Kindle acting wonky again, despite great care in keeping it far from wonkiness-inspiring conditions. Ideally, when one wanders the Balkans reading philosophy, one does it with kit a bit stronger than the present travelling budget will allow.
The theatre district in downtown Cleveland was built shortly after the turn of the last century, largely for touring acts and productions, much in the manner of its current functioning, although within a very different theatere economy. (Aside from the commercial tours bussed in, there's only the explicitly "experimental" house across the river, which would need to be the subject of a separate line of thought.)
My conservatory, which is apparently well regarded by people who for some reason are able to rank artistic conservatories, has relocated from its old home some distance from downtown to this cluster of theatres. But my training happened in a very different place. Two places, actually. The first was the university, still very much in the spirit of its small-college land-grant turn-of-the-century aesthetic. (The movement and dance classes were in the old gymnasium, and the theatre performances and classes were across the large street, in the college since merged with the old land-grant college, in a remodeled social hall that dated from the founding. Even this isn't there anymore, as both programs have moved across campus to new facilities.) The second was the play house (sic) itself, built at roughly the same time, in the spirit of the American regional theatre movement, and some of the early workers in that movement, now approaching their senescence, had been drafted in to launch the conservatory degree. The original structure was a small theatre built for Ibsen and Shakespeare, partially connected to the Little Theatre movement of the time. The prosperity of the beginning of the 20th century brought a much larger stage next door, taking the same aesthetic to a larger scale, and the prosperity at the end of the century brought the huge, boxy, Phillip-Johnson designed venue that served as the mainstage of the present venue, along with an array of rehearsal halls carved out of the Sears, Roebuck next door.
In a sense, these two place, and the temporal realities nested within them, were the ground of the training, not least because the people who had worked in these realities were the ones structuring the training. But that time in America, the pre-war years, is almost completely hidden from sight now. Any play from before the second world war is siply approached as a "classic," staged in a certain manner because it is right to stage things such as that in that manner, without any sense of what made working in that way so necessary at the time. Imitating the past, as the past, is at best door, and never the mansion itself.
The play house is now a parking lot for a nearby hospital (after having been given over to the local police force to use for tactical training for a few years). I'm unfamiliar with the new setup at the university, as I've not visited the program since they moved. Which is probably best. The reality that has meaning for me, that shapes both the manner of my work and the way in which I think about it, is the schematic that I've just described.
There were difficulties, of course. The Midwest is the Midwest, and it will be the Midwest. (Especially, perhaps, with respect to a large gentleman with a Polish-American last name.) But given the presence of a good number of teachers, and the facilities at hand, I was able to carve out a useful path. And it presently functions, as I suspect it did at the time (and this was possibly the source of some of the difficulties) to populate the theatre as the city understands it. Large rooms that look a certain way, with the non-union tours bussed in on commercial contracts from New York. Things used to be a bit more organic, and I choose that word carefully. An organic form arises within nature and associates multiple forms to a certain end. Where the theatre of the time is living, there is a reason that it takes a certain form. Staging theatre without a connection to that necessity merely builds a scale model of a bodily organ. And, frankly, that's what the professional theatre in America does now, and it's priced sufficiently high that the few who get to see it feel that it must be worthwhile, or they've just wasted several hundred dollars on the evening that the newspapers clearly described as excellent.
To find the present, understand the past in the present. Recollection. Else, the need to recreate the forms of the past will govern the present.
Somewhere between 'gently down the stream' and 'Invictus.' Perhaps both, simultaneously.
The trick is to find those endogenously arising elements of the long journey that keep it from becoming an extinguishment. At minimum, a concentrated effort to do so every spring. Hence, perhaps the global, common notion of the holy month of fasting and abstention in early spring.
One paradigm for the journey: Worricker, ep. 3. (From the days when I watched those sorts of things.)
Make no mistake, New Amsterdam and the herirs of the Scottish Enlightenment are very much steering things stateside now. New York is quite effective at getting things done. But the larger picture of just governance, which is to say the Republic, is in some tension with these highly effective and profitable Machiavels. Which is, no doubt, being discussed over innumerable ambassadorial lunches in DC at the moment.
All might still work for the good, imho. But the question in my mind is whether this motion is the usual pendulum between Republic and Machiavel, or if someone is fashioning notions of a novel flywheel.
Odd frame of mind, perhaps connected to the unsettled weather. As with the weather, a few moments of worthwhile things, but with the Kindle rebuild taking my attention, achieved almost nothing with the day afterwards. On some days, the ship is stilled, no matter how much canvas is there for the wind. Remarkable sunset, though. Tomorrow is, as they say, another day that is only a day away.
The more I think about the resurrection on the third day, the clearer the meaning of having an entire day between the day of death and the day of resurrection, a complete event or cycle, seems to be. Undoubtedly an idiosyncracy of my understanding; it's my entirely amateur understanding that three-day spiritual exercises were a thing in Judaism.
Some of the Protestant writers of the last century held that Christianity had as much to do with any random pagan, primitive cult as it does with Judaism. What those thinkers might have missed, inter alia, is that our notion of random pagan cult is very much informed by being in the tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. They are primitive because they don't have our liturgy, they are pagan, because they don't have our theology. It would be impossible meaningfully to imagine such a thing, because the vocabulary of our imagination belongs to our tradition. What those thinkers perhaps really intended to advance was a negation of Judaism by means of its already-conceived opposite. You can't have the inauthentic without having designated the authentic in advance. Christianity arose from every ground, not no ground in particular.
An e-ink reader capable of rendering full-size pdfs would be ideal, as the reading is obviously all online, but they're still a bit pricey. The most robust solution seems to be continuing to cycle through disposable reconditioned (< $50, usually) kindles. Not catastrophic if stolen, and it renders the text. Sufficient is the device. And for octavo texts (before the modern sizing took hold), it's close to scale.
Noticed some minor oddities in the Amazon account (marketing information in one device set to share, which I always disable; another device loading at a peculiar resolution), so I used the Amazon option to log out of all sessions -- turns out that deletes all of the devices on the account. A few hours of restoring. I've only had one apparent hack on these peregrinations (when Amazon shut things down proactively), coincidentally in this city on a prior visit. Likely coincidence, not causation.
The Kindles are annoying, but a sub $35 alarm clock/ebook access device/backup web browser proves necessary sometimes.
Contact with international interests is not precisely participation within the international order. And even then, when you have a solid notion of national identity and role within the system, you again encounter the endogenous antinomies of the international order. Ricardo had the notion that nations did certain things, collectively speaking, more or less well than others, so the exchange of goods would work to the benefit of all. (This, of course, refracts Hegel.) But perhaps there is a correlative as to consumer desire; it similarly varies, and when let loose upon the prospect of distant industrial forms of production, it exists largely to satiate those desires. At every level--individual--community--nation--world, there must be an internal balance, understanding, and sense of identity before rushing into the next. Else, your factories will just be used to fuel the old wars over ancient cities, or, you know, make cheap disposable plastic things that make wealthy people feel marginalinally more satisfied after purchaing them online at two in the morning. May all living beings come to enlightenment.
In a prosperous society the wealth of which comes from industrial structures, the danger is that thoughts, expressions, and manners of life that favor the continuance of these forms tend to be unconsciously rewarded. And, more critically, having unthinkingly carved out this central path of the shared mind, thoughts, expressions and manners of life that fall outside of the central path tend to be dismissed out of hand. But not from rational thought about them, or even from their identity with things to which rational thought has been given. They are simply aside from the path being unconsciously divined.
Interesting news bulletins from the inaccessible and costly north of the continent: to detect foreign intelligence agents, be on the lookout for people with bad hygiene. Not knowing (or wanting to know) the ways of espioneurs and espioneuses, I can't say if that's true or not, but I do know that locals often have a keen sense for the scent of a stranger, and that it's not infrequently expressed in these terms. Compare the first reactions of the 19th c. Japanese to the European visitors. Perhaps the suggestion was a pragmatic attempt to trigger that sort of awareness.
Bartlett's fodder:
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Not everything said in a reasonable tone of voice involves the use of reason.
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The problem faced by a country, no names, no pack-drill, is never that there is just one craven and greedy person doing bad things. In fact, the degree to which it is commonly thought that it involves just one bad person like that is some sign of how common the condition might be.
I haven't been following this, but just based on a few hours of eavesdropping--there's perhaps a category error in the argument's reading of history. The usual question is whether the equitable remedy existed in UK equity practice at the founding. But the question of whether a claim sounds in law or equity is distinct from this, and requires some imagination, since the two have been unified in the interval.
A claim sounding in law (or constitutional law) can have an equitable remedy, possibly binding those involved in the action; a claim sounding in equity at the time of the claim (e.g., one seeking a universal injunction, without statutory basis, as the ultimate remedy) arguably should be subject to the traditional common-law limitations on equity jurisdiction.
Extremely important argument happening in DC at the moment.
Say a cabinet member walks into a university lecture hall and strikes a left-leaning professor with a baseball bat, claiming it to be a legal act. Litigation ensues, and the federal circuit court upholds the district court's holding that such things are illegal. Then, in a different part of the country, another member of the cabinet (and also a former television commentator) does the same. The question then becomes how to enforce the rule of law without these suits proceeding seriatum.
The present tactic is a tool of equity, the general injunction. Assume that goes away, due to historical abuse, under the principle that equitable remedies are not available where there is a remedy at law. If you have a government dedicated to lawfare, willing to survive any number of lawsuits as they continue to practice their unorthodox means of governance, how to maintain the rule of law?
First, the argument that constitutionally, under Article III, judgments can only bind the parties before them. This seems to contravene the equity powers granted the courts under the findings, and further, would prevent Congress from further modifying the jurisdiction of the appellate courts.
Second, the notion that a statutory class action could solve the problem. This seems an unwieldy tool, as it would require an institutional solution to every disputed claim; individual judgments would become hard to obtain, and thought useless.
Clearly, there has to be a solution in which, when a court says what the law is, it has some effect on the practices of the government. In the baseball-bat scenario, it would be good law in that first circuit that the government couldn't do that, and subsequent actions would awaken the usual tools -- constitutional tort claims against state actors, contempt sanctions, mandamus (the elephant in the room, perhaps), etc. Outside the circuit, a plaintiff might have to file suit, and arguably that's appropriate, in order to keep the boundaries of these percolating laboratories of democracy separate. If it's different than the first holding, then certiorari can resolve. If the same, then arguably a class action becomes a good tool if the government continues to maintain its practices outside of those circuits.
Alternately, filing suit at the seat of government could address the policymaking; jurisdiction over the cabinet member in their capacity in government should resolve the agency's practice. This is a more costly proposition in terms of the courts' power -- commanding the head of a cabinet agency to do something requires power, and costs influence.
Ultimately, making individual district judges the default backstop against flagrantly unconstitutional actions of the executive bats the bottom of your lineup card against the strongest forces of the adversary. Within the districts, the orders hold, and the power is proportionally balanced. Seeking a remedy in equity to bind the entire national government is a peculiar thing to have evolved in time, in that remedies in law are available, such as individual suits that write law for the states, circuits, or boroughs; suits against the agencies at the seat of government; or class actions defined by Congress. (Even where the relief is equitable in nature, the claim sounds in law, not equity, if you mentally piece the benches back together to consider the question.)
Top of the head, while listening to the argument in the middle of the mountains of Transylvania. Not advice, don't rely.
So King Arthur had ever a custome, that at the high feast of Pentecost especially, afore al other high feasts in the yeare, he would not goe that day to meat unti lhe had heard or seene some great adventure or mervaile. And for that custom all manner of strange adventures came before King Arthur at that feast afore all other feasts'
Malory (in Chambers)
The unpleasantness of that evening at R&J about a week ago is still with me. I've enjoyed the Szecheny baths both times I've visited, and Shakespeare is very close to me. But the attempt to create an experience that blended the two made for a very unpleasant evening.
Theatre is cognate with theory. It means point of view on the action. Gadamer tells the story well. You come to the ritual at Athens from a particular place, and that determines your vantage. The Romans, with their fondness for wild beasts, sea-battles, etc., destroyed this by making the theatre immersive--they turned it into a circle. Since there was then no angle of skene, of presentation, the play and the audience no longer faced each other. (Amphitheatre literally means doubled theatre.)
And discomfort is different than being in a bad place; we're talking here about the latter. I've sat in an uncomfortable posture on the floor through an all-night Taverner concert (in the presence of the composer, who rightly had a comfortable chair); I've stood in sunlight through a long play; I've sat on benches through long outdoor dramas and stood at the back of the house through a Ring Cycle. But in all of these cases, that was my angle on the action. I had come to that place, and found that position as the only or logical vantage. To be surrounded by an unpleasant event, particularly when you care about theatre, makes the evening very long, and tends to stay with the mind. It's certainly far from the worst in terms of regietheatre, and the playing was skillful. But the event was wrong. The room was wrong. (I can't say the play was wrong, because we weren't face to face.)
I seem to be able to summon an inordinate amount of mind-numbing material through the transom when I set myself to return to the early mornings and start to lay the foundations of some deeper work in the afternoon. Putting a bit of a seal on the transom--can't be for too long, as that's also how the food gets in.
A shared world constituted by the prevailing appearances of things, and not conscious, either privately or collectively, of the falsity of the prevailing appearances of things is ultimately a false shared world. Kant proposes a conceptual realism that accepts appearances as veridical, in that they are all that we ever can have, but this is necessarily paired with an awareness that the thing itself eludes us. Take either proposition without the other, and it's simply a sanction for solipsism or authoritarianism.
One doesn't realize this until one spends some times with people and institutions and realize that they entirely consist of trying to be what they appear to be. It would be much better for both if they would try to be that which they didn't yet understand.
The corporate (brudderschaft refined?) approach now apparently greasing the mechanisms of international diplomacy courtesy of the administration from New Amsterdam can be very effective. I wonder if the recent events in Yemen and Turkey might be the fruits of gears spinning sub silento, while the domestic agenda is captive to ludicrous things like the personal gift of a (flying) palace to the president by a foreign state. This sort of governance can be effective, because effectiveness, as with the Norman pirates arriving on British soil, is the reason for the existence of these forms.
But once the specific objectives have been achieved (and the losing side in the second really-big war was quite an effective state at first, using much the same commerce-focused policymaking toolkit), one is still faced with the almost immeasurably larger questions of general governance.
Will the "Laws of the Confessor" survive?
This is sort of a sidelight for me, not one of the things I spend too much time on, but perhaps a useful fragment of popular general ontology:
Baudrillard's hyperreality (basis for the Matrix films) is a useful concept, but you do have to decide to use it. And this reaches the explanation of why the Matrix scenario might in fact presently be the case. Allons-y. We see, empirically that the the mediated hyperreality, the sense of the world through stimuli conveyed by electronic devices, is a physical reality. That sort of thing is happening. Everyone's looking at their telephones. We assume that this is an inflection of actual reality, that it highlights certain aspects of given experience [cf. Sellars]. But what if the sense of the way things are that we receive from this παιδα is constitutive, not regulative? What if it constructs the understanding that then encounters the world of unmediated sensory experience, causing that world to be grounded in the ultimate reality conveyed by the machine? As proof for that notion, consider that a young or naive person, when looking for meaning, usually looks according to the gestalt -- when trying to be meaningful, we look to the more emphasized aspects of hyperreality, and along the lines indicated the culture, usually because we've been affected by some fragment of the culture -- a book, a movie, a play. These notions are more deeply held; this is where emphasis meets affect.
So, if this is the case, we ground our experience in the day-to-day world upon the hyperreality, instead of vice versa. Sensory data fleshes out the picture that is rooted in the meaningful moments that we've received. Further, to distinguish "actual" reality, we actively mask this grounding by constantly convincing ourselves that we are in the real, unmediated world, and that our understanding is constructed according to naive experience. But we are living in the given world. And this comes into focus when we act, when we actively seek to get meaning from experience, or, to put it in the old language, when we live according to our beliefs.
I'm wondering if I should just launch into something. Rather than doing this piecemeal annotation, working through the texts. (Which, I should note, I'm doing quite a bit of.) Along the lines of the contemplated work in Murdoch's Book and the Brotherhood. Just launch into that one big thing. But it's a bit like deciding to build a rocket while travelling between cities. One does need a place, a stable manufacturing base, a decent library and some stability of life. Else, you'll just make a rather large wobbly thing that bespeaks the circumstances of its creation more than anything else.
The winter was a bit rough, and I'm basically back from that. And working in the panopticon, in which someone trying to sell me something is probably noting absolutely every text I call up on screen is a bit unnerving. I sort of prefer not to have people reading over my shoulder, even if they are just an algorithm.
Time will tell. Likely after I finish the half-dozen books in the immediate queue. When you set out on this sort of a peregrination, you sort of put the larger projects in a mental steamer trunk for safekeeping. The wobbliness of travel can put a good idea permanently off-center. Trees grow to the light, even when the sun's going in circles due to the elliptic of the travels.
Time will tell.
Perhaps I should be more discreet with these thoughts about thinking and working. When one is marooned, and manages to create some aspect of utopia on the island using the bare materials at hand, the distant courts and palaces tend to send raiding missions rather than rescue missions. Rogue Gonzalos must not remain unwatched.
Gently down the stream.
Pace Jacobi, Kant was directing our attention specifically to that which we could not perceive, and setting up a system for thinking about it, so that we wouldn't forget that we couldn't perceive it. It's a feature, not a bug. If you ever forget that you don't really understand, the time will have you.
No one seems to have made this argument, which is puzzling.
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Reading Peirce. An offhand mention: time as identical with inner experience, and space as identical with external experience. I don't know that the association has ever occurred to me as identity. But perhaps that's just another one of the thoughts out there that's well-known and new to me. Every thought has its time.
I'm not convinced that the typography on Francis' tomb was an error. For example, it's common in older buildings (~18/19 c) in Transylvania to find Roman numerals highlighted within words in texts on murals and facades of buildings. If you reassemble the numbers, or perhaps sum them, you'll get a certain year, perhaps the year it was built, or some date significant to the message. There is a name for it, and it's in Chambers Book of Days, but I can't bring it to mind. At any rate, the two widely spaced letters on the tomb inscription are A and V. Which, I'm guessing, might have something to do with Α and ω.
Definitely off the local theatres for a bit. To observe the Shakespeare last night, I had to slog through an immersive thing--fog machines leaving a haze, uncomfortable seating, actors improvising with audience, etc. This included a spritz with some scented water from a water pistol and Friar Lawrence mashing his fist against my ear rather forcefully to mime the fact that he had caught some sort of an insect that he wanted me to listen to. Noblesse oblige.
If I had travelled to Athens to observe the sacred festival, and someone had suggested that I instead go to a small smoky room to listen to some artistic chanting, I would have ignored him and proceeded to my place in the Lycurgan stone theatre. To go to the theatre, one must go to the theatre. I've performed in some street theatre, actually at a relatively high level, but I strongly suspect that this immersive thing (which, in fairness, is thought by most marketing folks to be an amazing new thing that will transform the art) is simply a commercial device designed to mask the deliberate decline of the art. Staging a play is not merely an art -- it constitutes the art. Post-dramatic is not a good thing, if you were hoping for the drama. It's like arriving for lunch when things are post-lunch.
Rather peaceful day, at least for most of it. From time to time, it occurs to me that, given the larger circumstances, phenomenologically, things could be much worse. (This is partially established by the fact that things have been much worse in the past, within the same general circumstance--I could a tale unfold.) The incongruity, though, does give me some pause. Not to imply that the bad things in life are sent upon us by some dark malevolent force that is as creative as Hegel's spirit of history when confounded, but I must be sure to stay on my toes. Things can come out of left field sometimes.
#sabbathdaymusic #dead #Cornell #581977
https://archive.org/details/gd77-05-08.sbd.hicks.4982.sbeok.shnf
R&J at one of the city's theatres. Quite good, some spot-on moments, bold concept. When you know these plays very well, and for some reason I still do--apparently they're near the center of the mind, and you're watching folks from another culture stage them, the mind divides between seeing what they excavate from their own cultural context to reveal and sensing the lines of gold and diamonds just beneath, or to the side, and wanting very much to point them out. Luckily, as an audience member, I have only one option there, and it's still quite enjoyable. Though a Love's Labours in the ex-Yu. concept has been percolating through my consciousness for some time now.
Not at all an expert, but I'm beginning to think that the last papacy set the church on course towards a post-political identity, grounded in liturgical doctrine and charity. Francis was a great pope, but he didn't use the office to press for major changes in doctrine or practice, or to advance the interests of a certain side in geopolitics. The ground of the church was the church.
One danger might be that the powers that be in the national churches, who are very much invested in the political questions aired in church forums and the NYT, might begin to understand that the papacy is shifting to a different ground, and they might not like that. (The newly chosen successor of Peter was brought to Rome and raised to the highest rank in the College of Cardinals and the curia by Francis, so I would expect things to continue on the same course.) Witness the odd coolness from some on the left given the new fellow's (entirely doctrinally correct and charitable) statements about civil unions and such.
Add to that the as-a-given uneasiness of the other half of the NYT-reading Catholic leadership, the wealthy and socially conservative types.
The question might be whether the office is stronger than the political machinations supporting it. Given the office that we're talking about, I think (again, wiseacring non-expert) it might have a fighting chance.
Interesting day. It's the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which seems at first glance to be a devotion of Italian origin centered on some healing miracles, and placed roughly opposite in the calendar to the rosary feast instituted after Lepanto. But there's a much older feast as well, one that I encountered when looking at some of the history in this part of the world -- the apparition of St. Michael the Archangel on the mountaintop. The pilgrimage to the mountaintop on this day was apparently a very important event at points in the medieval calendar. (Though if memory serves, one of the local observances moved it to the day before.)
The angelic cults and feasts are generally of eastern origin, and very broadly speaking, the Marian and rosary devotions are closer to the developed, established hierarchy of the Latin church. And, of course, Leo XIII is closely associated with St. Michael, with the prayer after Mass very popular in certain areas of the American Midwest (and occasionally sneaking into the Mass itself, before the dismissal). He was also a bit wary of Kantianism and Americanism, so I might have had difficult time making light talk, if I had found myself alongside the sede gestoria in the late 19th c.
Beyond doubt, one of the historic events of the age. The American mind will apparently have to sort through a few things in the coming years. The shining city on the hill might yet prove the litmus, one way or another. So those of us with some acquaintance with it have some thinking, reading and writing to do. Even if no one's listening quite yet.
Prejudice, it is true, is mighty, and so is the greed of money; but if the sense of what is just and rightful be not deliberately stifled, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling towards men whom they see to be in earnest as regards their work and who prefer so unmistakably right dealing to mere lucre, and the sacredness of duty to every other consideration.
If you compare the number of scientific studies refining various industrial processes with the number of studies looking to determine how to brew the healthiest cup of coffee (brewed by billions each day), you do get some sense of the nature of the mechanism. Even having built the mechanism of utopia, you do have to decide to realize utopia.
To the city's national theatre for a farce by the 19th c. national playwright. ($6, balcony) I've seen this playwright's work in three cities, and it's very different in each of them. Shades of Hoffmann's short story Donna Anna at points. The standard line is that this playwright isn't political at all, but that received idea was developed during the dictatorship; this is clearly a very interesting allegory of 19th c. constitutionalism, along with an authorial type (the playwright was a newspaperman and politically influential) who gets a bit roughed up in the course of things. It's not unreasonable to think that the 19th c. political fights here had an element of physical menace to them; perhaps there was some back-story there.
The style is much broader here than in the capital or at the university festivals, but the reason that it's broad is that generations of audience memebers have imprinted themselves upon it appreciatively, and perhaps even gratefully. Watch a national playwright's work in his or her home country carefully, and you will have before you a small group of people trying to tell you absolutely everything (and quite possibly succeeding in the attempt).
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