Bit of a break in the heat.   Rooms much more liveable.  Still the busy road, but that's only noise.  The absence of fumes and heat (presumably a change in wind with the weather) makes much more of a difference.  The cost is much higher than what the locals pay in rent, but absent the caravanserai mentality, there would be no market whatsoever, an nowhere to travel to.  The caravan continues.

The fundamentals are good -- wood floors, open space, double-glazed windows, but the clothesline is an old synthetic yarn that leaves tiny splinters in the clothing, the air conditioner was literally packed with dry and oily dirt (a half inch on the filter), and there were other electrical/plumbing things.  In addition, there wasn't an open laundry room, so it's been a few weeks of hand-washing.  It's being run as an inexpensive rental, so this apparently the mentality of an inexpensive rental in this part of the world.  Which is odd.  There's no reason that it couldn't be run shipshape without doubling the rent, but that's apparently the distinction.  Hopefully, the month of exhaust fumes from the road won't cause any lingering cloudiness.

Oddly, I came here from the Jedi Council city, which had its own difficulties at times (Yoda's swamp, perhaps), and just before I left, I was watching Tarkovski's Solaris one night after dinner, and was struck by the soundtrack on the driving scene after the rural home at the beginning.  Listening only to the sound, I was struck by how nightmarish it was.   Just the constant rush of traffic, but...

 

 The church is a ladder supply warehouse, not a ladder machine.

In a moment of cynicism, I wonder if the world (multiplied tenfold in the last hundred years) has thought through what might happen if hundreds of millions of people in its most powerful country just start lying as hard as they can -- which seems to be the way things are going.  Our mediated ways of understanding the way things are in the world won't necessarily pick up on this, but the context of everyday experience will change, and unrest will grow.  And the mechanisms that have been developed to suppress unrest have grown quite potent, albeit quietly, over the last fifty years or so.  

Ultimately, you do have to be a good person, if this civilization thing is going to work.  ("You," not "one.")  You don't have to accept the prevailing notion of the good, but you do need to formulate your own idea of the good, and especially in that case of exception, hold to it with all your being.  The real danger is in the (now apparently increasing) thought that neither the common notion of the good, nor private notions of the good, nor the notion of private notions of the good can claim authority.  In a crisis, of course, the wagons will circle around the first, but precisely because that will happen at the expense of the second and the third, we, quite wisely, won't entirely believe it. 

Followed a small rabbit-hole to a digital facsimile of an early Gospel text at the Vatican library.  On a whim familiar to anyone with a smattering of Greek or Latin who has ever visited a museum with artifacts from ancient history, decided to zoom in to see if I could make out anything myself, across 1700 years.  Literally the first word I looked at: αποκαλυται.  

And to bed, I think.   

Again, my yeoman's Greek is full of misleading notions, but...  

Conjecture:  The missing root in "αρτον επιουσιον" was from a neologism, perhaps by the first translators to Greek.  

"Should we say αρτον eχουσια?"

"Νο, it's not about power or authority, it's about the thing itself.  Επι-ουσια is more like it."

"But that's not a word."

"Perhaps you haven't grasped what it is that we're doing here..." 

 In the Soviet film "Road to Saturn," the Russian spy who infiltrated the training program that the Germans were using to train Russian operatives is sitting at the table, drinking with one of the Russian women who are apparently being run in a parallel program.  She looks at him with disdain, and says "You even drink like a German...We Russians have the truth, but we live in s--t up to our ears."

One peculiarity of some folks from the large country to the east whom I've encountered is a disdain for brooms.  It took me a while to realize that this was a learned aversion, rooted in social distinction.  The poor have brooms, the normal folks have vacuums.  Similarly, both there and in other places, excessive organization or hygiene practices is sometimes marked as German behaviour. The need to distinguish yourself, for what might be entirely legitimate reasons, from the people of another culture can sometimes cause you to cede to them some objectively necessary aspects of human, as distinct from animal, behaviour.  I presume this happens unconsciously.  

The only way to keep this from happening is perhaps a culturally distant model.  Two random cultures in the Americas might equally cultivate a specific Japanese mental discipline.  Or perhaps it is possible to only have completely transcendent cultural models, notions of perfection not associated with any lineage or region.  Perhaps America serves for this in the global context, or used to serve for this.

 But there does have to be a discipline.  Like the spy infiltrating the training program, you do need to have sufficient distance from both your own culture and the culture that is being proposed as the model, and yet be focusing your mental and spiritual energy on the task.  As a result, being neither fish nor flesh becomes an objective of the psyche.  (And the character is genuinely between two worlds a bit, as demonstrated by an almost unconscious sniff of the knuckle after sipping the drink.) 

That focus is perhaps equivalent to the truth that the woman was speaking about.  The desire for perfection that is so strong that it makes you consider the lesser perfections (e.g., hygiene, brooms) something that should be renounced.  And yet, this focus, this apperceptive awareness, left to its druthers, would likely find those sorts of things useful. 

 

Rheingold livestream from Bayreuth, a coffeehouse across from the capital of the old Republic, while trying to finish Jaeger's Paideia.  The argument of giants over the completed hall, mortals hungry -- not for the spirit of youth, the original bargain (that which giveth joy to their youth, perhaps), but gold. And then the question of the ring of power, and then the murder of the brother.  An old story. 

 We fashion aesthetics, picturings, of past dystopias in an attempt to avoid them.  Jack-booted thugs, etc.  (Which, to be fair, is sometimes necessary due to the danger of imitation.)  But if you are acting in a craven manner and causing harm, you are creating that which the observers will eventually fashion an aesthetic around and learn to fear, and to teach others to fear.  And the aesthetic, or picturing, which is to say, the sense of how it is with the world, will then necessarily describe you.  This might be the place just beyond where the thinker sits.

 The λεγειν.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/efd25fd0-d33c-40c1-b485-6889a45684c1 

 Honestly like trying to read and think in an unventilated tollbooth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  (Which I would also try to do, if it were necessary.)

It's odd, though not unlikely, that these rooms are the antinomy of the present place (industrialization, etc.), while the dank, lightless rooms in the last place were a corresponding antinomy (contemplation, etc.).  When renting apartments on a strict budget, once things are no longer neutral, they become characteristic of the place, occasionally too much so.

 Computer/connection more than a bit wonky over the last several days.  Might need to do another rebuild.

Bayreuth season opens tonight, I think.   Hope springs eternal.  Though mostly in the countries to the north.  As for the professor in Vanya or any number of migrants from Africa or the Middle East making their way through the forests -- the picture of a Swedish cabin, that notion of northern civilizations, can exert a peculiar fascination in midsummer in southern Europe.

It's an interesting time in the shining city on the hill, as the world can see.  This isn't an accidental executive -- when a preponderance of hundreds of millions have to cast their vote, the verdict is never not meaningful.  

At the end of the sixteenth century, the travelling theatre in England changed.  People now had to pay to get in.  (This resulted in a few brawls.)  The theatre started to be staged in guild halls and commercial centers, and the audience strained to show as many outward signs of wealth as they possibly could.  In the well-told tale, this has a lot to do with the Reformation.   

If you believe that the having of money and power are good in themselves, and sufficient for the devotion of a life's work, you will make a certain kind of world.  In a prosperous society, this ostentatious flaunting of wealth and power might seem like an effective mechanism for keeping the factories churning and the trucks of frozen hamburgers rolling.  But correlation is not causation.  And when even the philosophers become pragmatic about the relationship between civic ideals and industrial prosperity, the proposition that life is a game, with the goal being to acquire wealth and powerful positions, and that success in this game writes both the rules of the game and the meaning of the game, begins to sink its deeper roots among the hundreds of millions.

Ground yourself in the truth of your being each day, and you will come to know the character of the times. 

The noise and pollution of these rooms are really difficult.  Like trying to read Henry James in the median of I-95.  And not the good bits.  Baltimore.  Jersey.

After the sunless rooms with sewage problems in the last country, I seem to be encountering housing antinomies.  Excesses in one direction or the other.  (Not being able to book sufficiently in advance due to some admin shenanigans was the main cause.)

Onward, in moderation. 

 You can't waste time, and your life, vaguely gesturing at the pervasive corruption.  Go back to the texts that were written before the corruption set in -- they're freely available now, and not the province of the academic libraries (that nobody uses now, anyway).  Come to a separate understanding of the world strong enough to stand in the light of the tradition, and if the world, or some small portion of it, has need of it, help them if you can.

Shifting tactics on making the rooms workable.  The irritation and infection, which I at first thought was an illness from the journey, doesn't appear to be particulate-based.  The air is stale, especially in the afternoon, but the summertime 2.5 numbers are negligible.  (There have been places during this journey where the meter has gone to purple--approximately 3-4x what's usually considered a lock-the-doors crisis stateside.)  Perhaps it's a dust mite thing -- I did clear almost an inch of packed dust off of the climate control filters when I arrived.   Bagged the curtains, rolled the rug, and covered the mattress in a plastic tarp.  Will see if the symptoms persist.

It does have a psychological effect.  Bit off the game. Onward.

Stardust at the Proms.  Hoagy C. seems to be orbiting back into the cultural view.  Probably won't extend to the more playful corners of his catalogue.  But there is some worthwhile magic in his stuff. I remember walking through the part of the campus at Indiana that inspired Stardust -- quite an idyllic spot.

This is a part of the world marked by atavistic political structures.  Perhaps this country is a kingdom.  A kingdom has a king, and usually dislikes him intensely.  (At least one of his two bodies.  Girard goes so far as to say that given the fascination with the model, and the rivalry that it generates, a king is simply a condemned prisoner with an exceptionally long commutation of sentence.)  But in such a culture, it is thought, nonetheless, that there should be a king, and this king is the one at hand.  A republic tends to function in a different, more mercurial manner.  With occasionally problematic results, given the types of people who can come to power.  Historically, this part of the world has seen many states in this model -- witness the monarchies that essentially governed the old Republic and the large nation to the east for decades.

A nation doesn't change its character by political action, but by cultural transformation.  A kingdom can't become a republic by electing a republican slate.  In the same manner, the government has nothing to do with whether a country is a kingdom, a pure democracy, or a republic.  The people make the king.  Transformation, if it is desired, has to come in the nation's notions of itself, before its political actions can be characterized as transformative.

Apolitical, of course, as to local questions.   None of the local political factions or paradigms seem to hold much truth or seem justified to me, which is as it should be.  They exist for the people of this place, and the people of this place are the only ones who can find them either necessary or superfluous.  The form of the state is a matter for the people of the place.

 "Know ye not that we shall judge angles?"

- Pythagoras (likely apoc.)

One thing to keep in mind in the context of American political discussions: In East Germany a generation ago, the border guards were convinced to fire on people attempting to escape by being told that the people scrambling over the wall were stealing the value of their education from the state. 

These questions are not entirely anodyne. 

 

 Still trying to find a way of using these rooms.  Picked this one over the usual residential place, as a business seemed safer than a random person given the politics, and, more importantly, there was a solid table and chair.  I cleaned out as much of the accumulated dust from the climate control as I could reach, wiped down all the surfaces, and cleared the drains (no chemicals), but the air still feels bad, and there are some corresponding systems.  (To understand the nature of a place, watch the way your physical and psychological mechanisms function.)

Wind from the south in the AM brought clean air, but the shift to the west and the heat of the afternoon made things stale again.  Hard to tell if the the bad things are coming from inside or outside.  Likely a bit of both.   

Since there turned out to not be a laundry room, it's hand laundry for the most part, a skill I acquired from the (also peak tourist--summer) garret across from the economics college in Bucharest.  Part of the difficulty is that some shenanigans a couple of months ago left me with a bit less of a reserve than I'd like, and I couldn't book the last two places sufficiently in advance.

Onward. 

 

Interesting, Taverner's Veil of the Temple is opening the Edinburgh Festival this year.  I remember the Lincoln Center performance shortly after the Temple Church premiere.  Groundling ticket, so the floor for the full eight hours -- composer in attendance, signalling for the audience to rise by raising both arms in a grand gesture as he stood.  And then on to the dawn.  Time (and the time) can be known in many ways, if you don't take it for granted.

Interesting talk about sugar in the carbonated drinks.  The pivot to corn syrup was Nixon, I think, primarily because of Cuba.  Wondering if there's anything in play there -- Florida businessmen seem to be driving it.  When I was still eating processed foods, Diet Coke was the elixir of choice, it's sort of a NYC business thing.

Not exaggerating the current quarters.  It's near a nice part of the capital, basically the UWS of the city, but it downhill, in an industrial quarter, with a bit of a canyon above a narrow, busy street.  Basically like going from the most unheimlich quarter of Louisiana to the most toxic corner of Bayonne.  (At several multiples of the prevailing local rents.) Hopefully, the one month's stay won't be too catastrophic on the health.  

Odd and powerful dreams after leaving the last country, a country characterized by strong dreams.  I haven't entirely put aside the notion that there might be a spiritual ground for the wars in this part of the world.   A divided sky.

Onward.