Interesting obit in the Times for the author of Chariots of the Gods. Many hints about his life that seem to suggest that there's more in his story than made it into the telling. Night manager of a Swiss hotel, financial speculation, jewel auctions, came a cropper on loan paperwork. Bit like Le Carre always remarking ruefully that his father was just a small-time con man. Skillful storytellers know how to lead their readers into a cul-de-sac.
Within general industrial prosperity, it's possible to say anything about anyone. Which is to say, if a life is largely anodyne, there is a certain freedom of characterization, especially from those a ways off. When life becomes unusual, e.g., extraordinarily difficult in an objective sense, the constraint on others' characterizations is the exception to this general freedom, and not all may be aware (especially those a ways off) that an exception is governing the usual stream of idle calumnies.
Despite the slightly chilly evening, the morning was going strong until I sat down to work -- something about the loud, circulating tourists photographing things, almost like a vampire movie, took the strength out of me as they drew near. Managed to finish the mediation, but a good hour or so lost to weakness.
This pining for the places of the last few years isn't an idle pining, or a wish to be in strange places. The winter here is rather difficult, and the escape to less expensive places with bookable housing might prove mission-critical. In addition to a genuine desire to be there -- the coffeehouses, theatre, music, churches, libraries, etc. Something might need to happen.
In sum, given the general situation, much more the angel in the night to Joseph than the idle desire of reading the travel section. Have taken the question to my usual travel agent at the side altar of Czestochowa. Unhemlich aspect: the image of the icon is partially obscured by a large "Exit Only" directional sign set in front of the altar by the cathedral staff.
Mentally wandering faraway Knej Mihela Alexander avenue in Belgrade, neighborhood of Vuk's Monument, as I plow through the reading for a future project likely to be accomplished when I'm far from a research library, hopefully because I'm abroad, rather than in internal exile. Though exile in the hills would be preferable to some outcomes that are increasingly imaginable.
Two-month mark.
When the plague hit in 2019, I decamped to my undergrad in the hills (small mountains) of Virginia. I was regarded with some suspicion, as all of the rentals there are corporate developments aimed at the students, with occasional opportunities for working staff. (Faculty generally rent houses.) But I bought a bike, and there was a Walmart nearby. Standard Wittgenstein setup of the room: camp bed, table. The libraries aren't strong at all, even for a public undergraduate university, but the morning runs over the hills, past the cows and the trucks, were invigorating.
But as long as I'm in the fishbowl gulag with access to the research collections, I need to Hoover up as much of this text as humanly possible.
----
There's some anxiety about the current executive shifting his focus to this city, and that's partially justified, as this is really the only city where the game means much to him, but what it misses is that what's going on in the other cities is basically New Amsterdam-type enforcement. Precisely this mindset is governing. (I'm apolitical, as always.)
There is perhaps a logic to their targets: Harvard not Yale -- red, not blue (Columbia perhaps merely purged its insufficiently blue elements); DC, Chicago, Minnesota and LA, not Boston or NYC.
New Amsterdam corporatism running amok under the neocons -- but the international actions might prove problematic beyond the potentially useful internal dynamic of Machiavel vs. the Republic. In matters between nations, it takes some time to realize that while there is no right and wrong, there is a very real chance of making a mistake.
Temperate evening, and a grey, stale morning in the fishbowl gulag. He tempers the wind to the newly shorn lambs. So, you know, keep close to the lambs. Seek ye the penine microclimate.
There are peculiar variations in NYC neighborhoods vis a vis the heat. Or not precisely the heat, perhaps the felt temperature.
Gently down the stream, et seq.
--
When the deeper adversities began, some years ago, it occurred to me that it might be some sort of a test, perhaps a secret game played on everyone who gets an A+ in a first-tier law school class, or has a certain level conservatory degree, but after many years, the balance of probabilities is weighing much closer to giving the large Polack his due. Perhaps a bit of cynicism there.
When I was blogging in Skopje, I actually floated a sort of Last Starfighter hypothesis and weighed the ethics, coming to the conclusion that it would be sufficiently immoral for an advanced civilization to destroy someone's life (in order to, as in the film, prepare some sort of super-warrior for the higher world) that the subject should refuse to participate. At which point, I had the very uncanny sense of a presence vanishing.
So I should be rather clear -- all of this grousing and speculation refers to the worldly calculus and the actions of worldly actors (however hidden from public view).
Deep Heaven and I are having another conversation entirely.
As dramatic as the recent Balkan crash-out was, it was hardly the most potent whiplash I've had in terms of fortunes. There was, for example, the time in grad school when I went right from a leading role in a staged reading at the most prominent theatre in L.A. to stage-managing the department's production of Three Sisters in Cleveland in January.
The morning meditations are becoming very difficult to write, almost like fighting through a wall of lead. Not infrequently losing consciousness for a few minutes beforehand, and then a constant heaviness throughout body and mind. Likely simply the body adjusting to the library workspace after the workout and the difficulties of the evening.
Perhaps I need a stronger form of caffeine. I used to (pace Brigham Young) have some German chocolate developed during the war in the mornings and late nights, but that was in the days of disposable income.
Discount biscuit shop apparently going out of business. Annoyingly, they've apparently stopped the bakery deliveries a few days ahead, so instead of the flour/water fresh pita accorded any decent refugee, I had to make do with a packet of Turkish tea biscuits at about the same weight (though drier), but based on the feelings afterwards, composed of distinctly inferior flour.
Flour is the most underrated ingredient in the cheap food sector -- the difference between a pizza with good flour and one with cheap flour is much wider than similar variations in any other ingredient, but the consumers (and therefore proprietors) rarely think of that.
The best flour on the pilgrimage was probably the Transylvania German hypermarket store brand. Although the Albanian was surprisingly good for the price. That was, of course, in the rare apartments with an oven that had been cleaned in the last few years. Mostly, I was limited to stovetop feasting.
Which sufficed. At Pirin, a saute pan filled with rice, the local cheap feta-like cheese, and vegetables was quite pleasant.
Missing as well the morning runs in Sarajevo and Belgrade. Though not when the trash dump was on fire in the adjoining entity in the former, and the digs in the latter were a bit rough last time around. (Though they frequently come to mind, much more so than the normal digs of a few month before.)
But the morning run to the yellow fortress (never did make the hill on one effort), or the run back across Brankov's most with the patriarchal cathedral on the left, about half the distance to the Danube.
Perhaps I should write about these places again, but from the point of view of memory's desire. The fellow in Siberia remembering nights in the cheap seats at the Mariinski.
This morning, the spirit spoke only two words: Pirin and Bucaresti.
While pining for things and places is conceptually disfavored, when it is the central thing about one's existence, it can serve as a marker for that existence.
In the meantime (hear the word) the world plods on, locked into its fatal dance of systematic repetition, imitation, and desire. Homo, fuge!
Notes for something Kafkaish, cont'd: By Act III, the protagonist has realized that his family is almost entirely composed of completely psychotic folks, due to their connection with a shadowy intelligence-gathering service of the local Margrave, and his three systematic attempts at the professions in the village have each ended in the context of very peculiar events and very corrupt people, effectively exiling him from the municipality.
Perhaps the genesis of Hoffmann's S. Serapion. Like bread, the social mind doesn't come to life until broken, and it will not break as long as the possibility of normal relation to the world persists.
Unrelatedly: Although this isn't in any of the variora, I'm convinced that Hamlet's "north by northwest" indicates the upstage, i.e., the platform where the royal couple would stand, and south stands for the groundlings in front of him. A sort of universal convention of the stage, for some reason, and perhaps also described that way 400 years ago. And always look for the groundlings-good-cheer lines. There's more of them in there than one might think. As difficult as life might be in the plot, one can always turn to the invisible audience for a bit of good cheer.
Also: hawk/handsaw -- also not in the variora, but these are very similar sounds. (Which might perhaps have embarrassed a nobleman visiting a theatre/worksite when he searched the sky.)
The most distressing thing about the bad people in my country is that even the worst of them are convinced that "it is right to be so." This has to do with the Puritan roots of the country, I think. (Cf. Santayana's apercu in Lat Puritan about the Puritan who was so Puritan, he couldn't be a Puritan.)
So the "we're all in this together" instant rapport of people who lend their moral force on the strength of an idle rumor or two, the placeholders, the Machiavels of middle management (who make up most of the professsariat), all of these social forms are percolating without any sense of duty to good itself, and occasionally explicitly thinking it a historical adversary.
The machine is being run by a small portion of the population, not on a meritocratic basis, but on a best-fit-for-the-role system of ad hoc judgment. The forms of industry ensure prosperity for a solid preponderance, a much higher percentage than in the past, but if you take the platitudes and nostrums of the society to be even an indication of the actual goals of the society, you won't do well. The success of the machine is in what it makes; the success of the society is in how well it preserves and develops the humanity of each person within it.
Hilary Term.
Phos hilaron....
Once you realize that it would be impossible to hold the events in your life in your mind at the same time as the generally held notions of the way things are (material contradiction in essence -- every change is negation, but I could easily hold a notion of the world with one less snowflake in my mind), there's a choice to be made. And if you're one of the few to choose rightly (not correctly), it's important to further realize that it's a fool's errand to be the world's notion of the sort of person who thinks the world to be false. Clear category error, as they say. When you exit the matrix, do so without residue.
Worthless day. For some reason, the books didn't arrive from the stacks, so I had only the background reading. Thick mental fog most of the day, still trying to figure out the reason. And for some reason, the folks sitting nearby were, more than once, of the non-non-creepy ilk.
Was going to stay and work at the branch library across the street, but when the mind is in an unexplained fog, best to switch coordinates. The whole reason I'm here is that I know these places rather well after 20 years. If the plane goes down, try to land in the right briar patch.
Extraordinary mind fog this AM, returning in the afternoon, after I burned off the morning banks with the reading.
Possibly physical/contagion, coming off of a few days of rare congestion and fatigue; possibly the weather, as the winter cold and winds returned last night.
It's a bit like a painter fighting off blindness -- bold, strong strokes of the mind might help to clear the fog, but they don't always serve the work itself, or the day.
Simply as an accident of how things transpired (sudden drop-off in remote work, quick exit from the Balkans, then to ground in a city where I'd certainly rather not be, but one with which I'm very familiar after a couple of decades), I find myself constantly not just trying to get back over there, but mentally still there, in a way. I will read a chapter or two of philosophy, and then it's as if I'm standing on a street in Belgrade or Skopje. As if normal, productive life ended there.
The mornings, when I first sit down to work after the workout, Mass, breakfast and lectio, are difficult. As if I'm a barge on a river, weaving through immense foggy walls of sleep, Occasionally, I'll look up and see a repeated keystroke filling the screen, and realize that Lethe had had me for a bit. (I'm not sure how much being surrounded by other has to do with this difficulty.)
There are, of course gigs similar to the one that funded the pilgrimage, but this work is not exactly a straightforward meritocracy. For that matter, I have the qualifications in law and theatre after years of work, and almost a research doctorate, but... the same caveat applies.
So I have the projects that I'm working on, using the world-class library while I have it, and I keep looking for the foothold that help me find an 'internal exile' place with basic first-world provisions, but I'm increasingly thinking that I should be aiming abroad. Given both my specific situation and the larger picture, the Republic might prove uncongenial. The work is the point.
Eavesdropping at the NY Philharmonic via the lobby Jumbotron again.
Beginning with the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto. (Not the Monty Python version.) The soloist attempting to outshine in the manner of the composer, starched collar and rumpled linen, staring fixedly at the keys, perhaps some of the scents of the incense of Valaam monastery still in his coat.
A concerto is fundamentally dualistic -- in Mozart, it is a contest of virtuosity, in Beethoven, a political argument between the one and the many. But Tchaikovsky surrounds his soloist with an orchestra already versed in the Romantic, marinated in years of the repertory of the Bolshoi or the Mariinski, even the third chair second violin is accorded deference in the restaurants.
When the soloist wanders off on a fugue or a fantasy, the orchestra waits, confident in its massed strength. The wanderer will return from his woodpath. Which, of course, only prompts the wanderer further and further up the lonely mountain trail.
Unlike the battle for virtuosity in Mozart, or the battle of Napoleonic brothers in Beethoven, the orchestra, in the hands of the playful one, is playful. Themes bounced back and forth, a quick crescendo in the manner of a lion's playful roar. We are safe inside the massed tones of the Romantic -- this is the enchanted snow-globe where the notes hover and drift above and between them. Inside this safety, the soloist is alternately brash and playfully cloying. The venerable orchestra of the old Russian theatre is a force he has known since childhood, an old alliance as familiar as his brandy-scented uncles at the candle-lit table, a clean place of warmth and camphor-scented dry air from the heating, against the slush and mud of the northern winter outside. He knows this faerie band of old, and, with the confidence of Meister Eckhart playing his puppet theatre, he leads them on.
And then, the massed forces of the orchestra fall silent, and the piano, slowly at first, and then with a quickening boldness, begins to fill the air of the filled theatre with sound. That same theatre of his childhood is now his own. He returns the gift.
Afterwards, an encore, irrepressible, he launches into a furious playing of Liszt, the Campanella. The low tones sounded with a soft touch, but the bright ring of the topmost ostinato ringing out like an alarm. A string breaks on the sounding board, and there is nervous laughter in the crowd. Like the moment in The Cherry Orchard when the unseen string snaps, there is at first a careless abandon, almost a liberation, the 19th c. equivalent of smashing the guitar on the stage so that it will never play a lesser show, but then a sort of rueful, almost apologetic grin as he fingers the steel thread. He has broken his toy again. But they will buy him another one.
After the interval, Shostakovich contra Stalin. The present politics offering perhaps a clear analogy, a populist leader with revanchist taste in the arts, high honors being doled out to the Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and country music stars. Against this, a cosmopolitanism, an obscurantism. It might win the hall, but one will have to go back to the apartment afterward, and the Bakelite telephone on the lace tablecloth on the small table by the door may ring.
The first theme of the first movement commanding, insistent, repeated tones of warlike urgency. But then the strings bring in a second theme, a wandering, indecisive random walk, like someone wandering through the snowy streets in confusion. The menace of the beginning returns, somehow less glorious now that we have a sense of a wandering soul trapped inside that world.
Brecht: "Will there be music inside the dark times? Yes, there will be music about the dark times."
And then the cacophanous blurring of the glorious noises, and a lone bassoon returns to the theme of the wandering soul. It is the anti-concerto -- the many are not there to hear the one, the one hopes to survive the terrors of the many. Another small cacophony, and an even lower reed takes up the cause of the wandering one, perhaps wandering deeper into the shadow. In his box, the President sighs in some frustration, waiting for the heroic theme from the horns, or perhaps a falling chandelier. The wandering theme now in the bass tuba, approaching nadir. A bright theme emerges in woodwinds, perhaps the hangers-on of the battle shouting playfully in the streets. The massed strings quietly echoing in pizzicato, like hundreds listening from behind quivering curtains in the city. And then the nervous, frantic theme from the violins, souls ennervated almost to the madness which we begin to hear in the echoes of the cellos and basses. Surreptitiously, the flutists slip earplugs in against the wall of sound that now rises from the back of the ensemble, the crashing mechanical shadow of the infantry arrived. Then, oddly, a precise and measured sonata-form of well-phrased music, but played with trepidation and fear. Life appearing to continue. Despite it all. The horns sound the fatal theme without melody, simply the repeated terrifying tones, until like Frankenstein's monster, they begin to fashion a primitive melody with the same force.
As if in answer to the Volgon melodies of the threatening horns, the concertmaster intones a low lament, no longer the breathing of the wanderer that we heard in the reeds, but the song of that which is within him. And then his breaths, and his journey continue, walking through the snowy city, searching, as high above, the composer takes his turn at the observation post, binoculars in hand,
The various sounds of the city emerge, in obscure, cosmopolitan fashion. The wanderer is multiplied into many, then dozens, then hundreds. Sirens sound, both near and far off. The traffic of the city returns, hard to discern from the rumbling of the tanks from the battle before. The well-formed sonata retuns, played with the same uncertain and nervous gait. The President, in his box, shoots a querulous look at a terrified aide. On the old stage, the orchestra plays out the theme like a madman convinced of the genius of his interpretation. The horns return with a theme that a dark soul might think heroic. And then, briefly, the breath of the lone wanderer reflected in the reeds.
Only the briefest hesitation, and then the next movement begins with the wanderer's breathing made melodic, merged with the song within him that we heard the concertmaster earlier intone. The battle-worn soul has found a small charm against the night. The heroic horns, now emerging fully formed from the brow of Minerva, seem to drown out all other song. But the strings, the many, not the crowd, but the populace, begin to sound, and then take up the tempo suggested by the wanderer's song. The dictator, restless in his box, begins to sense that there won't be enough time for things to turn back to victorious themes of past greatness and the praise of famous men. Stubbornly, like a broken metronome pushing forward through time, the strings persist, not with the charm of the single soul, but the faceless force of the crowd, then in open conflict with the horns, evocative of the condemnation of till Eulenspiegel or perhaps the incident at Kent State. The people advance, but not in the manner of being led by heroes and presidents, but like rising water, persistently filling the streets despite the tyrant's scourges. With encouraging whistles to each other in the flutes, the strings again asssy their well-formed melody with increased confidence. Every continuation without the heroic crash of the infantry intruding is a day won, a quiet victory of the spirit, a Sarajevo soul having survived the snipers and made it home to dinner.
It is a paean to the people, but not one the leaders of state socialism could ever have embraced. The people are an entity that existed before the journey to communism began, and they will survive the time, whatever the nature of the time. The one that is composed of all can never perish. The horns insistently return, perhaps from the west, from German lands. Orderly European civilization filing down the long rows at Bayreuth. Against it, in the motherland of the east, the meandering melodies of the people, nothing glorious, simply a random walk in the fading light. But human.
Line from a soviet movie, in response to the exaggerated German manners (of a double agent) at the table: "We Russians, we might live in sh-t, but we have the truth." And now the crescendo, which partakes mainly of the questionable virtues of the horns, a smile starting to stretch from the corner of the dictator's mouth, to the relief of his aides in the box. But then it peters out into an insistent darkness almost without melody.
Manet nobiscum, Domine quoniam advesperacit.
After two weeks of sloughing through 19th c. law treatises, checking variations between editions, I returned the last of them yesterday evening, and walked into the library this morning, and without even turning on the computer, opened Brandom's Tales of the Mighty Dead (pt. 1), and sat there, almost without moving, for a few hours, as my mind slowly came back to life.
If I had my druthers, I'd be making theatre; second druthers would be reading and writing philosophy. The other work and scholarship is simply an attempt to play the game that I seem not to have drafted to play, despite the expensive preparations. The gates of the law, Kafka called them.
That said, I can still write, and I think I have an interesting angle on this latest legal history project, which will undoubtedly taking up disk space on the usual self-publishing outlet at some point in the future.
The Others: "But you see, the proof of our game is that no one will read it."
To which I reply: "Quod scripsit, scripsit. Enjoy your game."
---
Listening to the Christmas Eve chant from Valaam while reading Enlightenment philosophy is enlightening. It's good to read books that assume that the mind is wide open to God, and also good to be reminded that the water is still very much, as they say, wide.
There is much in this pining for places where I recently had sufficient means and sustenance to read, work and think. (Though the trireme survival freelance work that flew in through the transom was exhausting.) After many years of increasingly difficult circumstances, fighting many questionable people, the ability to secure a basic existence is beginning to show signs of becoming an existential question.
Travel bath brush starting to look a bit ragged. Might have to go back to the hardware chain in Serbia/Montenegro for a replacement.
And if you think I wouldn't go halfway around the planet for a decent bath brush, you might be underestimating both me and the utility of a a really decent bath brush. I actually prefer the German ones, but the wood doesn't travel well. This is a detachable unit with a thin metal rod handle. Perhaps $6.
Pining for Zemun, today actually. Had a very decent place for writing there for about a fortnight, sublet from a local jazz/funk musician. (Missed the gig he invited me to, as I was writing.) Old Austro-Hungarian architecture, Catholic churches and monasteries mixed with the Orthodox.
Why I am pining for North Macedonia
Of the places that I visited and lived in during those two years or so, Skopje wasn't the most pleasant. My ATM card and prepaid card didn't work, so I had to Western Union money to myself. The housing was inexpensive, but predictably noisy, as across the street from a large elementary school and playground. I caught the vibe of the city rather quickly -- a monumentalism that made interesting things to look at, but not really places to dwell or wander. There was an interesting new music concert at the new philharmonic hall one night with a pan-Yugoslavian group, and a few English-language bookstores (but, peculiarly, missing translations from the local language), and everyone was very friendly, but the main advantage of the place was a small study with a big desk that I moved to underneath a large window, a place to read, and think, and write. The housing of the city is almost entirely relatively new, rebuilt after the earthquake in the 1960s (some interesting photos in the museums). Large concrete colonies, very similar to the housing in coastal Montenegro, with substantial retail and restaurants on the ground floor of most buildings, in addition to the half-dozen or so local malls. Across the river, in the historical Muslim quarter, things were very different, but aside from some nighttime peregrinations across the bridges, I lived in the new city. The cathedral is new, and nice -- a very puzzling structure has been raised on the old cathedral site to honor the local saint of recent times.
For none of these things am I pining, though. There is something else. On a few weekday nights, I heard music coming from what was clearly an outdoor performance nearby. Gandalf rose from his desk and wandered down into the village. The concert setup was the universal box stage, lights and sound, apparently now rentable in any city anywhere in the world. But the square was filled with the people who lived in the concrete semi-brutalist housing above, all the businesses open and thriving, including the bookstore with coffee, outside of which I set up with an Americano. Apparently, not so much a unique event, but the festival customary to some summer evenings. (Being there in summer was important -- I have been in Balkan cities with similar pollution issues from temperature inversion, and it can be a trial.)
I was beguiled.
The standard of living in the Balkans is thuoght to be low, because there's not much money involved, but the first sign that I caught that the economic analysis might not capture the true view was noticing that the cities in Romania cleared out on weekends and holidays, when everyone went to their second homes. It is possible to live well on less money than cycles through households in the West, when living well involves a solid supply of basic things, and not extravagant expenses for the latest devices. (For some reason, October in rural Bulgaria comes to mind, as the streets and paths near the houses begin to fill with cords of chopped firewood for the winter.
The point of living well is to allow people to be human, and engage in the work of human beings, and have the modest and gentle leisure that even an economically challenged society can furnish. Understandably, the apartments above in the semi-brutalist aren't filled with philosophy, given that that sort of thing was forced on them in the context of the last empire, with agitprop priced at cost. But mine would be.
The difficulty with my own culture reaches deeper than the economically-intensive notions of the good life. After the industrialization subsequent to the second world war, the sense of civilizational context in the context of daily experience has almost completely dropped away. The trucks of frozen hamburgers roll in weekly, and people take their sense of reality from their televisions. As a result, and this is somewhat difficult to express, when I go to a coffeehouse and have a coffee, I have very little sense of the civilizational context that this event is happening within. It is simply a corporation raised to furnish coffee at a certain price, as it might anywhere in the world there was money to be made, and we make the transaction in the manner of old Scottish shopkeepers, and I sit down and drink my coffee.
(I actually tended to patronize Western coffeehouses when I was in the Balkans, but that was primarily because I much prefer counter service to table service when dealing with unknown folks in different cultures.)
Even so, many people in my country wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about here -- coffee is coffee, and one is friendly to the local business-folks, get the coffee, and sits down and enjoys it. But the festival evening with some consciousness of the civilizational context is very different. In the corporate form, coffee is served, no matter who you are, and who the business is. A neighborhood business in a small country, though, makes the coffee as an exercise in nation-creation. They would be shocked (if not surprised) to find bad things going on in their own country, and this would have to do with the coffeehouse in the evenings. On the contrary, in the corporate context, unconscionable things could be going on on the street outside while the barista was pouring the coffee, and no one would bat an eye.
Industrial prosperity for significantly more than a preponderance of the people can be achieved by using only a percentage of the population, and treating a small subset very badly. The danger is that these industrial structures (artistic, academic, professional) can be taken over by syndicates -- this isn't as categorically evil as it might sound -- a syndicate, in the 19th century, was the customary means of dealing with the outside world under the corporate seal -- some university press workers are still referred to as "syndics". But when these factions govern the effective mechanisms of industry as factions, they think it a duty to govern without a sense of justice, or at least not an iota of it beyond the requirements of the positive law. As a result, extraordinary injustices can result when people don't go along with some of the questionable practices. I was a professional stage actor for over a decade with a strong conservatory degree, and then every opportunity vanished for a few years; I earned a top-tier law doctorate while taking as many doctrinal courses as possible, and then passed two bar exams unassisted, and found no work; I wrote a 300 page research doctorate dissertation while grading up to 4,000 papers per year and the requested defense wasn't scheduled. I had worked as a professional in the field in NYC for a decade and had the law degree, but there were no opportunities to collaborate or teach at the large state university other than the remote electronic grading.
I'd like to think that all of these things would be thought deeply troubling in a coffeehouse with a civilizational context. In the corporate model, I merely have the $3.76 required for a small cup of coffee from time to time. And this would be bad enough, if the story ended in a humble concrete apartment lined with paperback books of philosophy. But the syndicates of my country play rougher games than that. One is simply put to the street, excluded from the common life.
So I pine for these concrete brutalist apartments that would afford the possibility of reading, thought, and work. The streets are cold in the northern cities, and the corporatist culture continues to dominate the minds of the people through television and music.
Worth remembering -- a certain president of somewhere or other, no names, no pack-drills, in his first term, gave a speech to the staff of the CIA (carried on C-Span). Largely improvised, as most of his talks were. Talking about recent wars in the Gulf, he repeated over and over "you know, I would have kept the oil."
There's a profound, almost completely undescribed shift going on in American governance towards the corporatist model (I use the term as an analogue to "publicist"), which has profound implications for unwritten rules (e.g., jus cogens, internationally speaking) everywhere.
---
Interesting year-end report from the Chief Justice of the US. The Declaration of Independence, and Common Sense. We might not yet have the end of this particular run of events in view.
As for me, "I have taken a seat in the grandstand of philosophical self-detachment to fall asleep watching the cannibals do their death-dance." (The Iceman Cometh)
Thinking of stopping in a the Bucharest Opera House for a $4 seat in the back of the balcony this evening, closing my eyes, and listening to the dark, Dvorak timbres of the strings in the overture. Highly unlikely, of course, as I'm on the other side of the planet at the moment, but the thought does bring some cheer.
Normally, I would, of course be pining for Balkan and Transylvanian cities of recent trips, but I'm sufficiently cognizant of the mind-independent world to note that they had very little use for me there. (The trireme nomad work flew in through the transom from another country entirely.) In the main, I just observed the work that they made, and set down some remarkably inconsequential writings on the subject. Quite enjoyable, though. And miles better than the abyss of present days.
"Don't pine. It kills."
Most basically, I was able to exist -- to think, to read, and (despite all) to write a bit. The present existence (revealing word: one has existence only when not doing anything) almost seems designed to make thought and writing impossible. Making the most of the specific advantages of the situation, a bit like Pac-man getting the "research library" "cheap gym" "cheap non-meat protein" dots or cherries, despite the fact that, big picture, the ghosts are clearly winning the board.
If you send an army into a country, capture the head of state, and claim that you will govern the country, you have stated the claim that you have conquered that country.
But this isn't apparent to the corporatist viewpoint -- an utterly new (pace the East India Company, Russia Company, etc..) form of statecraft, with its own vocabulary and therefore its own logic. The difficulty is, and it's really one of the first things you learn when dealing with other countries, that the people of different countries speak different languages.
Interesting that the French were so quick with the demarche (television news version). The ancient first throne of Europe resurgent? #notexpert
At some point, I will write the history of these days. I don't discuss the specifics of circumstances in these ephemeral jots for many reasons, including lack of context, and discretion as to matters of personal safety. But when I do write it, I must remember that this time wasn't maudlin, or fraught, or emotional. There were simply a few things that had to be gotten through, and also a few things that might be useful if they were done at the time. The difficulty was only in the difficulty of doing specific things, and didn't really have a metaphysical cast to it. Part of this might be the discipline in my approach -- teetotal, of course, never asking for a handout or doing things a 19th c. member of parliament in similar straights wouldn't do. (For example, if there's a night without a place to be gotten through, one sits up straight on a parkbench rather than stretching out on the sidewalk. Decorum has a modal aspect.)
Today:a bit unsteady, likely ultimately due to the physical realities, so some background reading for the project, and trying to drum up a bit more trireme business through the transom.
At one point, one of the biographies of Peirce said something along the lines of 'being completely clueless about the social forces aligned against him in the academy, he invested some time in seeking an academic position.' Wry smile. But the shift of the last six months or so is the realization that I will have to be prepared to make the work outside the walls, extra muros. Navalny must have realized that he would need to put everything in his journals, as his autobiography, written after his fortunes reversed and he held office for some years, might prove... speculative.
Solzhenitsyn's First Circle (the TV version, which he narrates, is also worthwhile) was just outside the capital, as I recall. Surrounded by comfort and idleness, a life, or a small number of lives, of rather extraordinary difficulty. Find the strangeness in that, or you'll be wallowing in the maudlin.
Anything done in this culture must be against the grain. There is immense industrial prosperity, with which the people presently in charge have absolutely nothing to do -- a legacy of the post-WW2 industrial structures. At present, the game is that one goes along with the crooked game as a crooked game, or one dies in the street. (Unless cushioned by sufficient wealth to avoid dealing with these sorts of encounters.)
At the second setback, the peculiar goings-on at the JD, I was surprised that my pointing out the specific problems was taken as a general criticism of the system, a sort of d --- all, make all things new, etc. In retrospect, I should probably have thought closely about that reaction. It did, in a manner, indicate the nature of things.
In the widest possible view: making the citizenry accountable for the direction of the civilization & culture puts the minds and consciences of the citizenry in play, in a way fundamentally different than in previous, more primitive (or perhaps primordial) systems.
Importantly, this deliberate corruption isn't a delict to those who are doing it -- they generally seem to think that we should evolve past such compunctions, and I'm more than a bit concerned that we might.
On a completely separate note, it appears that 20 F with a wind chill in the single digits is apparently the low bound for restful sleep in the open. A moveable marker -- when things had just begun to go bad, I couldn't sleep a wink without 40F and sunlight.
The Metrocard is no longer. It had just launched when I moved to the city to make theatre after the conservatory master's degree. I actually did a short presentation on the fare structure of the new card in our "business of the business" class in the ground floor studio theatre in the old stone academic building (originally, the YMCA house) in Cleveland. All the same, the icon of the city that I kept on the air conditioner in the work room in my apartment to get through the Cleveland winter was a pair of the traditional tokens, which still worked at the time.
Then, when I moved to the city, I would check my answering service daily from a street payphone.
The present-day conservatory student would likely find a few things about that sentence puzzling.
A quiet new year's -- which is generally my preference. Perhaps my favorite memory if the eve is listening to the radio in my UWS apartment with some aquavit and the window open to listen for the distant explosions. Or in the apartment overlooking Cluj, Romania, watching the immense display over the city severally launched from each neighborhood or backyard, with the immense Hungarian church lit at the base of the hill.
Was going to walk through the park, but there was fencing, and closed off areas. And the traditionally free concert at the immense Episcopal cathedral north of the park is apparently no longer free. So I bought a pocketful of discounted Christmas chocs, and walked down along the river and out onto the piers. Passed 42nd Street just at midnight, and saw the fireworks in the distance "(it's a surprisingly wide island). Interestingly, just after midnight, it appears there's a custom for all manner of large boats, but especially harbor cruise boats, to circle the island, against the clock. Counted at least a dozen from the piers in Chelsea, before the parade stopped in front of the large sports complex so a few boats could blast out the "macarena." Then down into the WV, with the partying NYU kids and FiDi workers -- their cast of mind is utterly alien to me. It's bit like a party in the hills at my undergrad, making my way through all of the stoned folks with a humble Milwaukees Best in my hand. Children of the new world. Lo, the poor Indian.
The present equivalent of Nietzsche's horse might be watching some young Muslim guy in a Santa getup pedaling a cab brightly lit for Instagram and blasting a Christmas carol, madly circling the lane at the stoplight, so the customer doesn't stop the $10/minute meter, as I watch from the marihuana-scented curb.
The deal seems to be that so long as industrial prosperity makes it possible to pretend that things are as they appear to be, it's a fatal solecism to think or speak otherwise. This is the vibe of both the WV crowd and the greedy midtown tourists.
As for me, I will continue to understand how things are, and how they hang together. Even if it means waking up on a parkbench in a blizzard from time to time. The way is steep, but the mountain is real. (Pining a bit for the Bulgarian mountain stay of a month or so ago.)
Given under my hand, on the turning of the year of our Lord 2026, and of the Republic, the 250th.
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