Perhaps my view on domestic politics is a bit like Ovid's perspective on the city, as he looked out (the other direction) over the Black Sea.  Distance does give some perspective.  Reading the domestic newspapers, it's virtually impossible to determine where the news section ends and the entertainment section begins.  (One of my conservatory mentors, a Czech scenographer, had a standard talking point on the relegation of the arts section to the middle of the entertainment section.)  Events on scripted television series are considered news.  That's simply flabbergasting, and probably why a reality TV star is running the show.

 Considering the American mind, the most dangerous thing is that the entire sequence of thought, political and otherwise, now seems off-kilter.  It begins in this matrix of news and entertainment and lattes, and while it used to reach back into the fabric of existing things, the exercise of thought now moves away from the fabric of things.  Deliberate thought used to have a recuperative effect on the mind and the discourse.  

And this isn't just about political discussions and thinking.  Matters large and small miss the mark, but the frozen hamburgers roll into the small town every week nonetheless.

I think if I were to land back there now, I would be a bit like Sam Beckett, watching them silently, waiting for them to land in reality, to find the way things are, like they used to be able to do, if only for a moment. 

 Quasi-sequi-hebdomal walk down into the town for provisions.  Filled the ruck with groceries from the German chain, and walked back to the the mountains in the cloudy darkness.  Even invisible, save for the scattered point of light from a solar cell or chair-lift track, quite the silent presence.  Can sense them from the direction and character of the wind, almost.

 

I don't understand why salt in the porridge is thought odd.  Salt vastly improves porridge.  Otherwise, it's like bread without salt.  The other extreme, with the other sort of crystals, is just a cookie.

 Up until 3AM on unrewarding, mind-numbing, soul-stilling tasks.  Sufficient is the day, though this might not always seem the case at 3AM.

 Two days to the feast of Issac Jogues, who dared much in the Americas.  Both in New Amsterdam, and with the tribes living the good life around the Great Lakes.

 

 Still in wonky schedule world. Rolling with it.

As it turns out, the cheapest coffee in the store can be genuinely bad.  Roasted within an inch of its life, and only the faint scent of twig underneath.  Was worth a try.  Water would be preferred to it.

There are two kinds of cheap coffee -- a lighter roast of a cheaper bean (often Robusta), or the dregs roasted to indistinguishability.  The latter in this case.  Saw a company name in the UK, but in retrospect, looking to UK import/export for good coffee in the Balkans is like choosing Philadelphia soap based on a trust in the metropolis.  (At the founding, a famously bad soap precisely because of the non-rural fabrication process.) 

In the Balkans generally, the Montenegrin bean is the best, but the Bosnian roast is the finest processing.  Romania makes a decent cup in the Western style, and Hungary has the trade lines, so you can get the really good stuff from the Mideast in the small shops for not that much more.

   

 Essentially lost the day to that schedule change that came out of nowhere and extended into the early morning.  Fardels.

 Must return to being more robust about those sorts of things.  There's a bellum omnium contra omnes on.

A bit like finding a hotel in the mountain away from the front line and forgetting to keep your mind on the larger picture.  Restful, at first, but there are trenchant engagements elsewhere, and one might have to go over the top someday.  

 For all the talk about the southern Balkans (which, strictly speaking are the central Balkans, geographically), the people lead very comfort-filled, if not comfortable, lives without the stream of disposable goods.  Long coffees in idyllic courtyards outside the apartment.  In some countries, second homes in the country are the norm.  I've enjoyed these villages qua capital cities, but hopefully, the intensity hasn't vanished, as the village mentality doesn't always fare well when thrust into the larger fight.  As in a short story of the Greek-Catholic Romanian priest whose statue I found in the neighborhood, and whose works I later tracked down in the research library, in times of war, they simply vanish from the villages at a more or less constant rate.

I do envy all of the housing that they build here (think the opening credits to 'Irony of Fate').  They see it as a social obligation to build sufficient housing for the community.  Massive Brutalist concrete structures in which one could keep immense libraries of paperbacks -- Hegel, Solzhenitsyn, Kant -- from the ubiquitous bookshops.  (Americans, statistically speaking, read less than one book per person per year; the numbers are much different here.  My kind of folks.) 

 Lo these many years ago, I set out to work as an actor.  It was my understanding that this would involve a short time of extraordinary difficulty.  Then, after a decade or so, I studied law, and it was clearly set out that law school would be a short time of extraordinary difficulty.  Then, after a short spell as an utterly briefless non-barrister, I set out to write a research doctorate, and it was clear that this would involve a short time of extraordinary difficulty.

Clearly, life in its essence, or at least my life, which is all I shall ever know of life in its essence, is a short period of extraordinary difficulty.  And I don't know that it's wise to quarrel with either of those particulars too much.

And yet...  From looking about, it would seem that these difficulties would be a bit more productive if they were like the difficulties encountered by others who dared less in these prosperous societies.  The paradox: dare greatly, and you might very well have no place to stand.  Dare less, and you'll be allowed to harmlessly linger.

 Unexpectedly late evening on admin tasks, well past midnight.  Fortunately, the mountains seem indifferent to my rising time.

 A Scalian thought on the present politics:

 

 

 Peculiar moment in an international public law conference that I eavesdropped on last week.  An interesting talk, another international/regional tribunal might be coming into force, and the speaker was setting forth the case for it.  I sent in a question on a certain historical precedent that would seem to have to be made explicit in the tribunal's assertion of authority.  The moderators ended up posing the question, and the speaker gave a very thoughtful and surprisingly categorical response.  The moderator seemed troubled by the answer (or perhaps the question), though, and then launched into a long, involved question about how much historical precedent had to do with legitimacy, and if covenant among the actors of the time might equally provide legitimacy.  Watching this, I understood that he was attempting to dispel the hold of history, and this is a bit troubling.

It's consistent with the Weberian project of modernity, yes, but in the great European debate between historicist legal legitimacy and enlightened legal codes imposed by fiat, recent history offers considerable evidence against the latter.  Watching it, it seemed qualitatively identical to the conscious positioning that I saw going on in law school days among the professors who were aligning behind the debate over Romer, etc.  They wanted something, and thought they could achieve it politically, and they simply didn't want history to be thought about.

In a perfectly constructed world, this would be troubling enough.  But I've encountered more than a few corrupt gatekeepers to these corridors of power, and if simple political will is enough to trump history, then the corrupt mechanism will rule without those on the outside of things being accorded any legitimacy other than whatever present political force they might bring to bear.

---

Incidentally, I studiously avoided using the verb "trump" during law studies, and once mused aloud about doing that during a constitutional law 'cold call.'  It just seemed too easy a word to use, when a more full explicitation was possible.

 Interesting times in the homeland.  I continue to think that the most egregious and jaw-dropping things going on might be contrived to be so in order to distract from the things going on deeper in the mechanism.  When a mechanism shifts polarity, it changes throughout, so I have to assume that changes are going on at the enter of things while these egregious things are going on on the outside.  And the people around this instantiation of the government are very tech-savvy people, connected to some of the companies powering the movement towards digital governance.  (I noticed yesterday that half of the layoffs in one government agency were rolled back due to a "coding error," which would seem to indicate not merely a digitized process, but the fact that commands are arriving from on high, without too many cooks in the kitchen.)

Fundamentally: the present political moment is phenomenologically identical to a movie -- it arrives on entertainment devices, and is as scripted as 'reality television' was.  But the mechanism of the medium isn't anodyne with respect to the audience member.

Tweaked the website design.  (This blogger site is only a sub-site of the larger site, which you can get to by clicking on the link at the top.)  Looks much better now.  Branding shifting to the wordpress url, as it's more durable in a crisis, should a crisis arise.

Mulling not renewing the annual payment to keep it ad-free.  Everyone I know uses ad blockers, and I suspect that for the rest, it will just look like all the other websites. 

 Had a moment recently in which it appeared as if one of the big chutes in the great game of chutes and ladders was soon to open up under my feet.  I learned a lot from my reaction to that.  You have to have equanimity, whatever the danger or the event.  I understood that truth very clearly two or three years ago, but it appears that the equanimity might have slipped a little in the interval.  The uses of adversity are sweet, but it takes a conscious effort to make them part of your life.  Working on it.

From cultural reasons, there is a prevailing sense that a life is not properly lived unless you enter into the melodrama of it, and really feel the event.  As someone with a conservatory master's degree in acting who has played 19th c. melodrama professionally in the city (the play subsequently became popular, but not due to our production), I can vouch for the fact that this intuitive approach to life bears little resemblance to the experience of actual melodrama, and likely comes from a completely different source.   Actual melodrama requires an absolute clarity, not the muddle of fears that make up most of modern experience.

You must maintain equanimity with respect to these chutes and ladders.  It's possible that, in the fullness of time, both the chutes and the ladders will get very strange indeed.   Determination, regardless of the event.

Two quick cultural references.   First, C.P. Snow's dictum that there are two types of people in a crisis, those whose faces go pale, and those whose faces go red with passion, and it's better to have the first type in charge.  Second, the anecdote (perhaps in Chambers Book of Days, perhaps elsewhere) about the first sighting of the Spanish Armada.  News was rushed to the waiting forces, but Raleigh (I think) was engaged in a game of lawn bowling.  The breathless messenger arrived with the news.  Raleigh's (?) response, essentially: "We'll finish this game first."  And they did. 

This "ephemera" subsite continues to be completely invisible to the search engines -- the usual fixes (sitemaps, manual robots.txt, etc.) seem ineffectual.  No indexed pages in Google, all sitemaps inaccessible to the search engines.  Perhaps due to the present focus of the search engines -- blog content generated by hand used to be the gold standard for search, but it wouldn't be much use for the uses that search engines are put to these days.  

I don't think I've ever had a computer that worked exactly as it was supposed to all the time.  We blunder onward through the forest, bread cast on the water, breadcrumbs cast on the darkening path.

You can't trust appearances.  (Even though that's all we have.)  The church used to teach people that, but now that teaching has fallen away.  Philosophy used to teach people that, but that art has now been safely insulated from general experience.  People now have the altogether unjustified sense that appearances can be trusted, perhaps because they've been scientifically verified, perhaps because the reality of television is entirely based on appearances.  It is necessary to take off the VR glasses, as it were, though it's perfectly possible to die with them on.  Enlightenment, though not a function of our own will, similarly isn't an inevitable part of life.

 Remarkable scene on awakening.  A rare flock of birds swooping around the window, and the mist on the distant mountain was entirely rainbow.  

 Perhaps we should be concerned about the fact that the resources of the species seem to be increasingly turned to the construction of extravagant machines for cheating on homework and winning raffles.  There are already tried-and-true ways of accomplishing these things.  

A set of logic gates can be used to process a proposition, i.e., it can tell you what you want to know about a certain proposition by decomposing, processing, and then re-composing the thought.  But what we want to know, phrased in terms of a discursive proposition, is not necessarily always the real answer, or the necessary knowledge.

A bit of AI sitting in the middle of a field would harm no one, of course.  The problem is not the thing itself as a substance or entity.  The danger is in making the existing mechanisms of the world subject to AI control.  And since we don't really have a handle on what the mechanism of the industrialized world is, we fear losing control of it.  It's like fearing the ability to make a Frankenstein without understanding what he is being made out of, and what form he might take.  The Chinese box itself is simply a remarkable automated deterministic abacus; the real difficulty is that people want to use it to control their machines, as they might hitch their wagons to a wild horse, or delegate their roulette bets to a trained monkey.

 If a politician demands to be accorded the honors due to a modern Gandhi. it is possibly because he fears that the spirit of Gandhi will testify against him.

 --

Separately, one interesting thing about Kraznahorkai's work is his collaborations with Bela Tarr.  The film about the fellow who beat the horse in front of Nietzsche is very worthwhile.  K is an actor in it as well, I think.  I think I read that Tarr is now based in Sarajevo.  The diaspora goes in all directions.

There was an interesting below-the-radar moment when Budapest sent a contingent of police, ostensibly for training, to the Bosnian Serb entity at a time when the arrest of the leader was being mooted, and the goal of the exercise turned out to be a possible exfiltration.  These lines of affinity and alliance are centuries old.  There apparently was a moment at the last NATO summit when the US president turned and high-fived the Turkish president after reading northern Europe the riot act.  That moment might linger in a few memories.  And then there's the odd saga of the NY mayor, close to the Porte Formerly Known as Sublime,  who is now cultivating a relationship with Zog's state to the north, which is very closely aligned.

(Apparently, Zog wasn't mad, he was just having to constantly elude the vengeance killers who were seeking him out in the opera houses of Europe.  The vengeance code is still the operative mode of justice in parts of that country, though apparently the church is starting to make inroads on it.)

(End of Joycean political riff.) 

Tuned into a webstream of Nabucco right at Va, Pensiero.  Indeed.  Quomodo in terra aliena... 

Actually, I think if I had a foothold on this side of the world, I might be able to do some real work.  But as a tourist, I'm a reader, and I watch the goings-on at the theatres and the coffeehouses carefully.  Harps slung on the trees for the nonce.  (Which is, objectively speaking, a waste of a perfectly good pint.)

 Quasi-sesqui-hebdomadal walk into town for dry goods and provisions.  Long walk back up to the base of the mountain with a rather heavy ruck.   Exhausted.  But now there's protein to replenish the energies.  

I hear that 'rucking' is now a form of exercise in the city.  As always, way ahead of the curve.  Started with law casebooks and the types of laptops that a startup in the aughts could afford, and went from there.  My German Alpine corps nylon ruck (I've owned at least three or four of these -- the finest inexpensive ruck on the planet) continues to serve me well.

In an age in which religion is not commonly held to be good or necessary, it's probably wise to think for a bit why it has generally been thought to be necessary.  It wasn't entirely an imposition.  (Pace Westphalia.) 

I think you have to do one of two things.  Either try with your heart, soul and mind to see the real truth, past the commonly held notions, or in the event, especially when the event involves others, to deal as honestly as you can.  (This is, of course, a reflection of another duality.)  

If you don't do at least one of those two things, the odds are you're probably going around doing things as a part of something that you wouldn't want to be a part of if you understood what it might be. 

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20251004-dilexi-te.html 

Quick skim--very interesting.  I query the characterization of the Benedictine abbeys as utopian communities expressly raised against the 'logic of accumulation,' though.  Some were not exactly Savonarola/Shaker.  

There is something dangerous as well in the hypostasis of 'the poor,'  perhaps.  Not having a lot of things doesn't always affect who it is that one is.   And pace the 19th c. social scientists, it's not exactly a coherent or contiguous class.

But, that said, very laudable (co-authored!) document.  If you have a lot of things, realizing that some other people don't have a lot of things is a good first step. 

Badinter to the Pantheon.  (Overcoming the augury of the name, perhaps.)  Meanwhile, states-side, the television talking heads continue to encourage the people to identify the desire for justice with the desire to kill the malefactor.  O tempora, o furores...

 

And Kraznahorkai takes the Nobel.  Bien fait.  Mulling completely destroying the careful budgeting, booking a bus to Budapest, ordering a glass or two of unicum, reading an ebook, and taking it from there.  Will likely stay at Hans Castorp's largely empty (but pleasant) mountain villa instead, staring out at the snow-covered peaks, newly visible, as the rain and clouds have let up.  And, of course, the ebooks.  Sufficient is the day.  And the ebook.

 There was a long interview on YT that I was meaning to watch, but never got past the first ten minutes or so.  Apparently, he uses the mental composition method (Edward Albee once said he did the same) for long stretches of text and then records them.    

 

 

Unsubscribing from the pound-per-month Times and Sunday Times.  Paging through the pdf pages of the world news, as usual, and suddenly realized that I was reading a bad tabloid article about a bad movie.  First few moments of Radio 4 news at 6 should suffice. 

 

Phish isn't much for lyrics, but the music is very good.  #Beacon #onward

 Listening to a true-blue Thomistic homily on truth on the occasion of the feast, I'm struck by the tenuous position of metaphysics.  The danger is hypostasis; to glean meaning from the synthesis and relation of imaginary things can lead to a belief that a question has been answered that was never in fact truthfully asked.

The dam broke with pragmatism, but before that, in Kantianism and speculative idealism, before the mind lost faith in its own words for things, and a trust that the relationship between the words and the things was both adequate and possible, some ground was gained.  Read the moderns with a dash of the salt that they're so freely flinging into the readings of the old texts.  Critique the critique, as my university debate coach used to say.   And keep some Kant in your rucksack.

At Oxford, the feast of (proto-doctor) St. Henry Newman.  I well remember reading his Notes on the University in Ireland (later re-titled before the syndics set the linotypes) while working part-time at a hardware superstore on the Upper East Side after earning the law doctorate.  Seek truth in things, not things in the truth.

Not exaggerating -- seriously, I'm just going to sit at a table and read philosophy until they show up with butterfly nets and bailiffs.  A conscious objector.

Perhaps not.  But it's an option. 

 

 The local (regional, peninsular) preference for close, dark, unventilated spaces continues to puzzle.  An unfortunate convergence, perhaps with the airtight buildings required by forced-air climate control.  I've kept the exercise outside as much as possible, only going to the indoor spaces/gyms when I absolutely needed the weights, but...  There has to be a sensibility towards air and light.  Perhaps that's what's missing.

 With the exception of one or two days, constant clouds and rain since my arrival here.  Hans Castorp looks out the window, towards the mountains hidden by cloud and mist.  At any rate, the air is still good, and there look to be some uncloudy days to come.

 Feast of the Prayer-Beads -- on the occasion of Lepanto.

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath ...

And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,

And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47917/lepanto 

 

 Some time ago, my country decided to trust the social norm rather than the thing in itself.  And I think that was a mistake.  There is a solid philosophical grounding for it in pragmatism and the frantic attempts to get a grip on the mind after the waves of speculative idealism passed.  (German transcendentalism was seriously discussed as a threat to the republic in some of the legal scholarship of the late 19th c.)  And trusting in the alethic aspect of the social norm at the cost of the truth of the idea might be at the root of the present political unrest.  (Though both factions in that unrest are very deeply rooted in the state.  The  list of establishment backers of the present administration is long and deep.)

This isn't just an abstract political idea. It's how life is conducted, from the deciding of political questions to deciding which server at the neighborhood fast-casual restaurant gets enough shift hours to pay the rent.  The trust isn't in principles, but in the prevailing social norms.  And these norms are associated with powerful industrial mechanisms of wealth creation, yes, but there is a problem if a society has informally decided to dispense with the notion of truth.  The cash value of the thought, to use William James' expression, is that those who focus on the idea are sidelined, and eventually excluded from the game, whether it be cooking hash browns, studying law, making theatre, or studying at the university.  And since the game is coterminous with social existence, there's no home to go to then.  Importantly, the reason the society does this is that it genuinely believes that the social practice leads to a more truthful answer than the idea.  And they're wrong about that.

Some fraction of the population would suffice to populate the corporate mechanisms of wealth creation that form the visible fabric of social existence in the both the West and the East.  What all involved might be slowly coming to understand, as the political mechanisms begin to fray and fragment, is that the ability to populate these functioning mechanisms leaves unanswered the question of whether the social form shaped by these norms is a just society.  And that questions posed by ideas can linger longer than the ideas themselves.

 

 

Quite the backing Band.

 https://youtu.be/KcAaLk0ngWw?si=CWGsYZ8q0wygDOW2

Postprandial -- Dewey lecture at Chicago Law -- interesting.  The notion is that there are goods that people would pay to categorically eliminate (e.g., weddings, Barbie dolls), i.e., the commodity ultimately has a negative value, and yet the acceptance rate is high, and people might pay as individuals to acquire the good, given that everyone else is doing so.

The interesting thing for me, just based on what I'm thinking about now, is that it seems to confound the notion of the pragmatist 'cash value' (James) of political and social ideas.  In other words, pragmatism says that the real meaning of our shared social speech is that it signals what it is that we're likely to do.  Take weddings, for example.  If socially, we talk about how wonderful they are, but the individual cash value of that talk is actually that the commodity has a negative value in each particular case, that shared social speech either has an inverse relationship to the actual value placed on the event, or the speech (belief) isn't governed by the individual's private valuation of the institution (object).  Perhaps there's an inherent tension between shared speech and values, which are inherently normative (e.g., the village values weddings), and private intentions, which are keyed to actual personal value and intended behavior. (And I don't know that pragmatism easily accounts for the first case.)

This would be a rather good time to have won a lottery.  Of course, one would have had to actually buy a lottery ticket or two.  Lack of foresight.

The number of gambling parlors in the Balkans is sort of unnerving.  Occasionally, you read about a protest against them in a neighborhood.  But in some residential areas, there are literally two or three per block.  Some say it's a good place to just sit and socialize, have a beer, etc., but that doesn't correspond with what I've seen of the indoor furnishings.  My guess is there's a law that says that prohibits open windows and doors, but if you walk around enough, eventually you'll see one or two with a door propped open and the lights on inside.  Basically a wall of televisions and monitors, some cafe tables, and a counter or window.  There appear to be two types of employees -- usually both on the young side: those who are attractive enough that you might want to give them money, and those who are... persuasive enough that you might end up giving them money.  And the folks sit inside, apparently for long stretches.

It's bad form for an exile/expat to moralize about the places he visits, but seeing situations like that does make me want to start a Shakespeare theatre, or strike up a good conversation about Hegel.  Without a vision, the people perish.  In fairness, I'd probably have the same reaction in many small towns in the American Midwest.  (I actually did a Shakespeare tour through the high schools of Appalachia once.  Remarkable experience.  Gospeleers of the mind, and the classics.)

The most you can ever do is keep the work true.  And don't expect folks to place too high a price on it. 

  

 

There is a list of titles on my machine that I'd really like to read.  Perhaps I'll just set all else at naught, set up a chair within reach of the coffee-making devices, and sit there and just read until folks show up with butterfly nets and bailiffs.  Honestly tempting.  Sort of a modern, ground-level stylite.

But perhaps there's a middle ground.

 

 From my window, I can sometimes see the flocks of sheep being driven to their daily pasture.  A few days ago, some kine walked over and lay in the field behind the parking lot.  It's quite idyllic, especially if you position the chair so you can't see the dumpster.  Not that I have anything against civilized trash collection.  In the last city, I walked up to the 12th c. monastery (closed, shops open) along what appeared to be the old road, which had been used for fly-tipping for generations.  Morality isn't a benefit of civilization -- it's a prerequisite.  

Seen from the outside of things, the present civilization (which brings prosperity to a fair percentage, to be fair) does seem more and more like a slow-motion bank robbery.  #cynicism

 

And tomorrow, the first Monday in October.  Will have to tune in to see what shenanigans the current politics are prompting at 1 First St.  Spittoons being flung, newbie (US for 'puisne')  justices fleeing into the curtains.

The back of the Scotus building is very unheimlich.  You have the chambers windows on the upper floors, but they look out onto a sort of suburban, run-of-the-mill Americana street, as opposed to the usual urban landscape.  Very, very uncanny. 

One thing would be certain, though.  I would stay a million miles from the domestic politics.  If I happened upon a figuration of the current conflicts, I would simply take a wide arc around it, as if it were a movie set.  Which wouldn't be far from the truth.

 If I were to head back states-side, I suppose the salto mortale to the mountaintop would be to land in NYC or LA in a position to reinvigorate myself by actually doing theatre, but the cost of living, and the fact that both places are dominated by the same professional networks that I hit a bit of a brick wall with before the JD likely mean that those doors would be closed, at least to start with.  The second scenario would be either a law job or a survival job near a large research library that I had access to, so I could continue the present work on some level.  The third scenario, largely recognizing the difficulties of the first two, would be very humble quarters in the far upper Midwest: Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. near modest libraries to which I had access.  (Minnesota might be good for that, as their public system has interlibrary rights within the state universities.)

To be clear, all of these plans would involve some real difficulty, thanks to certain specific headwinds.  The choice is probably whether the difficulty is to be characterized by the salto mortale to what is likely a rigged game, but still proximate to the art -- or the long, difficult journey to humble winter quarters and a supply of books that, while it might not be optimal, would at least be sufficient.   

On the other hand, something interesting might appear in the interval.  

"Events, dear boy, events..." 

sunday morning -- latin mass on youtube

The church is of the world.  And does the work of the world, and has a comportment to things in the world as an already-understood part of the world.  But in its worldly relations, there is also sacrament, which has one meaning for those in the world, and perhaps another for an unworldly passerby.

Fear not to enter his courts in the slenderness
Of the poor wealth thou wouldst reckon as thine
Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness,
These are the offerings to lay on his shrine.

These, though we bring them in trembling and fearfulness.
He will accept for the name that is dear
Mornings of joy give for evenings of tearfulness,
Trust for our trembling, and hope for our fear

"Beauty of Holiness" (Munsell) 

Pulaski Day

Pulaski day Mass and parade in the city.  I recall, before setting out on the present peregrination, going over to the altar of Częstochowa at St. Pat's, also with the icon of Kolbe to the side.  I envisioned a trip to the ancestral homelands, meditating with the icons in the churches in the afternoon, working and reading in the mornings and evenings.  And a peregrination did, or perhaps has, come to pass.  But circumstances took me much further south, in the contested regions, with peoples very different than my country and my ancestral background.  The circumstances have not always been idyllic, but I'd like to think that I've made as much use of the circumstances as I could.  Instead of the country churches, kefir above the market while reading philosophy on the Kindle.  Instead of the chandeliers of the theatres of northern Europe, rooms in which a different sort of work was going on.  

But destinations, and this is very important, have the character of being a different sort of experience.  You must expect a transposition of things when you arrive.  The truths and places in which you began will seem to be at a distance, and a different vision will be set before you.  Enter upon  the event. 

Some years, especially before the high-security pens arrived, I would find a place opposite the cathedral for the Pulaski parade.  I would watch the faces of the marchers as they arrived at the cathedral, with the prelates arrayed in front and flags waving.  The expressions on their faces were quite remarkable.   

Traffic at the off-season mountain resort picks up considerably on the weekends, apparently.  Gives it much less of the abandoned-inn feeling.  Might be others attempting to use the weight bench and barbells, though.  These things have their trade-offs.