One result of the interesting paths of late, and long, is having remarkably little tolerance for the "All is lost, I ordered my latte without foam" line of thinking. It's a social and historical fact that in a world without consciousness of the divine, and people even unable to imagine the possibility of their own experience of eternal time, that in the game for social power, people cultivate habits of conspicuous consumption and learned incapacity. And to be rather obvious about it.
The game is at least partially to 'get a rise' out those around you. This is the part that gives an advantage in the social game. When you become angry at a person, group, or conceptual belief, it's the first step to being controlled by the question of them. A complicated formulation, but follow it. Anger at the night draws us into the question of day and night, as the two are the same question. Heraclitus, I think.
So when a conspicuous consumer appears before you, cultivate dispassion, and look as closely as you can, and try to understand.
Thinking about the friction that I encountered at the discount Turkish chain during the resupply run. It's the sort of thing I wouldn't think twice about if I had encountered it in, say Jersey City, or some other place, with folks of identical nationalities. It did rather stand out given the general mutal-respect tone here, though.
Outdoor ballet festival performance. Interesting. Sort of Twyla Tharp/Jerome Robbins to Dennishawn and the 1920s Olympic cult to a battle between Balanchine and Robbins won by Akram Khan.
The initmacy of this city is sometime surprising. Basically the scale of a well-attended NYC block party.
On the other hand, I have seen tens of thousands of the locals jumping up and down and screaming in fury in the night -- football derby, anniversary edition, on a prior visit. Left at halftime.
Walked through the old city afterwards, which isn't entirely the tourist/nightlife area found in the more commercialized countries to the north and east. People are still using it to live in.
Interesting episode at the Turkish clothing chain at the more Western of the two downtown malls. Was looking at an Oxford shirt, so I took the three that I was going to buy, walked to the mirror, put the shirts down on the shelf next to it, and put one of the shirts on over the long-sleeve shirt I was wearing. A clerk came over, and for some reason told me that I couldn't put the shirts on a shelf where they didn't belong. I accommodated the request, moved them onto the original shelf, and went back, and put the shirt on a second time, like a jacket. Whereupon the fellow told me that I couldn't do that (he hadn't mentioned that the first time) -- I would have to go to the dressing room to try it on over my clothing.
"Friend," I said, I "if you tell me to leave, I'll leave without buying anything, but I'm not going to buy this shirt without doing this." He stepped away, I put the shirt on over my clothing, took it off, bought the three shirts, and left.
Sort of a discount chain. Not exactly Saks.
Interesting place, sometimes.
[I should add that most folks are very friendly and hospitable, especially to US types. And the Balkan ethic of hospitality is very strong throughout the old Republic. Quite the matter of honor.]
The irony of the great conflict (or, at times, game) between Western Christianity (which has its own divisions of mortal enmity) and Islamic fundamentalism, is that the most vitriolic and intractable forces on either side occupy the same position of social conservatism within their society. Left solitary and adrift, they would most naturally land in the part of the other society that was most intractably opposed to their own cast of mind. There is a reason for this. This opposition is animated by the larger movement of encounter. Closeness and similarity, not difference and distance, brings conflict. (Girard is essential.) This isn't just irony and folly. The encounter and the conflict have a purpose. The preservation of all things under different aspects.
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Think of it as an island surrounded by land, and all around the shore, people are building bridges to it. They will usually succeed, given the cunning of the island. But it is possible that one of the land-dwellers can find himself on a bridge on which he will not be able to get to the half of the bridge nearest the island without an extraordinary bit of luck, grace, what you will.
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Tread gently.
The old Rothschild line about peaks and valleys being for amateurs parallels, and perhaps derives from a similar precept about happiness and unhappiness. (Which is distinct from pain and difficulty.) When things go up and down, when they agitate, they teach us that they exist. We perceive the territory. The question then becomes what they might be. Mountains teach us about the earth (despite the Victorian industrial rail travellers running down the curtains upon seeing them), and we then become aware of the prescence of the earth. The truth of the earth, though, isn't necessarily the mountains.
Anniversary of the deaths of Jefferson and Adams. One, the author of an important document of international diplomacy and an important law for his state, and the founder of a university. The other, a politician who helped to unite the merchant puritans of the north with the plantation founders of a more European inclination to the south, and who was largely responsible for the written constitution of his state.
Kindertotenlieder by the city's symphony orchestra at a local genocide memorial conference. At first, I thought looking to Vienna for the local vocabulary of mourning was odd, but then I recollected (hear the Hegelian sense) that I was sitting in a theatre that had been built by Austria-Hungary. These are ancient commixtures. Very clear overlay of the local meaning on the dynamics of the piece -- much more mournful and pensive than I remember in other hearings, very appropriate to the moment and the manner, and the intentions of the players. Very capable group.
Lessons from antiquity, con't: When the dictator comes to power over the aristocracy through popular support (e.g., Pisistratus), it necessarily implies that the aristocracy, the few, the mesne lords, had lost their legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
The Republic, if we can keep it, is of course res/publica. Enlightenment political theorists applied the term to many forms of government, including monarchies, legislative rule, etc. before settling on a democratically elected legislature. Res is thing, here the thing of common concern. And there's where the term does its work. The inferential construction of the public goods -- the saying of what it is that we have when we have something together. Heidegger, followed by absolutely none of the dictionaries that I've found, suggested that it traces to ρημα, word. When the common construction of the shared life is empty, a person takes its place, and becomes the republic.
Noticed some interesting phrasing in an administration statement today. "Under President X, no one is above the law." Let those with ears to hear, hear.
Inexplicable late morning. The sleep of the place appears to have made a bit of an incursion. Perhaps connected to the pollution, or the changed paths of the run that resulted. The main thing is to strike at the root -- I learned that in the country to the south this February. To a deeper asceticism.
Thinking of the years of classical theatre verse and swordplay. Many of the varying endeavours of the last space of years or so might be understood as an attempt to create a life that could sustain a good bit of that sort of thing. The lack of such things in present experience would seem to ipsa loquitor, as they say.
In fairness, having prepared for many auditions en route, I can testify that reciting classical verse by yourself while walking down the street can draw some odd looks. And that's even without the rapiers.
Path of the run took me into some serious pollution haze, which was odd for this time of year. Thought it would be local, but, in the event, it extended over a good bit of the run, and then I had to return through it. Checking the pollution monitors on return to the rooms, the levels were third-world levels, the sort of numbers that kept me in the rooms with a HEPA whirring away when I visited here in winter. Will increase the hydration in the coming days, etc.
That which does not kill us will quite likely try again tomorrow.
It's no exaggeration to say that I have to rebuild the tower in each city. The texts there come from a different construction of things. Like the fellow in the back of the caravan who rebulds his house of cards each time they stop for the night.
It could be much worse, of course. I think of the roughest times in the city where the days basically amounted to continuously taking a small hammer (or perhaps a large rock) to the intricate pocketwatch that I had constructed in conservatory. Here, there is a point in the rhythm for the creation of the means. A time of flowering. That point in the dance.
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