After the events of the last generation, and given the present state of the country, it might not be a mistake for those without a real role in things to stay away from the homeland for a bit, perhaps for a very long duration.  Widespread, largely undescribed corruption can be fought by those with some sway, but the wise commoner who has taken a few knocks from the corruption might be well advised to seek safer shores.  

The Roman generals of the famous epitaph didn't despair of the Republic.  But they were generals, and hoping for the good of the republic, and thinking and writing along those lines can either be done on the cold streets of the cities, or in a more civilized place. 

 

It would, of course, be a mistake to keep harping on the surprisingly long list of people and institutions who seem to have operated with a surprising level of dishonesty in matters relating to my interests in recent years.  Such habits of complaint make the mind grow small and fearful.

At the same time, though, one feels an almost scientific obligation to report the extraordinary coincidence.  Perhaps it's a sign of a new form of matter.  The anti-alethic electromagnetic state.

 #saturdayradio

Odd to discover that PHC took its name from the cemetery in Moorhead.  I only accidentally ended up in Fargo/Moorhead (though it happened more than once), and I've walked past that cemetery many times on my way to the library in the small Lutheran college, or run past it before dawn on my circle of the town during the pandemic years.  Lines in a country churchyard, perhaps.   

https://www.prairiehome.org/shows/57399.html 

If the majority opposes civilization, the majority is wrong, and subject to correction.  The majority is a function of the civilization.

 It is said that the Christian church is like a hospital.  There is an inherent duality to any Christian society, I think.  The social forms and political powers that would exist absent Christianity exist within Christianity, and the faith does its work both on these people and on the social forms in the society.  So a completely Christian society is not a righteous society, but a society in which the precepts of the faith are effecting changes within every aspect of that society.  Of course, this also means that those whose social position is identical to that of Jesus Christ will continue to have a very difficult time, even in the floreat of the Christian society.  But, in such a society, they hold the place from which the world is judged, and if they remain faithful to the doctrines, they can perhaps provide the critical assistance in the transformation of the society.  

Perhaps.

 Mist on the mountains.  Invisible from the rooms.

Just now putting together that the taste in childhood canned alphabet soup was paprika.  Seems exotic.  Perhaps an attempt by the Central Powers to conquer the tables of America one by one.  Or reparations, perhaps.  Cargo ships filled with paprika showing up overnight in industrial towns in the American Midwest.  To be transformed into a letter-soup without diacritical markings.

UK politics seems to be going bottom-up for its controversies.  Mortgage papers incorrectly filed, rentals without the correct approvals, individual prisoners released in advance of their set date.  These are database discoveries.  Similarly, the enforcement issues in the US by the immigration police seem to be keyed to fingerprints in the system, police visits, etc.  Also database discoveries.  

I distinctly recall that politics used to be about significant actual events that actually occurred.  Or perhaps I'm wrong about that.  Will have to check the blog archives. 

Was pushing it with the trail runners.  Would have gone up there a bit more if I had brought proper boots, I think.  Was hoping to pick some up in Sofia, but had to settle for a thrift-store version that was strong enough for the walks into town.  (Had been on city shoes for the last several stays.)

 Decided to press on into the mountains after the run (only a few times here, a route uphill across the long silt rise to the beginning of the rock).  Bit like Gurdjieff making his escape, or perhaps Merton taking the Gesthemani jeep out into the Kentucky mud roads for a bit.  Unjustifiable, but refreshing.

 Once I was past the paved walking paths, I was hoping to find a trail, but saw no blazes, so I just set out across uncleared land, uphill on a vector that I knew would hit the road.  Sure enough, after an hour or so of tough climbing over wooded land, a 1980's second world passenger van hove into view.  At least the top half.  Then to the hiking hut on the road, and past it, up into the gap on a well-blazed trail, as far in that direction as the path went before it doglegged back to the summit of the hill it was on, so I bowed slightly to the path ahead, and turned around.  Decided to take one of the trails down, which was an exercise in Fenimore Cooper/Dan Boone alertness, as there were basically no blazes.  Basically following a creekbed, and occasionally winding off to the side -- which was confidence-inspiring, as I knew that I wasn't just walking down a creekbed.  

 But on a large mountain, it's hard to get lost.  just go down and walk back around, if you need to.  Not like going off-piste in a completely strange range. 

Quasihebdomal walk down into the town for dry goods and provisions.  It's about four miles and change to the German discount grocery, and the uphill trek is when the ruck is full.  Quiet evening.  Sky glow behind the mountains.  

Solzhenitsyn's massive historical cycle (latest volume soon out from Notre Dame, I think) got me though the winter in the city a few years ago.  I carried the books around so much that they wore down much more than the public library might have reasonably expected them to.  (Some entirely fair compensation was provided at their request.)  Other parallels from east of Europe were found in different works -- a few characters in Green Tent, Life and Fate, etc.

Identifying with characters in stories from distant countries can be useful.  It allows you to contextualize your own difficulties within a more universal sense.  If you face a good bit of socially rooted adversity, and you only have the stories of your own people, you might not understand the event.  Once you have a more clear understanding, you don't jump over the Wall, or swim the Tiber -- you cross the aisle and sit in the back benches of the loyal opposition awhile, or linger with the cross-benchers.  You step outside the sway of the partisans.

 

A duality.  When I was first escaping the homestead, doing professional theatre in the summers, I was in rural Kentucky for several years.  At the time, the only way of getting the national papers from New York was driving to the neighboring town and putting in an order at the tobacconist's.  Issues fresh from the airport would show up soon afterwards, the Times having been put on a plane after being printed in midtown.  (The new presses are one landmark that you pass when going from the city to LGA.)  And that was a lifeline, in a way, keeping me from attuning myself to the local mind, keeping free.  On the other hand, it is very dangerous to want to think as the powerful folks think, to say things that they would find acceptable, to, in short, have my being as one within that world.  The talisman of foreign vocabularies, if it is to be a talisman and not an enchanted mirror, is is not an object of identification, but of strangeness.

Strange dreams of mirrored images, and strength.  Armaturum Dei. 

 

At one point today, I was trying to find a mountain trail with a red blaze, based on the information from the hiking map posted by the road.  (Balkan hiking maps are among my favorite forms of European fiction.)  I was reminded of the afternoon in the mountains above Rasinari, near Sibiu, in Romania.  I had gone off-piste after a rather frightening encounter with a few sheepdogs, and I thought I had found a marked trail, so I followed the red blazes for awhile.  Eventually, the spatial distribution was peculiar enough for me to realize that the marking was for forestry management purposes, and not marking a trail at all.  Things are seldom as they seem.

Quite aware that this sketchpad has taken a turn to the maudlin, but it can't be helped.  Seeing the battle to come, one is obliged to at least make note of the fact.

Normal service will resume shortly.  Currently plowing though some things on Frege for a seminar that I'm eavesdropping on, the daily lectionary essay revisions are proceeding apace, and the two or three other projects in my "desk" file (as opposed to my "second desk" file, and I think a "third desk," or perhaps a "credence table" might have to be added) are a bit quiet at the moment, but the trajectory is set.  Very glad to have edited and published the Balkans ebook before the peregrination ended.

One of the reasons that I had been thinking about Poland for these peregrinations is a very peculiar sense that I've picked up on, particularly in the city, and particularly among certain factions in the city, that the types of extraordinary adversity that I've encountered are somehow appropriate to large fellows of Polish ancestry.

But funding constraints dictated a southern route.  Still, quite the extraordinary journey.

Things will likely get rather interesting in the coming weeks.  I have set my intentions, as I explained at the end of the travel journals in the recent Balkans book, and I somehow need to reach that scenario -- right now, I'm thinking upper Midwest, a bare-bones apartment with access to a research library (Minnesota interlibrary loan is good for that -- the public libraries reach the universities).  In the journal entry, I called it an internal exile, and given my degrees and recent experiences, that's not an exaggeration.  Writing, reading, and separating myself from the culture.  Not in a shack-in-the-woods way, but in the manner of a quiet fellow in the upstairs apartment who doesn't watch television or read the American papers.  

It's certainly different from what I had been hoping to have, either in the theatre, or with the T1 law degree, or with the research doctorate, but precisely this difference is part of the present reality that I hope to explain, eventually.  And I fully anticipate that I'll have to work in a sort of internal-exile type retail job, or something along those lines, possibly for the duration of these times, however long that might be.  

The folks who have been tangling with me a bit over the years would likely gain some satisfaction from hearing that, but I was never fighting them on their ground.  Frankly, I did the honest thing at each turn, knowing that my success if I had done the dishonest thing would have been worthless.   

And this retrenchment isn't at all a sure thing.  Times have been extraordinarily interesting, which is to say difficult, so even securing this foothold deep in the homeland will require a small miracle. 

So.  Next chapter. 

The lingering injury and the amount of work at the desk meant that most workouts here were in the gym, occasionally with the sauna afterwards.  (Basically a weight bench and a set of barbells, but sufficient, and I very rarely visited the small sauna when others were around.)  It served for the nonce, and the mountain air was invigorating, as were the walks to town, but I would certainly hope to come back some time when I could simply walk around on the mountain all day. (And had proper boots.)

When I discerned for the priesthood with a society with an outpost in upstate New York (Issac Jogues territory), I spent most of the days on the retreat there up on the (small) mountain with a Psalter.  I also remember workshopping a play with an off-off theatre in NYC at someone's house in Vermont, with a mountain visible out the window.  Woke before dawn and walked up the hill before rehearsal.

Levavi oculos meos...  

 

 The mysterious hip injury sustained in Skopje appears to finally have mended.  (Mysterious as to nature and duration -- sustained after stumbling on a relatively mundane asphalt anomaly.)  Good run up the base of the mountain.  Decided to continue upwards (at a reduced pace).  Excellent views.  Made for a long workout.

 One bright point -- just now passing the one-year mark with the daily essays on the Mass readings.  Have discovered that with time, they have grown marginally less foolish.  Perseverance is a great way of bringing on the mystic tutorial, I suppose.  Have begun to work through revisions on the early ones offline.  With time, one becomes aware of the distance between what one thought and what one wrote.  

If I keep this up, should be able to pad out the gesamtewerke by at least a volume or two.  And that's in folio.  In octavo, the demands on library shelving shall be enormous.  (And justified.)

I have enjoyed these peregrinations through the Balkans very much.  I'm not sure these folks know how lucky they are in the scheme of things.  A country needs both civilization and culture, and any country in which it's thought important to build enough housing for everyone, police officers can be rationally argued with on a contested point (observed, not first-person), the arts and literature are priced at a level that ensures general availability (literally a tenth the price of the luxury-goods pricing), and it's a general practice to linger over conversation or a good book over coffee in the early afternoon is infinitely better off than the folks living in McMansions, spending five hours per day in front of their televisions, and constantly trying to stifle the terrifying fear that they might someday lose everything.

Famously, the Westernization of the countries to the north and east involved an attack on the "office tea" culture.  As globalization continues apace, some of the countries in these parts might want to define some of these virtues before the holding companies do.

At a bit of an impasse.  After giving the art everything I had through conservatory and then the decade afterwards, and being completely sidelined for a few years, I earned good grades at a top-tier law school while taking as many doctrinal courses as they would allow, and then when nothing came of that, I wrote a doctoral dissertation while grading thousands of undergraduate papers.  Frankly, I'm not certain which button to push now.  And over the last decade, I've had to go to ground more often than a lightning storm in the Midwest.

The informal aspects of career life in these United States might stand some scrutiny.  Prosperity from the mechanisms of earlier generations is no justification for general dishonesty.  There are some rather bad things going on, and some honest folks are being put in real peril.

Harumph. 

Anthem of the beautiful soul.

 

I generally don't wear t-shirts, especially with words on them.  (Scattered past exceptions for things like Star Wars, etc.) 

But if I were to make an exception, I might look for a t-shirt that said something along the lines of: "Someone who isn't allowed to defend a dissertation didn't fail their doctorate.  Not scheduling a defense is historically a sign of political disapproval."

But those very rarely turn up in thrift shops. 

At this point, the greatest incentive not to go completely stark raving mad is the desire not to prove the threadbare leprechauns pacing the ceiling right.  Their "I told you so" chorus can go on for some time.  Last week, they improvised a three-hour round with fauxbourdon and descant.

 Given that so many liturgies transfer the All Souls observance to today, enjoying the associated three day holiday of all the important dates that fall between the beginning of the month and today.  At least on the inside.

 Interesting, just learning about the 19th c. split between Austrian and German philosophy -- motivated by the anti-Kantianism of the Habsburgs, apparently.  Which might have mirrored the Wolff/Pietist divide of a generation before.  Austria goes positivist, which ends with the holy rota in Vienna, while German lands go from Kant to speculative idealism, and then take Kant back out of their ruck.

Some local resonance.  Apparently, Budapest followed Germany, even post-Compromise, because the German philosophy was seen as more enlightened and European (not to mention non-Austrian).  I had known that the Shakespeare lineage in Serbia comes from the German, in contrast to Romania, where the French translations were the source, because the upper classes could afford to flee to Paris for a bit (the same roads followed much later by Cioran and Brancusi -- I think Brancusi actually walked there).  So that would make for this culturally German corridor just beneath Austria.  And might explain why I liked Budapest and Belgrade so much.  If I had to jump to here, I'd likely angle to land in one of those two places.  Sarajevo is powerful and unique, but just before my last stay there, the city told me that she likely couldn't be of any further help to me, and she turned out to be right.  Powerful dreams, though.  As for points eastward, there are a few cities in Romania that I like a lot, and it's culturally much more Western, but there's something about the art, music and literature that much more strongly draws me to the other side of the peninsula.  I end up reading Kraznahorkai or Andric instead of Two Thousand Years or Carterescu.  But this is just idle thinking, as the odds of an avenue opening to any of these places is rather slim, and I'd enthusiastically head to any of these cities (with one or two exceptions) for a longer stint.

 In a cynical view, you could say that if you have a lot of money, a large house, what you will, in most European countries, your house is a piece of that civilization.  It is subordinated to the claims of civilization.  States-side, it often seems that if you have a large house, a lot of money, etc., you have only that property as itself, and the civilizational context is simply the desire for more people to be more prosperous in that manner.  It's  laudable aim, but if you think about it, if your neighborhood realized that they would each be twice as rich as you if they took away your house, you would want a more idealist grounding for liberty.  And that's precisely the ground I've seen vanish on more than one occasion.  At the critical moment, the civilizational context, the rules of the game, the larger meaning of which the specific social encounter is just one part, vanishes in favor of private advantage.  More, it does so under a claim of right.

 It's not about the rule, or lack of a rule.  It's about where you situate the meaning of the property claim.  If it's a part of the republic, if you own a piece of America, it has meaning in its inherent ideological content.  If the meaning is the immediate possession, virtually anything goes.   

Similarly, if a deliberative process is part of the society's general attempt to bring as much truth into the world as possible, arguably necessary constraints and biases come into view.  If the committee is simply a group seeking as much private advantage as possible, this has a certain determinative social character. 

You can't always know the nature of the war.  

You can know that there is a war, and from time to time, you can know that there is something you should do in order to survive, or there is some advantage to be gained.  

At the beginning, everyone enters the adversity and forms an idea of the nature of that adversity, and the nature of their own response to that adversity.  After things go on for a while, and time passes, and things stay essentially as they have been, you begin to understand that it has become impossible to know the nature of the adversity, or your role within it. 

But we ourselves are much more than the ideas that we might form of ourselves.  There's the saving force.

The mistake would be to cling to the image that you formed of the adversity and your response to the adversity, even when the situation no longer seems to bear that out.  Then the adversity takes on a confusing and random character.

None of us understands what this thing called human experience is.  When it gets strange, use this as information. 

 The Fall of York makes for some fascinating reading.  Letters patent are apparently constitutionally reserved to the government in the present UK order.  The Times suggests there was even some talk of extinguishing the title, which suggests that some of the constitutional thinkers rearranging the furniture might be (perhaps deliberately) oblivious to the value of the pieces.  

Today's edition takes the line that the primary countervailing force was concern for the welfare of the Duke, and avoiding psychological harm.  Not the first thing that usually comes to mind after a hard-fought negotiation, which the news also suggested.  

And the whole thing is of interest because it gives some grasp on the political order, even to the clueless foreign passerby.  While of course there are souls involved as well.  Uneasy lies the head that wears the coronet.  Any family in the service of the state tends to live in a bit of a silo.  The damage that can do to all involved shouldn't be underestimated. The republic, by its nature, isn't a sinecure.  The opposite, in fact.

 

 Anniversary of a tragedy in a neighboring country -- partial building collapse at a train station.  I was actually in a train station in that country on that morning, but I was in the national capital, having taken the legendary overnight train in from the Adriatic coast.  (Less than a bus ride.)  It was a difficult ride, as I hadn't yet figured out that the ticket agents could call down to the yard at the origin station to find out which cars were open-plan and which were compartments.  I was stuck in an airless compartment with five others, very warm.  And the custom in these areas is apparently indoor clothing, no shoes, etc.  Spent most of the ride hunched over in the corridor, half seated on a small ledge, trying to get some sleep.

When I arrived, I discovered that tickets for the trains to the new part of the city could only be purchased, at that hour, with a credit card from that country.  It was a bright, new spacious station, some distance from the city proper.  I stared in disbelief for a moment at the information desk, and then said in my best low-key ironic tone, "not much of a train station then, is it."  Irony can be comforting at such times, but a more perfect spirit wouldn't have done that, I suppose.  So, having done this walk before, I walked the vector to the large church (not the city's cathedral, much like St. Peter's in Rome), and from there to downtown, across the bridge, and to the new city.

 Heard the news about the events in the other city later that day in some disbelief.  I suppose a pleasant morning's walk through a city I like a lot wasn't that high a price to pay.  

On a subsequent visit, I discovered by hopping on a train at the station in the new city (intending to pay on the train) that there's no fare collection between those two stations.  Or at least so I was told by someone with a lanyard.  But I also later found a proximate bus line, after taking it to the museum of the old republic, and the buses and trams are free now.

An interesting morning.  Also a lesson to be a bit more jedi, even after a night like that and even in a circumstance like that. 

 

 

 

 

 

Assembling, checking and compiling the gesamtwerk on Amazon and the Wordpress site.  Making the mimesis monograph available in a few different formats, and reprinting the poetry book.  Apparently the files I recompiled the monograph from were either older than the filenames indicated, or had become corrupted in the interval, so I did another proof, and will hold off listing it on the Wordpress site until Amazon has the final version up and running.  Bit like the poet at the country house sending off a few envelopes to his London publishers before heading back to the front lines.  The possible futility of it inspires a bit of perfectionism.

Interesting, in the Times coverage of the fall of the House of York, they mention the close connection to Libyan interests that caused controversy in the past.  Which would make two colossal political reversals of late based on those connections.

The mountain inn is almost completely deserted on weekdays (not yet ski season).  Bit eerie.  But the air is very fresh, and the trees in the mountains are in the thick of their autumn colors.  

 Fascinating talk at one of the UK Inns of Court on Milton yesterday.  Viewership in the two-digit order of magnitude.  There's an extraordinary amount of very worthwhile things on YT that no one knows about.  Over dinner, I flit between the best chamber music in the world and very worthwhile talks with a handful of listeners.  The trick is to not just subscribe to everything -- so you can see the scrolling feed -- but once you identify a certain worthwhile area, look for comparable channels.  Every dinnertime, my feed is filled with evensong from UK cathedrals and Oxbridge chapels.  Not going to swim the Tiber anytime soon, but the BCP liturgy is compelling.

One oddity on the Milton panel -- I think they did an entire evening on Milton's dramatic sensibility without mentioning Comus.  Or I might have missed it -- multitasking, as usual.  

 Eavesdropping on an Oxbridge compline.  The spirit itself requires an architecture, more than an immediacy.  Not because the transcendent things are complicated, but because we are.  We need to be raised to the condition of our own complexity to stand properly before the sacred.  The dark in us illumined, the recalcitrant and sluggish will roused to attention.  

This is the truth to much of Orthodox liturgy, I think.  God doesn't need the repetitions, the grandeur, the awe-inspiring things.  They exist to awaken us, to help us across our half of the bridge to the other place.

 

Things appear to be at a bit on an inflection point.  At such times, it's always good to do what the television football and basketball broadcasts I remember from childhood used to call the "game reset."  Basically a quick description of the story so far.

 After about a decade of work in the theatre and a top conservatory degree, opportunities seemed to vanish for several years.  So I went to a top-tier law school, and, perhaps because I was a few years ahead of most folks there, who had gone from undergraduate study to the J.D., I seemed to be a bit of a target for some faculty members.  One in particular went very far over the line in my opinion, so I transferred to another top-tier school back in the city, got good grades, and took as many doctrinal and black-letter-law courses as they would allow (which almost no one does).  Was largely shut out from the career paths, though.  Perhaps coincidentally, it was a religious school, a faith different than mine (though not inconsistent with mine).  A few difficult years followed; things got about as bad as they can get in the First World.  Then I did a research doctorate, but after writing a 300 page dissertation and grading thousands of student papers, the faculty refused to schedule a defense.  Perhaps coincidentally, during my time there, I had respectfully pushed back against a few practices that I firmly believed to be unethical.  A few years of the same adversity followed.

This peregrination has been valuable.  I've been able to fund it out-of-pocket, no credit cards, thanks to the relatively inexpensive cost of living, and the purpose of it -- the cultural exploration -- made the game worth the candle.

And yet, there's that story of mine that was unfolding in my own country, and that seems to have paused for a bit.  This has been a time of work for me, not a vacation, but I'm conscious that it's the exception to the general difficulty that I've faced in my own country.  These three careers that I've attempted (the first is still my life's work) collectively finding no traction can suggest odd things to the mind.  I've firmly set my mind against thinking of anything like a vast conspiracy, but at the same time, I've come to realize that the generally held notions of what it is to live and work in my country couldn't account for these events.  So there is no conspiracy, that's true.  But, equally, the generally held notions do not describe what it is to live and work in this society.  The present distorted national politics are not epiphenomenal. 

I've been envious of the lives that I've observed in these travels.  Even without a lot of disposable goods, people make generally better lives here.  Coffee in the afternoons.  In many countries, most people have second homes in the country.  Bookstores in every neighborhood.  I've kept an eye out for positions that I might apply for locally, while doing the global job search, but an American lawyer/academic/what you will is not exactly a logical staffing solution in most of these contexts.

I do rue one mistake.  During the pandemic, I headed to the upper Midwest, a place that I like very much.  I had just finished the PhD work, and my hopes were high that I could land a position either domestically or internationally.  But in the interval, given the things I've described above, I've come to understand that even with my skills, degrees, and experience, the best that I can hope for in this culture is to find a place, read as much as I can, and write as much as I can, while finding a retail or basic position somewhere in the neighborhood.  (And then part of the work will be in explaining why that is.)

There are role models for this kind of internal exile, and I think about them daily.  My regret is that I didn't fashion such a place during the pandemic travels when I could have abandoned the job search and found a basic job deep in the rural Midwest, and set up the fortress of solitude.  I am still convinced that if I can write and study, I will be able to accomplish some worthwhile work.  And these studies are the sorts of things I would do even if I thought that everything I did was certain to vanish like words traced in water, as the romantic poet said.

So the wisest course seems to be to try to set something like this up, though it will be considerably more difficult now.   And it looks like there will be some extraordinary difficulties in the near term.

Spiritually, this has been an extraordinary journey.  The progressions of dreams in these places have been carefully noted.  I will close this by relating something that I wasn't sure I would ever relate.  At many points during these journeys, I have been conscious of a woman's presence, very near, and each time I am aware of her (there is of course no one around), she carefully asks if I am happy.  Well.  As I think about the question, I'm often tempted to reply somehow that no, reading philosophy while sipping a bit of kefir on the roof of the supermarket in Bosnia isn't precisely the dream, but I am happy in being able to continue the work, studying the philosophy, thinking about the theatre.  But it took me some time to understand the point of the question. Happiness is not some condition that follows the work, or that occurs when the work is going well.  Happiness comes from seeing the entirety of your life, as you do these mundane, particular things, and knowing that this living presence that studies, prays, observes, is a miraculous gift.  When Thomas Merton saw those around him at a nondescript corner in Louisville (that I've walked past many times) seem almost divine, it wasn't because they were doing extraordinary things.  Our prosperity has misled us as to the nature of happiness, I think.  

Perhaps I should have told her that.  

Perhaps I will.

### 

Morning run down the mountain, into the town.  Filled the ruck with provisions, and walked back up.

Thick grey fog over the valley on the way in.  Had the sense of walking from the clear and open place into the foggy confusion.  When you spend a week or so away from the towns, walking into the street plan does bring a cloud on the mind.  You can almost feel the energies of the place.  Harmless town, quite nice in places.  Suspect it would be the same anywhere.   On the return, the mist was general.

Mountain in view on the return, solid pack of snow now established at the top.  Summit appears to be right at the treeline, but in this part of the world, it's hard to tell.  The mountains in southern Bosnia and Montenegro (several evil names) appear to be mostly without vegetation for most of the peak.  There are summit routes to the one here, but without a vehicle, it looks like it would require a starting time well before dawn. 

Surprised to find some of the characters in Against the Day in the same coordinates I've been through of late.  Decided to pick it up out of the generic ereader folder, and put it back on the top, so I can finish.  The earlier time or two I made the pugnacious slog through, I hadn't yet set my foot on these mountains.  Started this read in the cafes of Belgrade a few months back (I think after visiting the House of Flowers, which is now the House of Small Pebbles) but there have been many literary detours and frolics in the interval. 

 

 Dojo shift.

Sort of like a month or so at a run-down country house back in the home country.  Can't get too into the Bloomsbury routine, or the Huns will make short work of me when I head back to the trenches. 

Bellum omnium contra omnes, incl. me. 

Fascinating piece on homelessness by William Vollman in the Vatican newspaper yesterday.  

Not linking it, though, since I had the same reaction to it as I did to the original papal document.  The reactions of (even excellent) clerics and picaresque novelists don't always describe the thing itself very clearly.  The graphic nature of the article is shocking, yes, but the shocking nature of it also has the unfortunate effect of supplying a certain social logic, in that it is the shocking people who have no homes.  The truth of it is that you can be the most clean-cut, clear-thinking one in the room, sometimes even the strongest in the room at whatever the task is, and if you offend the wrong groups of people (remember Madison: the danger of faction), you will possibly be due for extreme misfortune.  Granted, when the home is lost, almost everyone falls apart after a few days, and then the picaresque novels and the socially conscious colportage has a foothold.  But the implication that all of its victims lose the plot once their plot of land is taken away is dangerous.  There are clear-eyed, very intelligent, and puritanically clean-living folks at Mass every morning and pacing the streets in the evening.  When he visited the big city, Christ often slept on the side of the Mount of Olives.

A democracy, or really any state, relies on the public understanding of its present nature.  Part of the present problem might be that those with sufficient wealth and property, thanks to the media, can have an understanding of the present politics that's a bit attenuated from reality, both conceptually and also as to what it means to actually live there, in a place not insulated from the contact with the full spectrum of people in the society.

Most critically: do not assume that this is a meritocracy, or that there is a workable social logic determining who is wealthy and who is fighting to survive.   Knowing that (1) you are good and (2) that you are momentarily safe from want is not sufficient proof of the health of the republic. 

 

 Have discovered that breaking up a bit of pasta into the rice (add the pasta a bit later) makes for a much more satisfying base.  Strength in diversity.

Becoming convinced that the political problem in my country is the absence of a credible opposition.  Reminds me of the comedy bit about Dukakis against Bush.  Bush rambles on incoherently for a bit, and then 'Dukakis,' asked for a rebuttal, turns to the camera and speaks his whole reply: "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

A rodeo clown distracts the dangerous forces of nature while the workers go about their business.

But like Hickey in Iceman Cometh, I have withdrawn to the grandstand of philosophical self-detachment, to fall asleep watching the cannibals do their death-dance. 

If there were to be a project to save the humanities, philosophy, history, etc. from the slough of trite-minded despond into which it has lucratively wandered (to make all things new is the primary, and always necessarily frustrated ambition of the thinker -- but the present moment is slightly different than the usual), it might look to make available the most important books in each field from eighty years ago.  After that point, the humanities decided to imitate the technological sciences, and see every bit of a knowledge as material progress to a more perfect machine.  In fact, from Socrates to the present, every teacher has tried to teach the same things, and when it has gone well, the words were meaningful.

Germany in the second half of the 19th c. did something very remarkable with philosophy, history, the study of literature, etc.  I can't imagine the present mechanism ever managing to accomplish half as much in its time.

Hebdomadal walk down into the town for the week's supplies.  Mountain ranges idyllic with the changing leaves, warm breeze from the south blowing some extraordinarily fresh air from the mountains.  Unlike last week, the principal peak silhouetted by very faint sky glow on the return, as I walked back along the axis of the Milky Way.  

I cannot overstate the importance of having a good ruck, whatever your situation.  It's the sort of consumer good that's replicated by the million, but if you know what to look for, you can find a good one at about the same price as most, and much less inexpensive than those constructed in such a manner as to provide good advertising copy.  That, and the wide-brimmed felt hat, the sign of the artist since the mid 19th c. The Dauphin had his horse, I have a ruck and hat. 

 Given the advances in manufacturing, there is an abundance of goods in the world; the ultra-high-end in my experience is generally much overrated.  So you have to be selective, but not in the manner of the fashionable.  Once you identify a certain good that would be useful (ruck, hat, boots, etc.), honestly investigate the thing itself, find out what makes it good, and look for that sort of thing.  (Finding out what was the best 75 years ago can provide some pointers.)  No need to keep consulting the magazines to find the good things.   As Gurdjieff pointed out, that usually leaves you at the mercy of whoever has a large marketing budget at the time.  

 The difficulty with late afternoon/evening workouts is that the body tends to think that the fight is o'er , the battle won, despite the clear understanding of the mind that there is nothing keeping me from sitting down to another hour or two of work of the day that I stopped in order to go to the gym, instead of starting in on a second project more appropriate to the preprandial hour (reading, dinner prep, etc.).