Walked over to the cultural center for the first half or so of a set by a local blues/funk ensemble. Quite good. Was reading Hoffmann's Serapion Brothers. A bit uncanny at points -- to be sitting in a converted synagogue in Bosnia listening to a blues jam while reading a story about a poet and composer, old friends, meeting during the carnage of the Napoleonic wars and talking about art and war.
Local recycling appears to have dropped off a bit, as in the neighboring nations. Usual bins not in evidence, and the central bin location in this half of the city appeared to be filled with garbage when I ran past the other day. Two local incentivizing machines, one dispensing transit tokens, and the other dispensing food for stray dogs (a concept I've seen in a few countries, and always found a bit puzzling -- the prescence of hungry strays at the waste disposal point would seem to disincentivize)--but these generally don't accept the large water bottles that buid up from the daily supply.
Build broad, stong pipes, and--only then--figure out ways to incentivize the inflow.
Oddly, in the market-based country on the east of the peninsula, recycling appears to be going well. (So long as you find out which sector of the city is controlled by the recycling-friendly factions.) Second-to-last time I was there, it took some doing to find a clothes donation bin; I finally found one by a local Orthodox church. On my next visit, they were quite ubiquitous.
One other oddity about the northern city in that county. On my first visit, I rented an apartment in a concrete tower at the top of the hill, from which I could see the flashing lights on the immense steeple of the old medieval church in the distance. On the second visit, I was much closer in, but facing the other direction, so I looked up at the apartment I had rented on the first visit. On the third visit, I returned to the first apartment, and as I looked for the second apartment below, I realized that it was precisely on line with the steeple of the medieval church. Not a function of the street grid, or of main arterries, as the second place was off the main roads. More things in heaven and earth.
Odd day. Went to the coffeehouse in the early afternoon to read, and elected to sit outside amid the upturned chairs (morning storm), louring clouds, and occasional drizzle rather than risk the airless rooms inside. The people here seem to be a bit like the Chicago folks -- apparently comforted by airless warmth. The closeness of it, perhaps. Then the rain started in earnest, so I explored the downtown mall across the street, picking up a few necessary supplies.
Then, a long day filled with completely useless and frustrating matters, well into the night, missing the free concert at the arts center that I had mentally penciled in.
If things were going well, if Denmark didn't have the sulphur smell to it, I'd still try to wake from the thoughtless tread through the days that seems to animate so much of the world. But, with things going the way they are, waking isn't a virtue, but a necessity.
Postprandial: "July Rain" -- "Where will you go when spring floods the earth?"
Important set of UK international chambers seems to have reached a conclusion on the conflict in the Levant. That the sort of thing (unlike almost everything else in the news) that is more significant than it might at first appear to be. Perhaps. Haven't followed those conversations closely.
One tension in Kant is that knowledge can't reach beyond experience, and perception, and therefore experience, is limited to appearance. That which limits our thoughts is itself a bit false. Or at least chimerical. But, like a dull schoolteacher, it still wields the rod.
Things are seldom what they seem / Skim milk masquerades as cream...
Also. If you have gone through a time when there were extraordinary physical difficulties associated with simple existence, these times will recur to your mind in the future. Don't accept the pop-culture explanation for this. This is your life reaching from a place of danger to a place of safety. From the place of safety, remember the place of danger, conscious that it is of the same material life. Build that bridge for recollection in tranquility.
As I've become acquainted with the subtle and not-so-subtle aspects of this (historically unique) part of the world, lines of force have developed. I incline towards a certain place when I encounter a certain difficulty. I might devoutly wish myself into the busy streets of Bucharest, or (as happened in a difficult February in the nation to the south) the mountains of Bulgaria. And this isn't entirely about the empirical aspects of the place. Once you find the three (perhaps four) lines of main force -- from the West, the south, and the East (and perhaps the north), you can sort of feel where you are in that spiritual geography.
Keeping in mind as well, that pining is a classic human fault. No matter where you are, or in what straits you might be, there have been times in your life, or (/and) there will be times in your life when you wish that you were precisely in the place where you are. Everything in a life tends to the essence of that life, as it becomes known in time.
Discouraging day. Discovered a plumbing problem in the rental in the AM, which might have been running sewage through the shower drain for some time now, went out for a Sunday hot chocolate ($2.50), did some reading (Peirce, Wolff biography (couldn't focus), Jaeger's Paieda (could focus)) at the cafe and at some parks around the city, caught a bit of the Mass of the Faithful at the local parish church, but arrived later than planned, as I mis-timed the vespersII mumbling and the crosstown walk. (Have avoided the cathedral since the tourist/massgoer confusion that ended with my walking in despite the fact that the old fellow was grabbing onto me and trying to pull me back.) Then to the theatre for an hourlong piece that the English-language website listed an hour later than the (apparently correct) time on the local version. Perils of data entry.
Eavesdropping on a slightly tape-delayed Carmina Burana from the east now, quite good, especially the soli. Heard an excellent version in Bucharest earlier in the year from the back balcony no-view. (Intentional, as I didn't want to be distracted by the staging.)
Some sabbaths one survives, rather than finds the triumph. Boldly on to the other six days.
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.
Listened to a talk by a world-famous philosopher over dinner. Read his latest book a few months ago. The talk was recorded in 2018. Not only did the talk (on politics and philosophy generally) immediately drift briefly to the Balkans, but the philosopher, sotto voce, as part of it, mentioned a national holiday of a neighboring country. Which is today. More things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
Walked around the souk after a couple hours of reading with a bit of kefir in the cafe. Quite different at night. There's a qualitative difference between these sorts of bazaars/markets and the attempts to replicate them at theme parks, etc. Three hundred years ago, someone (along with several dozen others) thought it might be a good idea to put a booth with some baklava and coffee across from the mosque, and it's still a good idea now. They didn't set out to construct the atmosphere of the place. (Though the modernization does smooth things out a bit.) Much kitsch, of course, but there are still worthwhile things if you know the right sections of the market to look. Very famous section of hammered copper work hidden in a small side alley off the main spot.
Completely modern city, of course, bars and nightlife blocks packed full of folks with their drinks, tables set out on the road wherever the yellow line bounding the driving space allows enough curb. Distinctly Turkish vibe, in some tension with the Moorish style of the brightly lit Austro-Hungarian architecture. Rock music blending with the evening calls to prayer.
Lingered outside a mosque, looking in for a bit -- the fountain, the oudoor prayer spaces. Comparatively, filing in and briefly sticking a fingertip in a bit of water before finding a place in a pew seems downright puritan. Liturgy opens us up for the encounter with these things. God doesn't need liturgy. And sometimes a more careful approach to the building itself can be very useful. In the Midwest, they don't even use the door anymore. Since everyone drives to the church, and the parking lots are usually away from the road, people just head in the side entrance, bypassing the carefully designed entrance to the space.
You do have to be careful when forming ideas under conditions of adversity. Often, it's just kicking at the pricks, attempting to keep the stinger (Canetti) at bay.
I was cafeful not to form dogmatic opinions, but after many years of subsequent work, I think I can trust my understanding of what I saw when, as a method actor from New York, I went to a (top-ranked) Midwestern law school, and understood that there were some peculiarities there. I then transferred to another (top-ranked) school back in New York, and I learned something completely different. (While actually devoting myself to the work, incidentally, taking as many credit hours as I could, getting strong grades, and briefing every case.)
Subsequent work has been instructive. I'm confident that my keeping to the academics then wasn't illusory, and it is what a scholar within the larger academic tradition would have done. And I learned some other things about the culture during that return to the university. Many of the authority figures in the Midwest were like the police officers who would stop me from time to time on spurious bases, mainly because they wanted to keep the bicyclists and pre-dawn runners under control. At least they explicitly used the phrase "I want to teach you a lesson." And there's a long story there, about the land-grant state universities built in the 19th c. by nativist legislatures some distance from the cities, and their relationship to the immigrants drawn to them from the cities. Every institution is but the lengthened shadow of its founders, as Santayana said in his lectures on the university.
As to the culture of the continent writ large, I have come to the understanding that there's a lot of wrongdoing going on inside the prosperity brought by these industrial forms, perhaps largely because the postwar industrial forms are strong enough to function whatever the condition of the culture. But there are relics and useful things within these places. The old basketball gyms at I-----. The immense, usually empty, library stacks at I-----------. Useful things are there, but you won't find them if you think as the people of our time think.
They said, "You have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar."
Caesura.
Notably, Pisistratus was a very successful leader, despite bringing a tyranny that defeated the arisocracy completely. Poets and playwrights (I think) gathered at his court to enunciate the virtues of the reborn state. People generally stayed on the farm and prospered, rather than flooding into the cities in search of work and food. (One historian said that they didn't come to the cities because their pro-Pisistrates garments would be laughed at.)
I would say things are going just as one might have thought they would go, with the rise of a businessman from New Amsterdam. (Who, it should be noted, was relentlessly publicized on network television for many years.) Both the tactics and the alliances are what one might have expected. And the successes have been real, because running public policy with the herrschaft methods of private industry is like having a pro baseball player as a ringer in the company softball game. But the point of the company softball game isn't always about softball. And in the political realm, the success of an executive doesn't make a state. (See every book written by a king for his son, 1300-1650.) Statecraft, which is the game the others at the table are playing, is a more complicated endeavour.
That's the logical view. The best response from the paritsans of the current leader would be that the corporate mindset rewrites the rules of politics, and allows politicians to be more effective. All well and good, and the quintessence of the sort of pragmatism that birthed the phenomenon, but we have been here before. An expansionist corporate state led by a fellow whom they called their "guide." Perhaps because the image of the effectiveness of the leader was the only thing fashioning the state.
Things could still turn out well. But the aristocracy, even if kept from effectively governing things, does need to stake out a position in the collective mind. The idea of the Aeropagus, an institution for which the present leader has no use, must somehow persist.
Ambroise never indicates his role in the crusade: the only detail he gives about himself is the remark 'nos autre qui a pié fumes' ('we who were on foot'; Ambroise, verse 12039).
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66813
This is a rather spiritually dark city. Though very powerful--it hasn't been emptied out. These things are still living questions. But a jedi (shouldn't it be jedus?) has to tread carefully, wake early, and avoid the crowds. Rooms a bit lightless and airless, and some other difficulties there. Slogging through.
On my last visit, it struck me that it was a city under two shadows--the second being the realpolitik alliances with my part of the world, among others. And there is some distant Jeffersonian gleam there of a religiously devout, yet diverse, republic. But at the same time, speaking as a patriot, our realpolitik-inclined apparachiks aren't our best folks. And the local tendency seems to be to polarization and possession rather than founding a diverse republic.
The jedi wakes early, runs, reads, and tries to avoid thinking about the theatre festival in Transylvania that he'd much rather be at this week. Not pining, exactly, but one does plan these paths so that one can tap the wells and replenish the inner strength, and while there's safe quarters and reasonably priced coffee and kefir nearby, this oasis is not inhabited by my people.
What Britten is picking up on here (@ around 1:50) is the reversal of the iamb into the trochee -- strong/weak as opposed to weak/strong. Shakespeare uses it carefully. Sometimes it's called his "magic speech." Usually hexameter as opposed to pentameter. Generally it happens when someone is causing something good to happen.
Midsummer night.
The Eve of St. John is a great day among the mason-lodges of Scotland. What happens with them at Melrose may be considered as a fair example of the whole. 'Immediately after the election of office-bearers for the year ensuing, the brethren walk in procession three times round the Cross, and afterwards dine together, under the presidency of the newly-elected Grand Master. About six in the evening, the members again turn out and form into line two abreast, each bearing a lighted flambeau, and decorated with their peculiar emblems and insignia. Headed by the heraldic banners of the lodge, the procession follows the same route, three times round the Cross, and then proceeds to the Abbey. On these occasions, the crowded streets present a scene of the most animated description. The joyous strains of a well-conducted band, the waving torches, and incessant showers of fire-works, make the scene a carnival. But at this time the venerable Abbey is the chief point of attraction and resort, and as the mystic torch-bearers thread their way through its mouldering aisles, and round its massive pillars, the outlines of its gorgeous ruins become singularly illuminated and brought into bold and striking relief.
The whole extent of the Abbey is with "measured step and slow " gone three times round. But when near the finale, the whole masonic body gather to the chancel, and forming one grand semicircle around it, where the heart of King Robert Bruce lies deposited near the high altar, and the band strikes up the patriotic air, " Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled," the effect produced is overpowering. Midst showers of rockets and the glare of blue lights the scene closes, the whole reminding one of some popular saturnalia held in a monkish town during the middle ages.
Wade's Hist. Melrose, 1861, p. 146.
From time to time, I drop a few thoughts into the timeline as possible breadcrumbs, likely only to surface at Senate confirmation (or impeachment) hearings. There is a way of reading the occasionally spectacular adversities of many years as a means of steering my work, possibly towards government work of a confidential nature. (This is not as outlandish as it might seem; I could a tale unfold.) Even if the dystopan nudge-nightmare were to be the case, though, I think I would be permitted to record a brief minute noting the fact that I haven't ever agreed to do such things, and would likely never agree to do such things. (Having seen what doing such things can do.) Onward.
Interesting Mass at the cathedral. English-language cancelled, so I went to an earlier one. Tried to time it for the Mass of the Faithful, as the readings and homily would have been lost on me. Small, grizzled old man at the door apparently thought I was a gawking tourist and tried to physically grab me as I went in. Kept walking, saying I was there for Mass (in Croatian and Latin). In both the Croatian diaspora and Hungary, I've encountered a fair amount of such things. In this city, the church bells peal loudly, but the church doors are frequently bolted. War-weariness, perhaps.
Interesting free concert of local music scheduled in town tonight, but 9PM on a Sunday. I wonder if there might be some unconscious cultural habit of staging culturally meaningful events at times when the German and Austrian ambassadors would be certain to send their regrets.
American kitsch piece scheduled at the national theatre, Almost certainly going to give it a miss.
I get the sense that things are going just slightly -- but sufficiently -- askew. Perhaps a trick of the mind.
Beautful weather, though.
Oddly there seems to be a push locally for 1950's-style blue laws. The malls and groceries closed on Sunday. (The orthodox coastal bit of the old Republic to the south does the same). It's odd, though. Why would a largely Muslim city absolutely reliant on the tourist industry close up shop on a Sunday? (Though all the tourist things appear to be open -- it's just the malls and proper groceries and most of the retail shops, apparently.) Not that inconvenient -- the western cheap coffee places are still open, so I can get out of the rooms for a bit, and I generally do the grocery shopping on weekdays to avoid the crowds.
Curiouser and curiouser. Gently down the stream -- inshallah.
The lacuna in the Levant is not necessarily good news for peace. Things tend to stop and go off the public radar for a bit when the largest wheels are turning. There was an odd silence between events in Sarajevo and the beginning of hostilities in ww1. I read a Whitehall memoir once that talked about how even foreign office civil servants thought that the lull meant that peace had a chance.
The democracy putting highly mercurial people in charge in order to make a political point would seem to raise a fundamental problem for democratic republics. #notexpert #wiseacring
Ballet. ($5, back balcony.) Quite good. Carmen, which is sort of a local cultural touchstone, and a Bolero. The ballet here is very much of the place. Lyric, modern-oriented. Not the classical lyric of Mariinski or the austere abstract of NYCB, but a half modern/half classical vocabulary, very good at storytelling. Extended critical piece TK, God willin' & the crick don't rise.
Part of my reaching back to 19th c. philosophy and fiction is looking for a grounding in a way of thinking that was current before the modern, the sense of going along with things even if you didn't precisely understand what they were, came over the world. The latter, which came to ascendancy after the second world war, has its antecedents in idealist/pragmatist philosophy, and has much to do with industrialization. Even our unthinkingess is historical in nature, if you think about it.
What makes this essential, rather than capricious, is my particular situation. I've been through these things, and I've been to these places, and I know that much about them is false. It is simply a mistake to go along with these sorts of things even if you don't precisely understand them, and the present order of things seems to rely on some fraction of the population doing just that, and the rest proving manageable.
My slate is not clean. It has valuable inscriptions on it. Not quixotic, but Socratic. Onward.