Loud carousing late into the night and early morning by a few souls in the nahne. Resulted in a good deal of lost sleep, so I turned off the alarm. Sir Toby and Maria, in every culture. And their Malvolio lurks over the mountains, an ancient adversary who wants to put an end to all good cheer. This area of the mountains was the redoubt of the second, post-Vienna, rebellion against the south -- mountain strongholds of the Orthodox.
The saying attributed to the local 19th c. folk hero is that the world is a forum for the clash between cultures. Careful historiography would likely reveal that this was cherry-picked from his writings by the socialist government that showed up a half-century later. (The notions of the firstborn of the Enlightenment sometimes sit oddly with the subsequent social forms.)
All well and good, and every culture should preserve its revels as best it can. (The dominant note of the week, and likely of the visit to these quarters, is the long mountain hike that didn't get me to the cultural festival that exists to just that -- perhaps a lucky outcome, perhaps a necesssary outcome. Still mulling the event. Listened to the Bulgarian Womens Choir albums quite often in NYC. But it's a conscious engagement, and I'm always looking a bit over their shoulder at my own art and thought -- a bit like the Russian film Forgotten Melody for a Flute.)
At any rate though, if the culture becomes too garrolous, the conservative folks within it sometimes take on the aspect of the folks being rebelled against -- the Malvolio, the pasha. And the whole cycle begins again. Some degree of abstraction is necessary for cultural progress, even though it is these forms that give us life. They live within us, and transit time by our actions, but we ourselves, our intellects, our moral centers, are the greater good. To both have life and to stand sufficiently above the things that enliven us to have a deeper understanding. That is what a good wind brings.