Elected the main road for the walk over, as the back trail was terra incognita, and when carrying the full knapsack, I prefer the better-trod paths. (Though I did walk across a very narrow top of a dam once on Holy Thurday in a park in Budapest, similarly laden, in-between the Szecheny baths and the Basilica for Mass.)
Specatacular scenery hereabouts, but I suspect that vehicle emission standards aren't tooo stringent in these parts.
Shifting Humble Quarters -- the new one is a bit humbler than the last, but has a rather spectacular view of the mountain that I was on the other day. Further out from the town, so hopefully a more productive space. Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth tonight. Last year, I listened to the broadcasts in Belgrade -- magical Rheingold at the Sbux across from the national parliament, as the building lit up as darkness fell. Here's it's been about the mountains -- Walkure after the seven hour return from high on the mountain, absolutely exhausted, just sat in darkness next to open window for a long while. Seek, strive, find, don't yield, &c, &c.
One of my favorite Ring moments was the slight lacuna that I clearly remembered in the rest at the entrance of Fafner. It offers a foothold for notions like the caesura, as I mentioned when attempting to curry favor with the Wagerian on my PhD prelims panel. Just to check it, I ran it by Google AI, and it turns out that there is no rest there -- it was just Levine giving the moment a little extra hold.
So my favorite part of it wasn't in the score, but it came about because of the interpreter's notion of the essence of the piece -- is it part of the work of art, or just a nuance of the interpretation?
Sviatislav Richter once had a retraction printed and distributed when he realized that he had been playing a single wrong note in his recordings -- a Bach piece, I think.
Music, particularly printed music, is a little like a play -- it consists of the instructions for an event. And the nature of the event governs.
Local jazz festival underway. Wandered down to the mainstage, knowing very little about Bulgarian jazz. Interesting band, interesting singers. Perhaps just the act that I caught, but it seemed to be more about standards than the sort of experimental vibe that seems to be part of the tradition in Poland/Serbia (I happened to look through a recent history of Balkan jazz at the Lincoln Center library before I left, and I've found a few Balkan state jazz groups/esembles on Youtube, but that's about it. Basically clueless.) Very few solos, and the solos kept close to the melody. Capapble sidemen.
The old-school standards/songbook vibe was interesting. Balkan jazz works for the same reason that the Macbeth in Belgrade was so effective -- when the actual shadows in the culture are this intense, the art form expresses something almost primal. The gentlemen of the syndicate. And the music.
There's a Turkish-inflected jam going on at a restaurant within earshot as I write this -- that proximity has a lot to do with the culture here, I think. Green over red. Alongside the loyalty to the Orthodox to the east who helped them get free of the Sublime Porte and governance by distant purchased firman, there's also a certain sympathy of cultures, a certain cunning. (cf. "What do you suppose he meant by that?")
Southern Europe. Borderlands.
Lengthy maintenance on the the ragtag-fleet computing machines this afternoon, to keep everything up to spec, and surviving long past service life. Peculiar slew of scam financial emails this afternoon, likely unrelated. Last time that happened, I had just booked an Airbnb in Budapest -- no recent transactions along those lines, though. To take a line from Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of techology.
The difficulty with the mixture of corruption and exogenous forms of industrial prosperity is that there are so many more prizes to award. And prize-winners are historically loath to sue in piedpowder.
Like John Rambo and the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, I take things day by day. Rigor towards the simplicity, and rigorous simplicity.
Perhaps it's to do with the imbalance in relations vis a vis the UK and countries like France and Germany. A way of running society on an island nation with two or three universities and a tenacious squirearchy is difficult to map up to the continental scale. The forms of meritocracy must be more distinct. Despite the fact that a tendentious earnestness is bound to result. (qed)
Took some pride in my thick-weave cotton oxford shirt, jeans, found stick and leather hat amid all of the folks with fancy, or at least synthetic, mountaineering kit and togs. Upholding the nobility of the amateur (amo, amas, amat...) The fellow who simply sets out from his apartment with the simple intention of getting to the top of the hill louring over the city. Apparently, the big hill is a rather big draw. Counted three languages in passing hellos on the way up.
Of course, they were much better than me at most of it, but that's simply because I'm an inexperienced amateur. Simply a question of getting to the hills more often.
Absolutely brilliant and exhausting day wandering the nearby hills. Above the treeline especially, very difficult. In fairness, I've been at sea level for some time now.
Absolutely exhausted. Long maundering through a circular bike trail trying to find the elusive trail head, which took me a good ways orthogonal to the range, and ended up just walking up the access road to the larger hills. Blazes here are a bit spotty. The assumption appears to be that everyone has GPS. Much like the blank stares I get when asking at the cheap stores for compasses -- a few had some toy compasses which were quite an improvement on the traditional compass, as the latter has only one direction for north. Really, any of the usual Chinese bulk-buying websites would be able to get them decent compasses for $4, which they could sell for $20. (They're trying to diversify the tourist approach, but it's still fundamentally a ski town.) But the hills are extraordinary. Macedonian Pirin. Mythic in the Balkan imagination from the time of Phillip and Alexander. Gateway to the region.
After a 4PM turn around rather high up -- well above the nearby ranges, and an excellent view of the glacial lakes and ranges in the distance, made it back to the road before dark, and then walked down, sometimes only turning on the flashlight when a car approached.
Luckily, there was a 24 hour grocery open (at 24 hour grocery prices), so I bought much milk, turned on the tape from last night's first night at the Wagner festival, and some potato paprikash is on the industrial-strength hotplate. I found an enormous bag of it at the discount grocer for less than $2, and it has done me goodly service. Budapest in a bag. Then some Iris Murdoch until I drift off, and the mortal frame can begin its repair job.
Another dawn lost to piecework well past midnight. Slogging onward.
C. Miloscz, in one of his poems, talks about the fate of the poet, always taken for something other than he is, even after his death ~"no sign arriving from the other world to correct the mistake."
Peculiar events yesterday. I think I have the cultural context, and I'm aware that the locals who saw me disputing a receipt would have had little clue as to what I was disputing. But 'here I stand, I can do no other.' Be just in small things. Otherwise, when the small things turn against you, you''ll have no way of stopping the momentum. I'm not offended at all, by the way. My only concern is that the local folks not come to harm.
In my own country, it seems to me at least that many of my struggles of the last decade or so come from being surrounded by unsophisticated people who thought I was an unsophisticated clod for not realizing how much was to be gained from playing another sort of game. And if I was another sort of person, I might have believed them, and believed in them. Many do. There's a lot of bad stuff going on inside the prosperity.
My virtue, my discipline, my ways aren't as against the others. They're some of the only things I have with which to defend my mind and spirit against the others.
Onward.
But, all else aside, if a customer tells you three times that you gave them too much money in change, and appears to take the situation very seriously, it would be best to try to either understand the mistake or unwind the transaction. To folks of a certain cast of mind (I don't claim it's a good one or fortunate to have), a troubling transaction is much more costly than a few days of groceries.
I can understand the contrary view, and why it might be held, but in shopkeeping, if one side invokes the "make this transaction right" rule, particularly when it's not to their advantage, that does need to become the prime objective of the encounter.
Well, that was a peculiar and frustrating experience in balancing diplomacy and paying the right price for groceries to the multinational corporation. Realized as I stepped away from the till that I had the wrong change in hand, but there was a logic to the error, so it took me a sec. Scribbled some numbers in the pad that I thought would make it clear to the cashier, and attempted to subtly fix it, as I didn't want her to come to harm, but she affected (possibly quite genuinely) not to understand the error. Took it to the assistant manager at the back of the store twice, who might have been confused, or might have been trying to resolve the situation without undue trauma to local staffing, but both times shut down, and the Google translate screen at the end said "...It is okay for you to leave."
So, reader, I did.
Will have to figure out how to subtly return it to the local folks, despite my own wing-and-a-prayer budgets on this leg of the trip. I once enriched the poor box at St. Pat's with a twenty when I was in a similar predicament stateside. I don't want anyone local to come to harm, but even though it's less than $25, this runs too close to American Privilege for my comfort.
At any rate, have decided that it won't drive me mad, and now I'm going to focus my mind on the work for the rest of the evening. Insh'allah, and pace the bakshish.
Saturday night adventures in laptop cinema, cont'd: July Rain
I'm not sure what was forcing my mind so insistently in this direction, but the whole film seemed to be about the certainty of death -- the July rain being this brief, chaotic floreat of the flesh. But comes the hour when the springtime rises and washes over the earth, and....
So. We 'keep the door open.'
Along those lines, the constant phone conversations with the fellow who lent her his allegedly waterproof jacket in the storm seemed a bit like contact with the divine, with he who provided us with this garment of flesh. His own, no less.
The new-wave/verismo still works, even after the lapse of the fashion -- one test of a true movement, perhaps. It grounds the film in actual experience.
The rain, then, is our flesh, our life, which is to say the things that we do. But things in the city are constantly carrying the others out of reach and rushing us along -- which makes the night picnic among the white birch such a relief. But the ski-jumper girlfriend who blended so easily into the background in the city parties is revealed in the light of the campfire as an unpleasant sort of person.
Odd double meaning -- the pantograph, both a means of mechanical reproduction of art, and the point of connection between the tram and the wire. Like the typewriter at the beginning, these machines seem to have life, but the real point is that they bear relation to life, and change our lives.
And then, at the end, she is empty-handed. After the rain, walking among the veterans, which apparently was a bit of happenstance during the shoot, but it captured the sense of human relations after our midsummers, after the love and the war, we still have our humanity, though the storm has quieted, and might yet grow more quiet.
If, on a mountain trail, you encounter a family of trees that seems gnarled or misshapen, leaning in a certain direction, the easy logical conclusion is that some force of wind, weather or land has made them that way. Similarly, and this is a bit less commonly thought to be the case, people, communities and even nations can take on a certain misshapen form, relative to some general mean of health and open disposition. And yet, in these situations, we tend to take their disposition as not merely primitive, but itself an irreducible constituent primitive term of humanity.
In truth, and this is where the idea reaches its furthest point from the usual path, people are shaped by the spiritual nature of a place. (Spirit isn't necessarily a glowing, magical thing, it's simply the changes that happen within time. The material thing without a substance of its own, but describable.) In the course of the long logic unfolding within their lives, across the many years, certain types of thoughts persistently occurred to them. And just as the spirit is material but without substance, these thoughts were about everyday things, but the manner of their occurrence was of a certain character. This is how to find the spiritual nature of a place -- examine the character of your own thoughts in that place. And after many years of a certain characteristic pattern of thinking,emotional response and physical action came to shape the organism. The trees along the path took on a certain shape.
These are the sorts of conclusions one should come to after having encountered people of many different ethnicities and nations, not least because if you've only explored a few, each would take these sorts of thoughts as a personal criticism. This is a universal phenomenon, and I'm sure that my own spiritual/arboreal shape, to a dispassionate observer from far away, would reveal some of the storms that I've weathered. Ah well. Like Shelley (I think), I always made an awkward bough.
I don't have wants. I set objectives that will help me to accomplish things. The happiness is from the totality, not the particular circumstance, but it is good to make as many particular circumstances as transparent to that happiness from the totality as possible.
The different view is largely a creature of people trying to sell things.
But in working to achieve the objectives, it can seem that these objectives are desires. A misleading appearance. If you were to sop me on the street and somehow hypnotize me and demand of the most remote reaches of my subconscious what I really wanted at the present time, it would likely be on the order of a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee, or a decent used paperback book. But that's because of the nature of desire. I tend not to associate happiness with the object, or even the objective. That can be dangerous in a prosperous society.
We have a rational mind, but it is up to us as to whether it will govern the beast, or a more Humean sensibility will govern the relationship.
TLS on the cult of Oxbridge donnishness: "The only professors without private incomes who have ever lived a genteel life are those who were once resident fellows of rich colleges."
Much truth to that, even at the far end of the scale. I still remember the summer in summerstock at one of the Seven Sisters. Long afternoons reading in the parlor. And jobbing in as a technician (just after receiving a top conservatory masters in performance) at a theatre based in Edith Wharton's old estate, where I lingered in the library when not figuring out the electric wiring in the horse stables (where Raquel Welch was shortly to do some Bernard Shaw).
The piece closes with a quote from a Wittgenstein disciple. Cantab ascendnt, now that they hold no. 10. Rumor has it that some of the mannerisms in the Philosophers sketch in Beyond the Fringe have their roots in common-room impressions of W.
The notion of a distant Christminster (or two) is useful. In addition to Hardy, I've plowed through C.P. Snow and Iris Murdoch, and still return to them as a sort of ongoing mental frame. But as useful as the distant fiction might be, one hopes that the thing itself doesn't do too much damage.