A peculiar 24 hours, weather-wise.  Strong cold winds from the south suddenly appeared yesterday afternoon.  Storms in the air, battles perhaps, in the sense of meaningful things contending.  The air marked by the acrid smell of the southern air here.  Then, apparently, the victory of calmer things, and clean air and sunshine, presumably from the north.

Wandered through one of the malls.  Not quite the glittering and flashing desire-machines of the country to the northeast, but a solid place.  I seem to be able to sense the thread that goes from the market-based modern malls of the country to the southwest, through places like this, and to the north.  Perhaps my imagination, but it seems the vehicle of  one of the local social sensibilities, tracing out its idea of what a great, good place might be, and so it might be in some tension with the other groups.  Instead of coffee from a small, century-old tin pot, digital espresso machines costing hundreds of dollars arrayed between the televisions and the laptops.  Such things can be built from private notions of perfection, or in imitation of distant models, or against the proximate others.  In the last case, it might have that character for the others as well.  An amiable tabernacle, though.

Stopped in at a shrine of a local saint.  Whenever you see a sign or a photo on the wall indicating that a pope stopped in here to pray, you get the sense that you might be in a worthwhile place, as opposed to the place across the street.  Or perahsp not.  Perhaps he's just indicating the neighborhood. 

Paradoxically, the unreflective usually take the sense of being in danger as the primary indication on the question of being in danger, vel non.

 At every moment of your life, no matter the place, no matter the situation, every other moment in your life has a relation to it, and is hoping for it to be a certain thing.  No matter the present situaiton, there will be or were moments in your life when you might think about this situation, and have a needful relationship to it, wanting it to be a certain thing.  Our life also has meaning through intension -- these moments rely upon one another.  Perhaps the essence of "being true to yourself."  

Paradoxically, physical rest and getting away from the urban areas can actually work against dispassion.  The water clears, things come into view.  Thoughts are heard and held more clearly.

Like the executive in Priestley's "I have Been Here Before" who attempts to signal to his wife that the idyllic country inn might be more dangerous that the city hotel filled with the blare of jazz bands. 

Once again, I find myself in the southern Balkans, and pining to flee to the mountains of Bulgaria.  (And, presumably, when there, I would sense the path northward.)   

Precisely the sensation I had in the country to the south in February.  But the art of exploring occasionally means trying the thing you didn't like before, but with a slightly different aspect (different culture, faith).  

It's by no means as bad as it was, and the quarters are in a decent neighborhood.  I look forward to sussing out the cultural bits in the remaining time, but I don't think I'll linger. 

 

------

 

Orthodox - having the true faith.  Western: truly having the faith.  

"In the holiness of truth." 

 "Up to half my kingdom"  -- i.e., I will remain king.  Giving away a preponderance of the kingdom is the only thing that would change that.  He will retain 51% of the shares.  Likely not an actually limiting principle.  Expectations of a request well under that.

 Decollation of the Baptist.  Officially late summer.  The beginning and the end of the ministry: Ecce, agnus Dei to Go, then and...   Ending in the beginning.

There are three things that I'm trying to accomplish now, and today, I was able to spend a few hours on one of them.  In fairness, I did spend several hours on CV distribution, &c., which I try to do every several days or so, in addition to the real-time alerts. And yet, I was always doing things.

At the state university, I learned how to plod, which can be a skill when you cover ground in the long run, but that also means that the course of the day fills up with the exercises, meditations, etc. that keep the candle going from day to day.  The trick is to know when to draw from those energies to feed the projects, when there are projects that it would be good to spend as much time on as possble.  I certainly wouldn't give up the daily routines, the running, the eavesdropped Mass (liturgy of the word only if on tape), the focused morning reading, etc.  And yet, the thing carrying the mechanism through the day can fill up the day, and there's usually not much to show for it, though sometimes there's some useful things in the writing.

As Heid observed, the plodding is a form of existence that already knows its end and is working towards it.  And that can have an effect on a life.

More mercurial, perhaps.  To the extent that it's possible without destabilizing the covered wagon heading down the trail.  

 Flinging CVs into every open transom.  (Far and few, far and few...)

Lasciate ogni speranza... 

Have tried the local water over the last few days, after ascertaining that it was at least theoretically safe.  Interesting.  From the local river mostly, apparently, in addition to springs, which are likely abundant, given the surrounding mountain ranges.  Heavily treated, though.  Will let it sit out for a few hours before use, if I continue on with it.

 

------

 

Returned to Pynchon's Against the Day recently.  More and more clear to this pugnacious reader that it's about being shocked, or occasionally seduced, out of the episodic cartoon by the events of the aforementioned day.  The plot lines, in a fanciful though likely not entirely inaccurate reading, seem to trace the varying threads of the post-9/11 response to things.  But eventually we're inside a labyrinth of more realistic events affecting a slate of characters on a Dostoyevskian scale -- perhaps an uncharitable reading on my part, but I think, about halfway through, we get to the point at which you would have to know and care about the models for the characters to follow the plot-lines.  Even given the mind-candy settings (Michaelson-Moreley, higher maths, etc.). Or perhaps it's not the best novel to read whan nomading through the Balkans.  It requires the ennui of the UWS coffeehouse in early evening.  

Might see it through this time, but time and mental focus, assuming there's a difference between those two things, are precious things.

I've joked about this a bit, but it does reflect some rather serious thought.  Given the peculiar times between the beginning of the JD and the present, I would likely take a Socratic, if not Shermenesque, view to serving in leadership or government.  As an artist or a writer, or even a plain advocate in the courts, I could explain a few things, and help people out.  But in that Tamino didn't knowingly enter the trials, I suspect he would have very little business being in Sarastro's court afterwards.  I have my understanding; it suffices.  In a way, it does reconfirm the initial vocation, which was run a bit akew in the context of the NYC industry.  Vissi d'arte, &c.

I would not underestimate the dangers of the present political moment.  There seems to be a general sanction on lying as hard as you can, possibly extending to matters high and low. 

Which in better times is at least mildy frowned upon.  

Odd, the Great and Terrible Gurgle appears to have taken a dislike to this subsite.  Completely de-indexed, even after sitemaps, page fixes, and individual pages sent in.  (As I used to do this sort of thing for a living, not entirely clueless in that area.)  Also, the archive bots seem to have developed a similar distaste -- last snapshots were in March. (Posted a few pages there this afternoon, perhaps it will whet the bots' appetite.)

Bit odd.   Time was, this sort of hand-crafted content was the gold standard for search indexing.  A little like realizing that you haven't left any footprints on the trail for the last mile.  Might force me into mass-market authorship, just so I can be sure that a copy or two will still linger on Salvation Army thrift store shelves a century hence.  

 

The basic elements, perhaps: a tenfold increase in the global population in the last century, a vast expansion of industrialization in the Western postwar model, and considerable corruption in the Woodstock-to-Wall-Street generation that followed the generation of giants who built the place. 

 -------------

Not to use the interwebs for grousing or chuntering excessively, but this journeying isn't easy.  Away from the highways of air travel and proper hotels, one does land in the place itself.  In the pond, which is much more different from the last pond than one sunlit upland hill varies from another.  

No simple highway.

LG & Co. very strong at the Proms tonight.  Dvorak sumbime.  Seemed to be a deliberate wobbliness to the triumphs in the Sibelius that really made it interesting.

(Until the end, when it was rightly unalloyed.) 

 

 

 

It's not a disastrous place, just very underdeveloped.  It reminds me of anther city divided by a river, a bit to the southeast.  I can't help but think that part of the difficulty is that silent war. Defining your world as a marginal improvement on theirs, rather than a thing in itself, or taking a more distant model.  The nation to the northeast had less of that threat from the south, and is focused more on the northern models, to better effect.  The vibe is sort of underdeveloped small city in NJ.  Still evidence about of rougher times.  Banks barricaded behind double-door thick glass.  Was waiting between the two doors, and caught a whiff what must have been a cleaning chemical.  Essence of the visit, so far.  But time for improvement.

On the upside, found a decent English-language bookstore (unlike the US, people read here, so in all of these countries, pehaps save one, the bookstores have been ubiquitous).  Everything from abroad, though, so no translated locals.  Some of the shops in the last country made a point of setting a corner aside for translated locals, and that was always a good place to stop in for a bit. 

 

 Went on through midnight last night -- took the late morning.  The later-morning runs are really only practical in the rural areas.  In the cities, if you're not up before dawn, enjoy the coffee inside the blockhouse.

 Gently down the stream.  Well, there used to be a stream there.

In the homeland is the fullness of experience.  This is useful, as the task is to have the fullness of experience in strange lands.  Because the lands might get very strange indeed.

Not the things, not the places, but the possibility of experience that we have tied to them for safekeeping. 

 The news media, like the government, is equally a mechanism for keeping the bad people from getting away with things, and helping the bad people to get away with things.  A flourishing media scene or government can be doing either of these things.  

On this peregrination, I've tried to keep to the capitals and the tourist cities -- this is about travelling and studying while still within (a certain species of) European culture.   This isn't an Indiana Jones journey, in other words.  

That said, the southern parts of the peninsula can be a bit rough, as I discovered over the winter -- even in the larger/tourist cities.  There was a point of decision in January/February: I would either go out and buy some khakis and head into the dirty areas, or increase the amount of time at the kitchen table reading --  opted for the latter.  

I'm in one of the more decent parts of this city here, but there are still some rough edges and inconveniences, just from the nature of the place.  Far from what the locals have to go through, I'm sure, but it is a salutary reminder to stay as close to the pools of light as possible when travelling in this manner.  And there's always the table to read at.

Political coercion is not necessarily something you can identify by the clothing fashions, or even the vocabulary, of those enforcing the general compliance.  If you can't describe the way things are without getting run out of town, arguably, things have come to a pretty bad pass.

I do miss books a bit.  I've been careful to ensure that there were large research libraries nearby, whatever the nature of the times.  Given the peregrinations, though, everything's on the glowing screen of the foldable panopticon. 

On the other hand, I've been equally frustrated with the conditions of the books on occasion.  The other side of the fence is no idyll, just a marginal improvement, all told.

An ebook reader large enough to handle PDFs might be a marginal improvement, but those are still a bit pricey, and I'm wary of carrying expensive things around.  Inexpensive, interoperable, and easily replaced technology has been the watchword on these trips, and that approach seems to have worked well so far.

One of the more revealing things that I've seen in the media from the present American president was the disparaging of the notion that the country is an experiment, a test of a certain social proposition.  This is disconcerting, because I've never encountered a historical narrative that didn't hold this to be true.  For a very long time, the word was governed a certain way, and then another way of thought started to take hold in the northern European island nations.  The colonization of (at least the top half of) the hemisphere was based on this new social order, and if it falls apart after a relatively short run of three or four centuries, we'd lose a lot.  

If you're being tested, and you don't know that it's you being tested, if you prevail, it won't necessarily be you who prevails.  In the same way, we should be clear that a very specific idea of governance and social order is being tested to see if it is a true way for human beings, and it's being tested in the historical context of other ways of going about things.  If things go badly wrong, the conclusion might be drawn that a democratic republic can't be trusted with the mechanisms involved in governing an entire continent.  

It is possible to err.  In the context of a general prosperity, it's easy to forget that. 

(Apolitical -- I have no opinion as to which of the present factions would be most, or least likely to provoke the error.  Just pointing out to the baseball players that they are, in fact, playing baseball.)

I am a bit careful about how I look for opportunities these days -- which trees I shake.  If any of the several networks of folks who've gone up against me in the past decided to be marginally less evil for a brief moment, I could find myself entering a world with an ordained outcome -- "things bad begun..."

So I emphasize the formal aspects of the qualification and experience--so many degrees, so many courses, so many years of experience of practice at a certain level.  But, as I've increasingly discovered, the present order of things relies much less on the way things are than what happens when you talk to people. 

(As strange as that might sound, if you paraphrsed it out, you might reach the essence of the problem.)   

Skipped the AM run to nurse a bit of a twinge through the weekend.  Onward. 

 

 #oscotlandscotland

(Another litmus, perhaps -- those who take these lyrics to be in the past tense, instead of imprecation.)

This is many years of experience talking: the people who are successful and influential in the present order of things (on every level of society) are, by and large, not good people, and the sense of reality that they create in their interactions is not a good world -- despite the structures of postwar industrial prosperity, and the fact that the trucks of frozen hamburgers still roll into town every week.  Perhaps it was ever thus, but it most certainly is thus.

Look to the past.  Piece together a world from the relics. 

 Octave of the Assumption.  Same note, just more high and lonesome.

 One test of the general outlook might be whether someone assumes the calendric octave is a upward journey, or the other thing...

 One difficulty with thinking about religious things is that pretty much everyone who has given their ideas serious thought has a rather good point, and yet they occasionally completely disagree.  The puritans of the new world, for example, all the way to their antinomy in the (still-thriving) know-nothings of the midlands, were vehement in their criticism of orthodoxy.  Several of the founders explicitly equated both the eastern church and the western church to the Vedic pantheon and practices.  As I travel, from time to time, I do pick up on some of the same vibes around the orthodox clergy as I did among the sorcerers (almost invariably apprentice-level) in the theatre and experimental theatre.  And yet, the mind is a mysterious thing, and the whitewashed walls and clerestory doctrines of the reformation might not bring the whole of the human along on their forays into higher things.  Cf., perhaps, "I will draw all things to myself."  

It appears that the good air comes from the north here, while winds from the south bring a peculiarly acrid air.  I've been in some difficult places in the winter (3x -4x the levels of emergency levels of pollution stateside--HEPA at full blast at the desk, and jedi shemaghs over the mouth and nose outside, before they became a political symbol), but I would certainly not want to be here in January and February.  Although I understand that it's significantly better than it used to be.

https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20091104.html 

Cf. the Enlightenment vs. the romantic/historical school.  Very similar -- indicating an underlying truth about the mind, perhaps.

Postprandial:

 

 

Perhaps the question we are heading towards: whether a state (as distinct from government) in the service of the 60%-70%, administered by a more or less corruptly selected further subset of the group, is a valid desideratum.  The percentages are high, in historical context, cf. Picketty's second book, but given the industrial mechanisms at hand, an ogliarchy in service of the democratic preponderance is not necessarily the only option at hand.

I see this reflected in local conflicts here.  There seems not to be a push for elections, as the political machine would have enough influence to carry a preponderance, but at the same time, the mechanisms of social advancement are gummed up by the corruption.  (At least in the view of those protesting, or just grousing.)

One misleading notion: that in an increasingly educated society, there are either fewer career slots or fewer signs of social distinction to compete for.  The present reality, seems to be that, as JK Galbraith said when equating the universities of India and the American Midwest, you either go along with things, or find yourself out in the field/street.  Not really a plumage competition there. 

Up past midnight rebuilding the netbook.  It's the sort of computer that folks likely would consider not worth the risks of theft, but the fact that makes that so also does other things in the world.  

Gently down the stream, stream permitting.

If you ultimately believe that words serve only to help groups of people get along, you will create corporate and social structures in which the primary task of each person is to hold such a position in such a world.  

 Google appears to have de-indexed the "ephemera" part of this site.  Spent some time on the seach console figuring it out, and there are a few oddities.  Can't say that I blame it.  Taking up valuable disk space that might be used for the things that people customarily use the internet for.  Will continue puttering around to see if I might have missed a trick.

Looks like I left the last country just in time.  Some of those riot images are places I was walking through & reading in a couple of weeks ago.  Some interesting goings-on near the end sugggested to the (perhaps overly imaginative) observer that it might not be the best time for an American to be wandering around.  And the rooms were very bad.  But a decent, prosperous, and hospitable country (with reasonably priced Starbucks coffee--like NYC in the early aughts).  And the capital of the old Republic.  Listened to the live Bayreuth stream of Rheingold (from a Sbux) while watching night fall on the legislature's building, and the lights come on.  Bit magical.

Like every country, its problems are its own, and should be sorted by the folks with a legitimate interest in the matter.  #primedirective

Still mulling the notion that the fantasy novels of Tolkein (read only once or twice) and C.S. Lewis (re-read yearly) have their sources in undisclosed wartime travels in the Balkans and elsewhere.  Lunatic notion, but the second Lewis novel has clear resonances with his American travels, and the others seem to have a similar verisimilitude -- and the overarching theme is an Englishman type coming into contact with distant cultures. And then there's the powerful City contacts of Charles Williams.  (My hierarchy puts him between the two.)

Every work of fiction is an invitation to fictionalize the life of the author.   

 

 

One trick in securing the housing is to find a place somewhere between the cobblestoned tourist-catering places and the hobbit villages.  Clearly, the present booking has landed me far afield into the latter.  Much like the place in German Romanian Transylvania some time ago, the only difference being that the neighbors' chairs facing the windows are much closer here.  Will be a bit of an exercise in dispassion. Om.

Quiet day.  The goal was to sit quietly and read.  Restoring a bit of the focus that was lost last month in the inner-city rooms.  Quite successful for most of the day.  

To be productive, occasionally you need to think of yourself as an animal, and cause the animal to do the useful things by manipulating surroundings and habits.  While always reserving the capacity of free will that could accomplish everything in an un-caused and spontaneous fell swoop of success.  

Gently down the stream.   

Postprandial cinema: Trial and Error (The Dock Brief), 1962.  John Mortimer play, on Broadway the previous year, adapted for film with Peter Sellars.  The Proto-Rumpole.  Very mid-century UK, a bit like a J.B. Priestley, with morals and apercus of a masonic tincture scattered in among the macarizing.  Worthwhile.

 Pisistratus is still the classical paradigm, perhaps.  Some of the details are almost eerily on-point.  A tyranny brought to power by the people over the oligarchs.  His supporters wearing characteristic garments that one historian said kept them on the farm because they looked ridiculous in the cities.  Reaching out to the conventionally highly-regarded poets and writers, so long as they wrote in service of his golden age.

 I have to wonder if part of the chaos in the country now is from no one explaining the different thories of power, how they relate, and which of them (after a pragmatic alliance with the right-wing think tanks), has suddenly come into almost unchecked power.

These are the corporate types of New Netherlands.  This is a specific theory of power, and virtue (Weber, Gierke, etc.).  Instead of voting for their own representatives, the people voted for their neighbors' boss, in the hope that their neighbors would get what was coming to them.  And now, at least for the nonce, it's America, Inc.

That's the dark view.  There's another way of seeing it, in that very old forms of statecraft are being used in the manner of free-enterprise corporations, and there's an outside chance that new forms of statecraft might result.

It's a vertiginous moment, and one that could still go either way, but very few people seem to realize the nature of the event, and the history of these forms. Or how far we might be from the ground.

I see that India is trying to get a handle on the stray dog problem, interestingly through judicial means.  When the poor neighborhoods are marked by hungry, roaming, suffering carnivorous animals, civilization needs to adjust a few things.  Those in the neighborhoods come to symbiosis with them, of course (with lapses and exceptions), but I can vouch for the fact that they have a different approach to the stranger.

The northern countries have solved the problem admirably by sterilizing them and leaving them in place, but the root of it is that people bring them into the place and then cast them out.   

Local strays I've encountered have seemed quite docile.  Much more like the country to the west in that respect than the one to the southwest.