The possible chronology of the end of the last papcy is interesting.  Assume that the doctors told him on release that he was near the end, and he should reduce his activity, and begin to seek some peace.  Of course, what followed was a whirlwind of political and spiritual activity.  (Against the morbid background of speculation and media interest -- the new form of the fascination with death and the desire to anoint the corpse, perhaps.) The point, as one SJ once explained to a retreat I was attending, is to finish the roller-coaster ride with your arms raised and shouting in exhiliration.  Perhaps.

Of course, this happens against the background of a two-thousand year old see of authority.  So the energy, in keeping with the spirit of the age, and of his spiritual discipline, might have another context in the larger picture.  But at least he was true to the spirit of the age and his discipline, rather than imitating some general notion.  And perhaps the spirit of this age and this discipline will prevail within history.  That's the thing about history.  Things change.

Notable that in the seating arrangements, heads of republican states appear to have been granted a status equal to those of reigning houses.  As mis-translated Mao had it, perhaps it's no longer too soon to tell.

Which is not to say that the republics aren't in a bit of a mess these days.  Perhaps the real point is that going backwards is no longer an option.  Or perhaps the equvalence suggests that it is an option.  Or perhaps it was all the caprice of a diplomatic cadre appointed by a more liberal administration.  

Time tells.

For the pragmatic and political types, the fight happens inside the notion of the way things are.  For those doing real things, this simply results in notions about the way things are thought to be becoming more or less useful at given points.

For the great mass of folks,though, the fight happens governed by the prevailing notions of the way things are.  Not because it seems particularly veridical, but because it provides a lingua franca, a common currency, a λεγειν that they can use as a background and source of vocabulary for expressive speech.

A thought I came across today:  Goethe's distinction between finding meaning in forms of being (Freude des daseins) and the meaningfulness of existence itself (Freude am Dasein).  You must take the second view, if you're prepared to recognize that most of the rules of the game are themselves a game, at least for the game-players.  For the rest of us, it's just a matter of trying to run the program with unreliable code.

 ----------------------

 

When I hit a bit of a brick wall after the JD, and had to decamp from the city during a rough winter, I headed to Cleveland, where I had done my conservatory training.  I rented rooms in Little Italy from some medical students from the Mideast, and headed right to the university library.  I had studied Koine Greek in a class at the parish church with a Fordham classicist for about a year before the JD, so the first thing that I did was get a few of the Loeb octavos down off the shelf, along with a middle Liddell (no Great Scott to be found), and spend a few days re-centering myself by working through an (heavily reliant on facing-page translations) adaptation of the beginning of Sophocles' Ajax.

And in the evenings, the novels of Iris Murdoch.  Mass-market, but the difference in usefulness between British mass-market novels and American mass-market is significant.  A novel written by a moral philosopher at Oxon. in which she attempts to do the same thing in the novel as she does in her scholarship is very, very useful.  American novels are cultural figurations that require us to find meaning in them, usually at some cost.  I blame the Iowa workshop.  Some interesting scholarship on the connections and motivations there.  Saith Ajax.

My first purchases when building my office library during Ph.D. work were inexpensive copies of the Great Scott and the 2 vol. micrographic OED.  I also found a very cheap copy of an original Chambers Book of Days, which turned out to be ex libris from one of the large Scottish universities.  (All lost in the third year, of course, when the university workers took up the asbestos tiles in the flooring of my rooms without doing any abatement.)  During these travels, it's more than once occurred to me that the universities hereabouts are building their English-facing programs very rapidly, and the American universities are trying to get rid of their printed books with almost the same urgency.  Seems it would be simple enough just to fill a few shipping containers up, and send them over.

 I read Charles Taylor's latest, on the Romantic poets et al. (finishing with Miloscz, which was appreciated) in Belgrade a couple weeks ago; the first half was valuable, but the second half seemed to peter out in a flurry of grace notes.  The point of the first half, the defense of conceptual realism, seems important.  If I can say that of two incorporeal notions, one is more important than the other, not just for me, but always and everywhere, much of the speculative reductionism that has enabled so much intellectual (and otherwise) corruption instantly loses its legitimacy.  If there is an enduring map to the spirit, then we simply don't have the utter freedom of meaninglessness and devised games.  It's as if there's an expedition, lost in the wilds, and half want to have a final extravant feast, as there's no hope of rescue or finding one's bearings, and the other half is trying to point out to them the fact that they actually do presently have a map in their hands.

-----

There is something quixotic about this shift that I've made in the last few months to putting more text out there.  Anyone who was conditioned by the usual forms of of social life and television workplace dramas, and who stumbled upon a notebook of someone who is actually trying to do real thinking grounded in more secure notions of the past, is going to think the author a loon, and additionally (for reasons unclear to him), think that his opinion about that should be shared with others.  And the trend in online writing is clearly away from such things; witness the close censorship and highly mediated social language on the twitmachine, or the fact that AI is routinely used to revise CVs to make them more like the sort of CV that one should write. Imagine a 1950's television character happening on a notebook of Heidegger, or one of the Monkees stumbling upon some writings of Derrida.  It simply doesn't compute.  I don't claim to be identical with such folks, but we are all playing, with greater or lesser skill, the same sport that the stranger would find baffling.

 ------

 Onward.

 

 

 

The triple crown was deprecated some time ago, but perhaps this scholar was the first to serve as the bishop of Rome and not be thought of as a king, or some sort of spiritual emperor, or political authority over empires.  You could see that in the expressions of the curial officers, and in the conflicts in the media.  And the reaction to the death was different.  More that of a co-worker and a good person than a spiritual commander.  So, political questions of succession aside, the question might be whether such an authority can be transmitted in the current political world. What meaning would it have for a second scholar and minister to take the office, without the political strength from the halo of a crown.  Is the catholic form inherently aligned with kingship?  The early bishops of Rome wouldn't have thought so, but as the church expanded though the world, it came into itself, brought into the fullness of existence by the peoples it came to encompass.  (Hans Kung's history traces these doctrinal shifts clearly.)  So, and this does resonate with the current global politics, the question might be for the species at large: how magic do we need our authorities to be?  The impulse towards the old ways of sovereignty is a form of recollection; the secular world, contrastingly, is creating authorities without a history, without recollection, and lit only by the flickering thoughts of the television: all things new (and as a result, is susceptible to revanchist waves of populist fervour for old authoritarian forms).  Perhaps there is a form of recollection that impels us to the new.

To the 500-year-old university for an orchestra concert by the region's professional ensemble.  For some reason, the first row is sold at balcony proces, and the house and ensemble are small enough that the sound mix in the center front is quite good.  Ere now.  For the second piece, they wheeled out the concert grand, and I was staring right at the sounding board.  The Grieg piano concerto.  The nerves should recover by autumn.  Otherwise very enjoyable.

Took a closer look at the architecture of the university on the way in.  The massive building that had so impressed me before is laid out orthogonal to the main pedestrian avenue of the campus, but immediately across the street from it is an unpreposessing building at a slightly different angle, apparently the old gymansium, built in the 18th c. by the Jesuits, then run by the Pietists. Classical lines, everything square, unlike the quasi-gothic rounding in the main building across the street (which otherwise clearly draws from it).  Apparently the meeting-place in 1848 as well.  After looking at it for some time, the larger building across the way seemed modern and diminished.  Classicism.

In the city, before 7:00 AM Mass, I would sometimes sit on the steps of the cathedral, waiting for it to open.  Usually, I would think back to the time when the old church and Jesuit college was there, think about the philosophy that they might have been mulling in the shade of the trees at what became 50th and 5th.  That gave me the grounding to enter the Rockefeller Center vibes of the cathedral.  You do have to do that in NYC, especially now.  Recollection.  Else, you're just living in a theme park.

It's important not to overstate things.  At it's most strong form, the critique that I'm coming to understand is simply that after the world war, mechanisms of industrial prosperity were set up that are now at full throttle, mostly for the good, but occasionally going a bit out of the furrow.  Additionally, the generation that built these mechanisms perhaps understood its own children very well, so these machines and social forms are, to a large degree, idiot-proof.  And, perhaps because of this, some very craven and corrupt people  are now controlling some of these mechanisms and forms, both large and small.

The compendium, not to say magesterium, of past thought is still available.  Cultivate your own garden.

Slogging on.

The bit of Shakespeareana that made the Guardian today seems completely spurious.  Known since the late 70's, and the only new bit seems be that it turns out that the impecunious fellow referred to lived in a sort of run-down neighborhood with theatres in it, which might have been a fair guess anyway.  And it might not even have been him, just a fellow of the same name.  But apparently a headline piece in the subscription journal, so I'll reserve judgment until I o'erleap the paywall and land on the other side.

Frankly seems bit pitched to the present American administration--Shakespeare as the family man, ducks & drakes in a tony London suburb. Much of the Elizabethan cult of the 1950's was an attempt to capture the imaginations of the (sometimes former) colonies.  Churchill's 'empire's of the mind.'  

There's an obscure reference in Trollope suggesting that the map of the American colonies stayed up on the wall of the Ministry for the Colonies a bit further into the 19th c. than one would think.  When an American refers to the king or the queen, it's invariably GB & Northern I by the G of G, never another.

England and St. George.  The latter being, at best, half-English as the Billy Bragg song has it.  Martyr of the Levant, born in Cappadocia, patron of  Malta, Barcelona, Valencia, Arragon, Genoa, and England.

 

 Given the many ways in which people use blogs, especially in the post-Twitmachine world, in which the internet is largely used by people to send smiley-faces, unclothed photographs, and intemperate and incoherent political exclamations to like-minded folks, that this is an old-school, 1990s stream-of-thought type operation, not really an attempt to communicate anything to anyone.  I'm literally sometimes listening to Pearl Jam or Phish (TAB, technically) as I write these things.

One writes because one thinks, and a convenient means of recording these thoughts is at hand.  And, the world being the world, this is undoubtedly being used by devious others in evil ways.  But, as the fellow says, quod scripsit, scripsit.  And this is also a limiting principle. 

I'm not exaggerating the difficulties of maintaining focused thought on these sorts of odysseys.  New respect for Adorno, Auerbach, Benjamin, et al.  

And yet, things are slightly different.  Those were the times in which the world divided into adversarial factions bound by solidarity and by loyalty to loyalty.  If you were on the wrong side of the border, there was an--at least theoretically possible--escape to the right side of the border.  Now, it's more of an omnes contra omnium proposition.  A wandering Jedi from a galaxy far, far away could begin to lose his context.  So, for that matter, could an itinerant Duke of Omnium. 

And yet, as I write, I realize that being from the galaxy far far away is the essential constitution of the wanderer.  The constitutive context is alienation.  That's what keeps the game on.  The strangeness of it all.  Otherwise, you're just a local without a map.

Detachment.  And yet preserving the human by that very detachment and conscious alienation.  Onward.

 

 A visual image for the 'unknown unknowns'.  Imagine the mind as a sphere.  Points of understanding emanate out from that sphere in all directions as beams of light with varying diameters.  Each point of understanding is potentially infinite, just as the sphere is potentially infinite.  These radiant points of understanding increase in area relative to the plane of the sphere as they go out from the sphere, like expanding cones, but the angle of increase is less than the increase of a cone the base of which would be at the center of the sphere, and the arc of which would be defined by its points of intersection with the sphere.  

 In other words, if that part of the sphere that intersected with these beams of light had expanded according to the natural arc of the sphere, the cone would be larger.  Thoughts, while infinite, are directed outward from the subject, and don't have the native fullness of the mind.

So we have these thoughts in all directions, but as they travel outward and grow large themselves, making conceptual syntheses possible with other beams of light coming from the sphere -- not crossing, but in relation to each other, an even greater area of darkness is created between them.  Perhaps this is the area of the 'known unknowns.'

The 'unknown unknowns' perhaps come from the fact that our thoughts and representations don't retain the native arc, the original angle of the expanding sphere, because they are directed towards the object.  This would be the difference between the area that would be covered by a cone that retained the native fullness of the arc of the original sphere, and the focused beam, which although expanding and infinite, expands to a lesser degree.  So the known unknowns are those areas outside of the boundaries of our thoughts, and the unknown unknowns are concealed between these boundaries in a sort of a penumbra around each notion due to the representational nature of thought itself.

I know what I know, and know what I don't know.  But what I don't know due to the act of knowing is hidden.

 Perhaps.  Just a rough notion.  Not particularly promising, quite yet.

 

 I'm not exaggerating about having to rebuild the thinking machine in each new place. Start with a bit of fiction, eventually you follow the story.  Then to the nonfiction, philosophy usually, and once that's in hand, pick the work back up.  My notion was that I could travel with the books in arm's reach, like Autolycus or Dr. Who in his TARDIS, but apparently, if there is to be a journey, the mind must put the book down, and then make the journey.  In fairness, this is Balkan busses and second-class rail, not the Concorde.  But perhaps it's better to learn that way.  And Prospero does break his staff and throw his books overboard before he leaves the island.  (Or intends to.)

And not just to read and annotate to do things, or even to keep the mind engaged.  The originary force of these ideas and objects.  Discovering essential things, and making note of them.

---

 Interesting, the basilica for the pope's burial apparently has a close Jesuit connection.  Loyola's first Mass was there, Christmas 1538.  At the same time, it's not the Paris basement church of the avowals.  Roma locata. [sic]

Signa, te signa tangis et agnis / Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor...

 

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

One goes on, despite it all.

Rather dispiriting day, all told.  

I do feel compelled to note from time to time that in many parts and places, the whole thing is very much a sham.  Just preserving the objection in the record.  Even though stay and leave to appeal has been denied by the wizened, bespectacled, threadbare leprechaun on the ceiling with a tiny powdered wig playing the judge, on the grounds that "One canna stay and leave at the same time, can ye?"

They don't have that firm a grasp on civil procedure, to be honest, but their logic is sound, in a certain manner of thinking.

 A peculiar experience:  I was in the apse of St. Pat's, perhaps after the morning Mass, perhaps later, when a small fellow wearing a deacon's stole over an alb came up to me and handed me a small, inexpensive miraculous medal.  I demurred at first, but he insisted.  This was shortly after the election of the cleric who was head of the church as of this morning, in the short period before his work began, when he was consolidating his power in the Santa Marta house.  The fellow in the apse was a foreign fellow--at first I thought he was alone, but after he handed me the medal, I noticed that two of the senior priests at the cathedral were watching him carefully from the recessed door to the passageway some distance away, and they seemed to be standing at attention (one was the MC, I think), and looking at the deacon with a sort of reverent awe.

I was never entirely sure what to make of the event, but I allowed my imagination to suggest what propositions it thought right in its free and harmonious play of thoughts, and took them as suggestions of imagination.  People give miraculous medals--that wasn't the only one I was unable to refuse.  I placed the medal behind the band of my hat, and carried it everywhere for a few years, until one night the hat itself was lost in a blizzard in midtown. 

 He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary.  We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2025/documents/20250420-omelia-pasqua.html

Eternal rest grant him, and light perpetual.  

 https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/pope-francis-dies-on-easter-monday-aged-88.html

 

 When parsing American society, it is very important to keep the idea of appearances in mind.  Conceptual realists posit that the world of appearances is mind-independent.  That which we think the world to be is something beyond ourselves, but doesn't reach the actual existence of things.  So manipulating this shared notion of how things are becomes the game.  Baudrillard calls the resulting social world hyper-reality; this was the concept for the Matrix films.  

The poet's blue guitar, that thing that changes things as they are, opposes the shared notion of the world that is the basis for this social reality.  This isn't inevitable; a culture more inclined to be constantly seeking to determine the way things are, more truth-seeking, as it were, would accordingly value the poet's work in revealing things about the world.  But if appearances govern, revelators threaten.

These are important mysteries.  They indicate, among other things, that the ones who understand the nature of the time are attacked by those who by their actions attempt to serve the will of the time.  Read, and tremble.

 The mode of modernity, that trope of 'being with it', that emerged a short time after the decades of intense industrialization, might yet prove to be a very insidious thing. The reason for this is that it displaces the the general sense of how it is that things hang together -- the canvas or background of cognition and social form.  The basic premiss is that the introspective stillness is replaced by a doing, lifting the individual into the energies of encounter.  But my question is whether we then have the same disposition towards our own judgments made in the context of this energetic engagement, or whether we unconsciously devalue these second judgments, however useful they might prove to be in the social encounters, as not being our own. Even though we persist in maintaining the thought, and think that we have done our task in the context of the time by doing so.

Perhaps we have retained the power of judgment, and simply aren't using it.  Sowing some doubt as to the secular world might therefore might be, specifically in the context of the present time, useful in a more broad sense. 

 Balkan Triduum, cont'd.  The international train leaving Budapest was delayed until after midnight, so there was plenty of time to study the rafters, have a bit of bread and milk from Lidls, and work out which of my ebooks I didn't want to finish.  (Knowing the location of the German groceries is an essential first part of learning any city.)  The Dacia going to Vienna, on the occasions when I've taken it, has used open cars, as opposed to the closed compartments that become very trying for the visitor, as the locals tend to turn off all of the ventilation and seal up the doors and windows (before sometimes taking off their socks and shoes and putting them up on the seat).  This is why I swore off Tito's train, until I found out that they can call the yard to find which cars had open seating.  So it was a very, very bad ride in to Transylvania.  After about the halfway point, I just sat on the folding panel in the passageway by the window, and tried to come as close to sleep as I could in that position.

Come morning, I found myself in one of the historical centers of Christianity in Transylvania.  Found the old fortification walls; noticing a steeple just beyond it, I climbed up, my travelling kit in bags on my back.  The first building was an old wooden Orthodox church, with a lively surrounding of flowering trees and chickens and roosters running around.  Stood outside and listened to the liturgy for a bit, then walked over to massive Austrian fortress, 18th c. gates, with the informational sign pointing out the gap in the equestrian statue above the gate where a leader of a peasant rebellion was immured.  Walked a bit further in, found a section of the old Roman road, and glimpsed a bit of the city beyond.

Then, back to a train (open car) for the last leg of the journey, passing many small mountains with flocks of sheep on them, being tended by a shepherd who usually seemed very intent on his phone.  Walking directly over after the train had arrived, I arrived at the massive ancient stone church at 3:00 PM, and did some private work and meditation, before checking into the local rooms, cleaning up, and rushing out for a production of Hamlet at the city's Hungarian theatre.  Very lightly attended.  It seems that Good Friday evening services are more the case here than they are in the Latin West.  Given the previous two nights (staying up after Traviata  in Belgrade to pack, the above-mentioned bad cars added to the international train from Budapest), I could barely keep my eyes open at parts of the play).  I'm a believer in seeing some theatre between the services of Friday and Saturday evening.  It seems to ground things.  The paradigmatic memory is a production of J.B. Priestley's I Have Been Here Before in a Saturday matinee in the East Village.

 Balkan Triduum begins at St. Stephen's Basilica in Budapest.  The bus from Belgrade allowed me to catch a bit of rest after packing and cleaning through the night, or whatever was left of the night after walking two hours back from the Traviata.  The 6:00AM bells from the nearby Franciscan monastery chimed as I walked out the front door of the building, and then another two hour walk to the new bus station.   Made it to the minute.  

When I arrived in Budapest, I headed right to the baths, under the rule that when sleeping overnight on buses and trains during the journey, such things are wise.  Learned that after trying to push through 3-5 day journeys at the beginning of the trek.  A bit in the mineral pool, then two and a half cycles of the radiant rock sauna (at a third of the price of a cheap hotel), and then to the Basilica (after a bit of inner deliberation whether I might be better off taking it easy there, recumbens cum fratribus, or, technically speaking, alone).  "Lord, if I'm mistaken, teach me my errors while I'm alive."  And about 20 minutes later, I had the inner certainty that I should head south to the church.  The first subway station had an issue with the fare machine, so I walked on down the line, including across a lake along a thin stone dam, following two children (who, it should be noted, weren't porting two bags of travelling kit).  

When I arrived at the Basilica, which I've never visited, as there's usually an admission fee, I rant the gamut of the tour-staff and their quiet backing of the security folks.  Oddly, they asked if I wanted to go to the English service.  Given the rubrics, very surprised and wondering at this.  I opted for the local language in the main hall, because the point was to be at the event.  My guess is that she thought that I was just using it to catch a quick glimpse of the place, and although he was right about that, the way she was right about that would never have occurred to her.

To walk into the room is a wonder.  Immense, bright and clean yet somehow still dull, smoky old walls, murals, and decorations.  (Including four statures, presumably evangelists, who are on sorts of platforms in the crossing dome, parallel to the ground, to rather good effect.)  Very interesting local liturgy that seems to resonate along the precisely the fault lines that give me some concern with the present politics here.  No consecration bells, still the Lenten blocks.  All crucifixes veiled, but still incensed, and after the long local devotional that followed the Mass, I assume they were bowing to the veiled cross above the tabernacle.  At the conclusion of the communion rite, three sort of chalice-like pyxes were placed on the main altar.  Abp., with concelebrants, offered incense and adoration from behind the sacramental altar.  Then the removal to the altar of repose behind the main altar, never leaving the sanctuary, with a local variation on the Pane Lingua melody that I couldn't quite grok.  Then, the return to the sanctuary, the congregation having sat down when they left view, and an old-style changing of vestments for the Abp, who then appeared to do a private silent meditation at the ambo, not a soul having left the darkened nave.  Then to the old altar with the tabernacle -- removal of something, perhaps a corporal, and a solemn opening of the doors.  Then (the order of some of these might be off), the Abp, with vested concelebrants, solemnly doused the six candles on the high altar and reverently stripped the altar.  (Under the American system, this usually falls to the assistant sacristan at St. Pat's, and I have to imagine that he'd be surprised that anyone was watching.  Though I usually was.)  Then another private mediation at the ambo, followed by a very long spoken meditation in the darkened church, the Abp's reverent low tones the only noise.  Quite powerful, actually, even not understanding a word.  An attempt to hold them safe using the voice and mind alone, rather than the sacred appurtenances of the building. 

Last year, I was with the Croatians in Mostar for these ceremonies, and among other things, I was very struck by the way that the priests used the formularies to create a dynamic of personal power.  Herrschaft, in a certain way of speaking.  But this is the nature of the sacred fabric here.  The Boston puritans would call it priestcraft, but it has preserved the faith for centuries.  Not incidentally, in this very building.  And the essential fabric of the faith is that thing within which the things happen.  That's why the long sermon in the darkened church was so powerful for me.  Christ and his fishermen-and-tax-collector minyan had finished their three years of training; no more midrashes on the text and shared formal prayers, no more spiritual apprenticeship.  Events now, not deliberate devisements would be the nature of the time.  Only the voice and the thoughts of the one who remained -- not the sacrament and the power.  

Events themselves, due to the nature of the event, would be the nature of the time.

 

 As noted on the main site, another Balkan odyssey impends.  Flixbus to international rail into the mountains of Transylvania.  Likely arrival late Friday afternoon.

 Walked in for a last afternoon in the city.  A piece by one of the national playwrights of the early 20th c. at the drama theatre was sold out in the balcony, but I managed to get to Traviata at the national theatre in time, $3 standing room.  Violetta extraordinary, some moments of the singing were the equal of any house I've been to.  With the walking around and picking up sundries for the journey, didn't accomplish the central intention of the walk in (an hour or so over a proper coffee).  Will have to come back for that, I suppose.

 This perpetual peregrination can be wearying.  The plan for this leg of the journey was a month of excellent theatre with $5 tickets, and then a fortnight of desk and writing focus.  Some complications -- social unrest cancelled about a third of the shows, slight injury meant that I had to stop the AM runs, but basically a good visit.  Now to see if I can maintain the work while shifting places, TARDIS-like.

Chrism Mass at St. Pat's in the city.  Always made it a point to be there when I was in town, starting two Card. Archbps. ago.  The pillars near the pews in the back must think it odd that the actor fellow isn't there anymore.  But pillars are just pillars. Peregrination seems preferable to the St. Sebastian approach.