Historically, this part of the world has been at times a place of refuge for scholars from the northern wars; in early modern times, they were often of an alchemical bent, writing treatises under the patronage of the local nobility, and sending them off to the German book fairs.  There's also a strong impulse to a vivification of life by the mythic and the ancient; the fantasy sections of the bookstores seem comparatively well-stocked, relative to other parts of the region.  (Though it is common to the region; in Belgrade at night these days, a colossal LED image of a (14th c?) king lours over the river bridges.)  And with the tech boom, like the American Pacific Northwest, the costs of living in this area have significantly outpaced both what the underlying non-tech economy could support, and the country's historical balance of income allocation.  While there are certainly a good number of penurious folks, the standard of living in this part of the world is very high, even relative to countries with higher income levels; second homes in the country appear to be quite common, and housing is generally very liveable. (This part of the world sees it as a social obligation to build a sufficient number of homes for the population.)  

But with the surging rents locally, it's clear that some sort of Camelot is being conceived.  According to the old (Norman) legends, Camelot was created by Merlin's tracing of a circle in the earth.  When value outpaces worth, look carefully at the sources of irrational desire.

The blue suit, and worse, the national flag in the lapel.  The walking on the carpet.  Possible mistakes.  Especially odd, as there's a chance the host upended a centuries-old global diplomatic protocol to give him a better seat.  The AI photo...  Well.  Imagine the next head of the church did the same with a threadbare Uncle Sam costume and a banjo.  You get the idea.  

Possible anger at decreased popularity among Catholics after several key appointments in the first term.  But this was clearly (a) a sop to evangelicals; and (b) an attempt to spread an image, like the royalty-based ones, that unconsciously influences a public guided by the constant stream of images on the wires. 

The image of the head of state had a peculiar effect in early modern times.  It created a direct notion of power -- we use the word state as an extension of the physical presence of the sovereign, and this started at around that time.  Although the facts are on point, this isn't like an embarrassing doodle in a royal sketchbook -- this image was AI on two levels -- first, on the technical rendering, but second, more important, a thought placed in people's heads.  For some reason, I remember a newspaper article, many years ago, with an interview with a graffiti artist.  He proudly pointed to his work and said: "See that?  I just made you think that."

Fascinating outcome in the local elections.  Unless I'm missing the story, the narratives in the press are a bit puzzling.  But the prime directive counsels silence for the traveller, so back to the philosophers of a century or two (or three) ago.

 #sundaynightradio #goonshow 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b007jtqc 

 #dimanchedemarche

 Procedural legitimacy is justified in two dimensions.  The first is that a stable society follows from everyone inhabing their role, or playing within their understanding of the game.  The second, perhaps unique to liberal democracy (or perhaps more general), is that in the determinations of the several roles and the game-playing, a sufficient number of ideas is created to give people an understanding of the event.  There must be sufficient freedom and understanding constituting the exercise of power so that the objects of the power can identify the freedom of the lawgiver with the freedom of the subject.  In a free and equal society, this provides the basis for the lawgiver's freedom.  One must exercise power to preserve sufficient freedom for the exercise of power.

When the ways of thinking about power change, they don't so much augur political change, as make it a logical necessity.  The building falls because the nature of gravity has changed.

To attempt to explain to people that their words mean less to them than these same words used to mean to others would, for obvious reasons, be a fool's errand.  The only remaining task, then, would be to build the eternal forms in the present time, using only the shadows of the tools.

Or at least that's the sort of thing that I might say if I were trying to seem sententious and old-fashioned.

Apparently, the Executive is thinking about revoking the begging license granted to the clerics gathered around Rev. Harvard's old library.  Difficult times for the crimson piping.  Since the academic lawyers defending the Executive appear to be writing from schools with football teams playing with blue uniforms, based entirely on a pseudo-Goethean theory of political colors, my guess is that Old Eli can rest easy.  

L'Etas Unis ne fait pas la guerre contre la science...

 The quintessence of Baudrillard's hyperreality.  Anticipated, perhaps, in the painted reality of the chapel.

 

 All of these countries are very hospitable, both officially and personally, and this country has the added breathing room of being rather firmly in the Western side of the ledger books of the moment.  (Though I see the national swerve of the present executive yesterday had an enormous effect, as the much-anticipated and celebrated visa-free program appears to have been derailed.  This might land more strongly than might be in evidence in the western-facing discourse.  There are countries here in which the citizens likely would never even be allowed to visit London, and there is even one country which prohibits its own citizens from leaving unless they have a sufficient amount of money, in complicance with a treaty agreement with its neighbors. Outside Schengen and the rich West, visas matter.)

The arts are much stronger than in many much wealthier and more-systematized countries.  And the ticket prices for classical music and theatre are almost precisely a tenth of prices in the American cities.  (The American theatre is based on a production model that maintains these high ticket prices; the number of strong professional actors in the cities who are out of work at any given moment exceeds by far the number working--the guild publishes these numbers regularly.)  That said, there are peculiar assymetries.  There are countries in which it is hard to buy a cheap, decent computer, countries where the prices are basically the same as in the West, and there are places where the tarriffs are low enough that you could use the Western websites for supply.  The same obtains for things like cheap jeans, decent shirts, travel sundries, etc.  Some cities keep coffee at a reasonable price, some don't; the more Westernized cities are generally in the latter category--a tall americano in sbux in this city would be (note the subjunctive) twice the cost (>$4) of the cost in the last country.  Objects of irrational desire.  The more Westernized malls are basically desire machines, enormous adveritsing images of beautiful people on video screens, and those in the less Westernized areas more of places of quiet prosperity and rest (play areas for the children, areas set aside for womens' luxury clothing) though there's generally considerably fewer goods on offer, and what is on offer is generally more expensive. 

 From time to time, I catch things in the corner of my eye which serve to remind me that I'm not in Kansas anymore.  (Full disclosure, I can't recall if I've ever actually been in Kansas, and from the news stateside, it's entirely possible that even Kansas isn't Kansas anymore.  Sic transit gloria mundi -- possibly ad astra.)  At any rate, I was walking to the German hypermarket for groceries, when a constabulary car drove past with its siren sounding and lights flashing. Apparently, they were dealing with a fellow at the bus stop who was shouting.  I walked quickly past, but about 15 yards away, past an intersection, I turned to look at the event.  And one of the constables turned and looked at me -- entirely unthreatening, just as much dispassion and curiosity as I suppose I was showing.  Fair enough, I thought, and then walked another 15 yards or so, crossed another street, and then turned to take in the long view.  And the fellow turned again and stood there looking at me--totally neutral, not threatening, just as curious as I was.  I suppose I stick out a bit, clearly a foreign tourist, so perhaps it was just curiosity about the fellow who looked a bit out of place.  Quite a few people about; busy area.

Later that evening I saw the aftermath of a car accident from a distance.  After about 10 minutes, the constabulary arrived, and within a minute or so, the small crowd that had gathered to watch was completely gone.

Anodyne events, nothing objectionable, but it does serve to remind that this is a strange world, perhaps with unpredictable social mores and lessons.  I'll stick to the officers mess (the desk in the rooms is sufficient mess), the coffeehouses, and the balconies of the theatres.    

 

 

 Have spork, will travel.  

Quite proud of it, actually.  Titanium.  Made in Japan.  Has its own travel sheath.  Quite durable.

One goes on.  And quite often, although not invariably the case, that one turns out to be me.  

Let no one think that they've gotten an iota beyond Vladmir and Estragon.  There are just different types of turnips to be sought and found.

Eavesdropping on Gershwin in St. Petersburg.  The monoculture can be a bit surreal at times.  It took me a bit at the Christmas fairs in the Balkans to realize that people weren't hearing the American carols and popular song as I was.  They stand for something else in their minds.  The distant ideal.

My motto for this peregrination -- Ovid's "Heu, quam vicina est ultima terra mihi."  Written in the Balkans, incidentally.  Sorrowful letters in exile. 

Every moment in your life, no matter what the condiditions, is a point towards which, at some other point in your life, you will direct your care and will -- perhaps wanting it to recur, perhaps thinking it the source of meaning (or perhaps one to which in the past, you have directed your mind).  Perhaps our life consists of these tensions between these points.  In which case, mindfulness would seem to counsel that the point that is the object should attempt to be conscious of the point of the subject of attention and will, and the finitude it implies.  Nunc et in hora mortis, e.g.

 

Mulling coffee methods.  On this peregrination, I've been using the Turkish/Balkan method with a steel pot from the German hypermarket.  But apparently, this method provides much more cholesterol; in some scenarios, a single cup provides much more than the safe daily allowable portion (and the levels of oils in Balkan roasted coffee are high; it is, after all, a roasted nut/bean).  The mokka pot had been my usual method in city life, but apparently, there's an aluminum risk there, and I'm not sure that the abbreviated steam-mechanism of the pot would provide less of the oils.  Will mull.

https://www.hirox-europe.com/gigapixel/girl-with-a-pearl-earring/ 

The images from underneath the Magdalen tower and the bridge are interesting.  Throngs of visitors, much like the crowds in NYC, penned up safely distant from the edges of the brige, with the constabulary in hi-vis vests on either side.  To be clear, unlike Jude Fawley, I'm rather clear that the Christminster that I have in my understanding is of more use to me than any Oxford I might visit.

May morning in Transylvania.  The city quiet during the run, due to the holiday. The 16th c. university quite idyllic in the dawn light, and almost completely empty.  In this part of the world, the cities tend to clear out during the holidays, as everyone goes to their second homes in the country.  Weather quite good for maying or, for that matter, sitting at the table and reading.

Notably, the Founders did not envision the direct election of Senators, and the old ways would possibly give the state legislatures (i.e., the ideological centers of the interests currently being claimed by the populists on both sides) a more clear role in the national scheme, and -- most critically -- insulation from populist administrations and national political machines.

 

One of the comically tragic aspects of the Balkans is that places that people seek out for fresh air are also considered great places for smoking.

A society with a more or less permanent underclass of some size can never become a communitarian society.  The resources of the society devoted to maintaining the underclass become a more or less fixed sum, and anyone outside of that underclass who requires the assistance of the society is drawing away from that on a zero-sum basis, imperiling the political compromise.  Such a claim is resisted both by the defenders of the underclass and those straining to acquire as much wealth as possible for themselves.  It is an unscheduled poverty.

So perhaps one danger of less-prosperous years is that a prosperous society will resist an expansion of the social role, as it will be seen as ceding more resources to the existing permanent underclass, which has only won its proportion by a hard political fight, and the resulting identity and cohesiveness; the latter will then operate to exclude these other claims.

 One of the slightly uncanny surprises of late was finding this on the programme of the region's professional orchestra (via the Vaughan Williams fantasia) the other night.

 

 Today has essentially been an attempt to undo yesterday.  These things come at some cost.

Rather exhausting day yesterday.  Sleep at 3AM, and waking out of sorts, late in the morning.  Must take steps to prevent those sorts of days.  Actually finished up shortly after midnight, but then there was dinner to be made, and distraction.  Relatedly, the BBC, or as I call it, the Saxe-Coburgs' Marconi machine, appears to have taken the Goon Show archives offline, likely for purposes of exploitation.  Shame.  Excellent cooking/eating background noise.

 

 

 

 My CV is solid, and I have a decent grasp on the mens sana et corpore sano, but this is still an extended exercise in catastrophe management (on an Atrean scale).  I worked professionally for a bit, then did a decent conservatory degree, then ten years in the city.  During that time working in the theatre, I set my basic stance towards the world.  After about a decade, I was driven from that ground, and went to get a top-tier law doctorate; took as many doctrinal courses as I could (which is generally considered madness), and graduated with a good GPA, and passed the NY Bar with a strong score after self-study.  Despite that, I was again rather quickly driven from that ground in the city.  I then headed to a large midwestern university to do a research doctorate, synthesizing elements of these two fields.  Took many courses, ranged broadly across the university, philosophy, history, etc., before writing the dissertation (the department didn't let me audit seminars when writing, contary to the usual practice).  The department there was pretty corrupt, and I didn't go along with some of the bad things, and perhaps in response, when I finished the dissertation, they refused to schedule a defense.

That's the story so far.  I am basically still working to vindicate that initial stance, but in the interval, my understanding of the struggle has considerably broadened.  Onward.

 In the difficult February, in the port city to the south, I used sleep as a means--a solid ten or twelve hours (as against the customary five and change) could preserve me against the difficulties. Now, whether or not that was a good notion (and it should be noted that it saw me safely through), with this springtime, the body needs to learn on a deeper level than it did last springtime that we're not doing that anymore.  Gently down the stream.

(Abruptness, as the yogis point out, is dangerous.  Advance the morning in half-hour increments, rather than trying to take a flying leap.  Unless, of course you want to take a flying leap.  In which case, go for it.)

Listening to Handel's Messiah from Moscow.  All of this is still one disjointed, fractious, warring and confused project of the Enlightenment.  Bloody wars under battling tricoleurs. So -- focus on the work of the Enlightenment.  Don't get distracted with more transcendental thoughts.  (These are notes-to-self.) 

And yet, this is a very ponderous and unwieldy reading of it.  Tones are very careful, and there is a rounded beauty to some moments that I've not heard before.  But the heavy tones of centuries of Orthodoxy are obscuring the work that rings so clearly in the brash sunlit uplands of the Scottish and German Enlightenment.  I remember a Samson and Deliah in Bucharest at the beginning of this peregrination -- I was reading Milton's Samson in the interval, and realized that I needed to think with Milton, rather than the with the dark, romantic tones of these eastern orthodoxies.  

Being a Westerner, I should reason as a Westerner.  The quickness of the mind, the Anglo-American law, German and British philosophy (with the odd American mixed in).  Intellectually, nativism consists of placing yourself in the way of working with which you have greatest facility.  Beckett wrote in French, but Beckett didn't write in order to write.  His understanding of things was already complete when he staged some scenarios in order to show us how things are.  If the world is still an active question, if there is hope, then we have to cling to the homelands of the mind, and its most familiar languages.

Which means that we need to take up the mantle of the Enlightenment in the context of effective history, even abroad.

Everyone involved is very smart, of course, but reading the TLS is a little like reading a political article in a trade paper, like the bar society magazines that I used to get free copies of as a student.  The pieces themselves, though brightly lit, are largely unilluminating, offering at best a bit of schein, and the only useful things are generally the mentions of other things used to leaven the prose, either signalling erudition, or trying to send a worthwhile signal or two through the flames.  Basically, reading for the offhand footnotes -- the small flickering things near the edges.

 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.