in Mostar.  Interesting services, very revealing modifications in the rubrics.  But it's difficult to point out the borderline idolatry to a roomful of people who have just survived a religious war.   There is some comfort in the obviousness of such things, and with years of peacetime, the seeds in the practices will lead them back to a more reflective understanding, I think.

The folks from whom I was renting (a rather difficult) apartment told me that there was a Good Friday service at the mountaintop cross, so on that morning, I walked over to the Franciscan church at the base of the hill, had some coffee, and made my ascent.  Extremely difficult and somewhat dangerous climb -- the path had just been reopened after de-mining.  Finally, I made it to the top, a bit perplexed that I was apparently one of very few people climbing the mountain.  At the top, others appeared, and then a huge crowd, all of whom had walked up the paved road on the other side.  A very interesting afternoon.  

--

And then, last year:

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/04/19/a-balkan-triduum-i-ii/

https://defrydrychowski.wordpress.com/2025/04/19/a-balkan-triduum-iii/

Of this year... it is best to remain silent.  Next year in a holy land.

#holyweek #salvationtothesavior

Someone should investigate the habit of Americans to signal virtue by pounding especially hard upon their keyboard.  Like Tchaikovsky trying to signal an ardent passion, but not quite as resonant.

Every iota of my being during the morning workout was pining towards Madedonian Pirin.  Gate of the south of Europe.  

I am becoming Spartan about this; very little room for Athenian equivocation.  As I look around myself and think carefully, with perhaps some heightened perception, given recent spectacular adversity, the problem with my country doesn't seem to be the bad parts, or the bad people, but the general cast of mind.  An indolence, sustained by general prosperity, which is easily focused on objects of greed, or ideas broadcast on the television networks.  This isn't incidental or accidental -- this sort of neutral, pragmatic (Kant: pragmatic as precursor to moral sensibility; this sense precisely is the one taken up by the American pragmatists of the early 20th c.)  cast of mind is an essential part of the post-war plan in which ideas as ideas can't take hold.  Problem is, virtue, truth, and honesty are all rather abstract concepts.  

So there's a lot of corruption, yes, amid a lot of prosperity.  But the problem, the thing that heaven would smite if the heavens still thought themselves valid arbiters of human sensibility, is this idle, indolent emptiness of mind.  

"It is required you do awake your faith."

---

Realized this morning that the thing that I'm attempting to attain, a working situation abroad, using far less funding that would be required for a similar setup stateside, while being much more rewarding culturally, is thought a luxury good.  I assure you, if you spent some months in the most modest accommodations available in Bosnia, Albania, Romania, et al., you would not have this notion.  But it is the general notion in the society.  Much as I realized weith a dull shock while doing the predawn runs in Illinois that NYC, which to me stood for difficult housing, scrimping by, waiting hours in audition lines, and finding it almost impossible to do even the smallest roles in the most modest theatres, was thought of as a luxury destination in those parts, meaning that my pining for the city that had kicked the tar out of me for almost two decades would be thought presumptuous, something only the wealthy should aspire to.  The same cognitive dissonance happens with theatre generally; it's a very basic activity and art that I understand very, very well -- but in the US it is priced as a luxury good, so when I express my desire towards it, it just seems a longing for the pots of gold for which everyone pines.

In sum, quite frustrating.  I would be very happy to return to the days of reading philosophy while drinking kefir on a rooftop cafe over a supermarket in Bosnia, or sipping an inexpensive Americano on the sidelines of a glitzy mall in Romania.  These aren't pipe dreams; they're elements of a minimal existence.  But to speak of them brings thoughts of luxury vacations to the American mind.

----

I see the Illinois peach-basket team has made it to the semifinals of the national tournament.  Don't underestimate the danger of these immense institutions.  Many of them are the largest landowners in their respective states, and the penetration of the political mechanism, combined with pure economic force (technological research, etc.) make them analogous to the worst of the English pre-reformation monasteries -- and there's corresponding corruption to be found there, I assure you.

----

Brief game reset:

Unbelievable levels of adversity for many years, over a decade, during which I've kept absolute spiritual, intellectual and physical discipline.  Unknown, and likely unknowable source, but I have a few notions as to the first cause of such things.

Attempting to get back to southern Europe in a digital nomad capacity, but the freelancing work level isn't high enough to support it.  

I've come to see myself as a sort of American Navalny (remember, he was a patriot of his country).  I have a top-tier JD with strong grades and a top conservatory degree with many years of professional work, but all roads have been blocked to me for many years, and I'm unable to find employment sufficient even for a basic existence.  So the times are very difficult, and have been so for many years.  I am almost certain that this is political -- see the note attached to my online CV for a brief description of how I've resisted participating in some rather corrupt practices at these large institutions.

So, what's to come is still unsure.  My thoughts are now entirely on the Balkans, despite the lack of paths leading there.  Unless an opportunity to do real work turns up stateside, I need to leave for an extended period as soon as possible (considerations of mens sana and corpore sano).

The event will decide.

 My mind is set, and will not be changed, unless a genuine opportunity to work here arises.

Against the erasure.

Away from the corrupted homeland. 

Work, study, understand by using the differences in culture.

Remain awake  (despite having sufficient room and board).

Ora et labora.

 Wondering whether my open discussion of hopes to get back abroad at the earliest possible opportunity have brought on the present conditions in which getting abroad looks to be a long way off.  I've wondered things like this before, never profitably.  Perhaps some karmic jinx of some kind, the universe lining up in instinctive opposition.

So, the light at the end of the tunnel would appear to be an oncoming train -- but only within reality as presently understood by human beings.  So, you know, there's hope.

My comfort is in the memories of specific places that pop into my mind, unsolicited, during the course of the day.  And of course the whole point is to find a place to think, work, and write, so continuing on with those as best I can in the midtown gulag; hic Rhodus, etc.

Likely one of the last below-freezing evenings in a winter that proved a bit difficult to endure.  I am at the coffeehouse that proved to be a lifesaver when I found it open after the morning of the first blizzard.  

I've just written a very long essay that was lost completely when the sbux internet connection dropped underneath when writing it.  Perhaps some fragments of it will allow the entire thought to regrow.  

The psalms begin by blessing one who doesn't sit in the seat of the stranger.  Literally, this is the seat of the 'babbler', which some scholarship connects to the travellers between towns, the merchants.  The mercantile laws of England developed in relation to the legal orders of the local aristocrats, providing a legal order sufficient for commerce between towns.  The one who stands outside the city becomes the foundation of the larger order, not because he is beyond the law, but because he is subject to a higher law; the laws of the world are inscribed on the staff of the traveller.

Likely, I come off as a bit military.  This is only because of the limited range of paradigms of strength; a strong and disciplined person is thought to be properly a soldier, just as a someone skillful with ropes and navigation in a seafaring town might be thought to be a sailor.  

The Germans divide culture and civilization.  Culture is that living force that is awakened conceptually by the others, and it takes the form of visual arts, music, stories, etc.  It is an inward strength, but one called forth by the presence of others, and shared with them.  Conversely, civilization is the ability to navigate social forms with sufficient dignity.  The shared facility of encountering others in ways that are conducive to social projects and productivity.  The city is a complex mix of these two things, and the one who stands outside the order of things must preserve their own forms of them.

There is an old Russian film about some soviet earth scientists who travel to the barren north, mapping the territory and seeking mineral deposits.  Natural disasters and misfortunes pick them off, one by one, and at the end, the last survivor lashes some logs together and throws himself into the stream of the river, trusting that it will take him to populated areas.  At the end, he has a vision of the cities that will come, after these times of privation and struggle against nature.

But the cities are not solutions in themselves to the problems of mankind.  Some even make the problems worse.  The one that I am in right now seems sometimes to only provide sufficient material security so that the people can function as greedy end-users of consumer products, and fight ruthlessly for position in the local social order.  It's not exactly the divine city that the most extreme partisans of the local faiths sometimes make it out to be.

The storytelling of the cities also preserves the notion of the wanderers between the cities.  Islamic stories tell of wandering angels testing the hospitality of men.  The wandering Jew, Prester John, the ships that travel eternally in the night, Wotan the wanderer, with the laws of the world inscribed on his staff.  It's odd that these narratives would preserve some notion of travellers subject to a moral order higher than the local order; the partisans of the city would seem to have little to gain from this.  But perhaps these are stories told against the city, preserving the memory of life from outside of it, and the world elsewhere.  

There is a sort of purification involved in standing outside of things.  Perhaps this is the condemnation of the psalmist.  On the coldest of mornings, I was struck by the scents, the microbial life, of those around me -- I had been purified of such things by the cold.  Inwardly as well, the body becomes less able to digest things, as the microbiota die off, and the guts become less fecund.  Panem angelorum.

But this is a form of death as well.  The city will rise up against the traveller; the nature that the city has overcome similarly stands ready with its own attacks.  Many of those caught between worlds simply slink back into the depths of the city; the alternate-history Oedipus lurks the dark corners of Thebes, afraid to leave.  

There is a priesthood of the one caught between worlds, or perhaps that is a pleonasm, as a priesthood is by definition one caught between two (or more) worlds.  Like culture, it is distinctively inward, but it is called forth by the social order that surrounds him, and seems to attack him.  A higher discipline and self-regard than the circumstances might tend to indicate.  

The laws of the world are inscribed on the staff of the traveller, as they are not inscribed in his heart, and in his relationships with others.  Their inscription is objective, not a form of life for him.  He understands them, and strives to honor them.  Both in the fight against nature, and among the cultures of the cities, the traveller stands apart, purified by the adversities.  But the purification of the winter is not the final word.  These fragments of remembered truth, now reduced to obective language from memory, grow within him, and from them, there is a higher culture, and a notion of a higher civilization.  

Panem angelorum.

He will not survive within their worlds, but he will live.

Springtime in the city of the power of evil.  Everyone seems very exhilarated, loud, and not infrequently, stoned.   I expect that the clouds of vapor at the streetcorners will increase in the coming weeks.

When I moved here at the turn of the millennium, I ran in the park and rode my bike everywhere.  There were a good number of folks doing that at the time, but now things have been raised to another level entirely.  Platoons of bikers and runners course through the streets and the park lanes in the evenings -- undoubtedly revenue streams for the marketers and organizers, and networking opportunities for all involved.

Apparently, Scotty's still working on the transporter issues.  Hopefully, I'll be able to survive a bit of time among the dark souls ennervated and enlivened by the springtime. 

Historically, a difficult time for a son of man.

 An interesting episode from Pynchon's ATD.  Cyprian, the wandering flaneur turned old Balkan hand is solemnly informed by the fellow whom he has been dispatched to protect that he, Cyprian, was by this and through this being proffered to the other side, in exchange for which his masters expected that the others in their family of operatives in the field would be left alone, and perhaps even assisted.  Perhaps a mind game on him, but subsequent plot turns would seem to bear the conjecture out.   The (successfully completed) assignment involving extraordinary danger and difficulty was not so much heroic as pyrrhic. 

 Lasciate ogni speranza...  The speranza's not on today.  Try the veal.

Anomalous, almost-superhuman survival can complicate things.  Things appear normal, but the one who has survived quite logically declines to accept certain norms.

This can, perhaps, be strong enough a mental reservation that living in one's own country slowly becomes beyond the pale.  It might be possible to just head off into the woods, but if one's life is based in the phenomena of culture, this would be another alienation.  And if it were to be compelled, i.e., the border were to be closed, this sort of forced rustication would be a second adversity.

Contra Providence:

One concomitant of growing up in a peculiarly well-connected family at continual internecine war is an active distrust of the providential.  Gift horses not infrequently with time-bombs hidden behind the molars.

That which happens next is not God.  In fact, the present event is frequently the result of machinations of the peculiarly unholy.  The providentialism comes in the fact that we might be able to survive it.

 Thinking about the MFA in Ohio recently.  ("A perfect cretic.") Very peculiar time.  For some reason, they spent three years trying very forcefully to drive me out of a closet that I most definitely wasn't in, while the closeted folks around me went on cavorting in the usual manner.

But three years in an art form can teach you much, even in a place a bit bent.  I found a few true souls and learned.  

About halfway through, I got a big break, an offer to do a reading in LA.  The head of the program was against it, but allowed it. Presumably to keep me from getting too cocky, they had me stage manage an undergraduate production of Three Sisters when I returned to Cleveland in January.  In theatre, that's called whiplash, and it can put you out of commission for awhile.  In the last year, I grew a long beard, read philosophy (beginner stuff: Foucault, the Greeks), and played supernumerary roles at the theatre (and Malvolio at the university, which now makes sense to me in light of the above).

There's a fair amount of anti-Slav sentiment to be found in the Midwest.  I remember some comments and events rather clearly.

And then to the city.  But I think some of the events in the subsequent years can be traced to the goings-on in Ohio.

 I go mad, I go mad, I shall wear my trousers plaid...

---

Really, whoever had the idea to send a lounge singer into the reading room of a major research library twice per day, six days a week, to sing "People who need people" needs to be cashiered out of the library game.  Some high school guidance counselor erred significantly, there.

(Now knowing the schedule and the best routes of escape, I'm elsewhere for those half-hours.)

It is right to speak of this today, March 25, which is the day on which, in the novel, the Ring is cast into the fire by Gollum. With the destruction of the Ring, the reign of Sauron, the powerful and dark Lord of Middle-earth, comes to an end. 

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2026-03/lord-of-the-rings-politics-andrea-monda-humility-mercy.html

 Annunciation.  It arrives almost unseasonably, or at least surprisingly.  As a homily yesterday observed, it starts the cycle of events that will culminate in next year's Passion.  (Although arguably one shouldn't insulate it from the coming events, like two books being read at the same time.  It also contextualizes the present moment in the cycle of events.) 

And perhaps the unseasonable or surprising arrival carries forward some central attribute of the event.   Long habits create rhythms of thought, but the new, by its essence, arrives according to its new logic.  Christianity didn't arrive within Judaism according to the logic of the Jewish liturgy or seasons.  Not a rejection of the old, but simply the next thing.

One almanac records that this is the beginning of the old Roman hilaria, the first festival after the spring equinox.  

φοσ ιλαρον...

 On being pragmatical, or Notes for a Notably Non-Benjaminian Exile

--

I should make clear that this constant glancing towards the horizon and pastures new isn't about pottage, or fleshpots (vegetarian fleshpots: pan casseroles with cheese and eggs).  It's not about having good, hot meals and a proper place to sleep.  Everything revolves around the work, and as I look back through the reading notes on some of the more blizzardy days, I have some doubt as to whether they will be useful.  (Not exactly "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," but I'm certain that there was much more in the text than the mind straining to keep focused could unearth.)  I'm also cut off from the culture here, both practically and conceptually, and given my background, that speaks to the center of the work, not an issue about things done in the spare time.

It's as if Dave, floating outside the pod bay doors, discovers some repairs that could be done while he continues the long dialogue with HAL, though as he reviews some of the early repairs, he notices that he hasn't been able to do his best work under the circumstances.  Incidentally, if memory serves, a stencil on the outside of the vessel indicates that HAL was created at the University of Illinois, which is hilariously appropriate, in a David Lodge sort of way.  I was working in what passed for the arts there, but I did make it a point to go to as many of the campus talks as possible.  The closest the supercomputer folks came to the public discourse was one talk by a Dean as part of the critical studies lecture series.  Absolutely nothing of substance, just an hour of "shouting out" to researchers and professors in the room, seriatum.  Hope not for minde in administrators...

But I digress.  The point is that the dissentient, persecuted fellow looking for a place to work abroad isn't looking to the Black Forest resorts of Baden Baden, or a fashionable arrondisement.  There are a band of countries on the southern part of Europe that have a living European culture and memories of the old republics, and the cultures percolating within them are a microcosm of the energies moving the Western world spiritually at present.  And I could afford to travel and survive with the decent minimum required for professional travel and for the work.  I've published my theatre reviews from the last visit in an attempt to point out both that there's something there, and that I can see it.

As an example, my thoughts sometimes tend to Studentski park in Belgrade, and to the nondescript Western chain coffeehouses in Sarajevo.  In both instances, these places are far from the cultural or tourist notions of destination travel.  And Studentski is hardly Versailles--more like Washington Square before it was renovated and turned into the NYU quad.  But it is a good place to sit on an old park-bench and read Henry James, surrounded by the buildings of the university, new and old, and it's a short walk from the theatres.  Not to mention that there's reasonably priced fresh bread to be found at all of the chain grocers in the neighborhood.  My usual ritual in the first escape was to walk over Brankov Most from New Belgrade, get a balcony standing-room rush ticket in the late afternoon, and then, for the several hours before the performance, head over to the park to read awhile with some coffee in a thermos and some bread from one of the stores.  

The point is that this immense seething mass of a country that I call home has formally renounced such notions of civilization, finding them old-fashioned.  This general mindset likely has something to do with the fact that the corrupt folks that I've encountered have felt free to use the big Slavic fellow as a bit of a scapegoat and punching bag.  Not to whine, just pointing out that the last two decades have been extraordinarily difficult, with many years spent in conditions that not everyone could physically survive, let alone keep attuned to the work when within such frames of existence.

But I have survived, and I'm fairly certain that I have understood.  And I intend to head to the living places, in order to see what I can find there.

 Admin task in the AM took me off the island for the first time all winter.  Had been dreading the task, but in the event proved quite quick and painless.  Aside from the $7 subway tab.  Odd to be off the island -- definitely perceptible.  Imagined I was in more distant places when I found myself in corresponding micro-geographies.  ("Hic Rhodus...")

The most I can do is fix my mind on the cities and places (mountains) of possible minimal sufficiency for living, working, and cultural encounter.  The event can't be ensured, or for that matter, forestalled by any action of mine.  The event will bring its own logic.

This comes after well over a decade of extraordinary adversity, though.  It's not just the whim of a random person who has been reasonably well off their entire life within a prosperous society, and could learn to live with a more circumscribed existence if the river proves too wide.  Especially after this past winter, we are in hardened dissident territory.  I'll find a path out, or I'll keep trying to find a path out.  

"Graces will appear, and there's an end."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These examples have not been selected at random.

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

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

 Despising, for you, this city...

There is a world elsewhere.

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

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

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

Historically, a difficult time for a son of man.

To will to stand before God is an ontic resolution.

To be against the erasure is an ontological axiom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Bit of a nip in the air last night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Homo, fuge!

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

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

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

'nuff said, perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIC RHODUS -- HIC SALTA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 tl;dr:

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

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

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

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

Two lessons from the experience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 Feast of the Angelic Doctor.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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