Watching the Coronation and Other Saturday Morning Odd Jobs

 Do not think me a monarchist. However, this is historical and not likely to be repeated in my lifetime.

First thought: this is a religious ceremony; particularly a Protestant service, and even more particularly, a service meant to reinforce the Anglican Church.

Second, the choirs are nice, but are unintelligible to my ears. That is, until the Black choir came along.

Third, how old Charles looks, and how long his face has been in my world. The Prince of Wales is now also looking not so young, and rather challenged in the hair department. Where has the time gone?

Lastly, Charles is not the most auspicious of English royal names. Albeit, better than James and far less ominous than Richard.

I suggest reading Russia, Ukraine, and the Orthodox Church: The Aftermath? by Fr. Robert M. Arida from Public Orthodoxy. We Americans are not being told how much of the Ukraine War is a religious war:

The “triumph” of the Russian state and the Russian Church was further developed by the 19^th-century Slavophiles. With passion and persuasiveness, writers such as A. Khomiakov (1804-1860) and I. Kireyevsky (1806-1856) sought to recover Russia’s true Orthodox identity—an identity that, for them and for their followers, had been overtaken by the Western theologies of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and the philosophies of socialism, individualism, and capitalism.

During the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855), the political/ecclesiastical banner of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” was raised, calling Russia to free itself from Western hegemony and to return to its Orthodox roots. Under Nicholas’ minister of education, Serge Uvarov, the indivisible triad of church, politics, and nation was embraced as the cornerstone of Russian identity and to this day holds a place in the Russian psyche.

What exacerbates the Orthodox Church’s role in establishing something similar to the Vatican’s International Theological Commission or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that while Russkiy Mir is brazenly promoted by the Moscow Patriarchate, an inseparable relationship between state and church also prevails in Ukraine. Will the young autocephalous church of Metropolitan Epiphaniy of Kyiv be able to take the initiative to call for the canonical unity of the Orthodox churches in Ukraine and distance itself from political ideology? If so, will it, together with a free Russian Orthodox Church, be able to forge a path that will guide their respective governments towards truth, peace, and reconciliation? Will the leaders of the Orthodox churches in Russia and Ukraine be able to speak the truth in love (Eph.4:15), acknowledging the atrocities against human dignity and life that are the inevitable outcome for all parties involved in war? As former president Bill Clinton poignantly stated in his 1998 remarks to members of the Palestinian National Council and other related organizations, neither Israelis nor Palestinians “have a monopoly on pain and virtue.”

To purify the collective memory, to speak the truth in love, to move towards embracing the other requires courageous, humble, and visionary leadership. It requires ascending Golgotha. Presently, on the Russian side, barring a radical inner transformation, the words and actions of the dramatis personae have shown they are inadequate to the task. Vladimir Putin is no Nelson Mandela, and Patriarch Kirill is no Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On the Ukrainian side, in addition to reaching out to Metropolitan Onufriy, Metropolitan Epiphaniy has the formidable task of reminding his nation that victory over its invader will ultimately manifest itself when it embraces truth, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Well, I had not planned to watch it at all, and now it is 6:36 am. Time for Crap From The Past from last night.

Thornfield Hall has a short, sweet post that all Hoosiers should read: John Mellencamp, Midwestern Rock Star

M D Usher's Self-Satisfaction touches on a subject dear to the federal government. The PO keeps asking me questions on the subject, as if self-satisfaction poses a threat to the Republic. He seems disbelieving at my answer. Thing is, it is a rarity nowadays. Too many damaged emotional ties come to mind, cutting off any joyful memories; my body is too old and tired and achy to remain conscious during the act. I wish I had already stumbled onto this idea:

... The problem with Homo sapiens sapiens, according to Diogenes and his followers, lies in a fundamental confusion of needs and wants. We have become dependent, the Cynics argued, on unnecessary luxuries that have made us physically soft and morally weak. We are not satisfied with having our needs met but go to costly, harmful lengths in search of pleasure and novelty. Nonhuman animals, by contrast, live happily within the compass of their means – the environments that nature has provided for them. They understand their place in the world and accept it.

When the truth is, my heart is not in the act. If anything the last two months of CC has proven to me, I am leery of any more emotional ties. Death puts in its nose, reminding me of the future. My imagination searches unsuccessfully for any woman with whom I can make a connection that might make me forget the errors I made with other women for the whole of my life.

I did not vote in the primary election. Going to Bloomington remains a goal. I think roots leading to a future necessary for me to vote in determining candidates. Therefore, I am part of the 91%: Ridenour cruises in low turnout primary election.

Things were marginally better in Anderson: Approximately 11% of registered voters have cast ballots and Voting described as light but steady in Madison County.

The cleaning crew will be coming this morning and I need to take a walk. A crash this morning has set me behind, so I may wrap up this morning soon.

Public Orthodoxy has updated its website. I plan on spending time here, although I have not been fasting or have seen the inside of a church in 2 years.

Charles III has his new headgear and toys. Firefox or my internet connection has gotten balky; I just did my third reboot of the morning, Now, let's see what Chrome will do.

Terms and Conditions Apply The paradox of free speech. deserves a stand-alone post. Something the Second Amendment nut jobs have not understood is no right is absolute:

For readers seeking surety about the state of the law when it comes to free speech, Baron only makes one point with resolve—“Free speech is never absolute.” That conviction does not make Baron susceptible to relativism or cynicism about such a crucial right. Originalists place their faith in the belief that the intentions of the framers of the Constitution prove knowable and, in turn, authoritative. In contrast, Baron places his faith in the courts to interpret the Constitution and the willingness of people of good faith to live within the scope of such interpretations.

Although 30 years have passed since the publication of Stanley Fish’s book, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And That’s a Good Thing (1993), the book covers some of the same ground as Baron’s. Fish would likely agree with Baron’s argument that the stability of law does not rest on words “but on the willingness of society to be bound by law, to accept legal interpretation, [and] to acknowledge the need to challenge an interpretation from time to time.” The law itself provides a means by which agreement and disagreement are forged. While a more nebulous source of faith than originalists might prefer, Baron and Fish invite readers to invest their faith in the abilities of the courts and the citizens whose interests the courts represent when interpreting the law.

What about when it comes to coercion and speech? Baron writes about compelled speech, seditious speech, obscene speech, and threatening speech—and in each case he is both informative and essential. Baron opens chapter seven by acknowledging “The First Amendment prevents the government from interfering with your right to speak, with some exceptions.” He goes on, however, to offer an important reminder that the First Amendment “also stops the government from compelling you to speak, though here, too, terms and conditions apply.” This chapter includes a discussion of the oath of office taken by US presidents as well as a brief discussion concerning the intersection of the law with efforts by various dictionary editors to ascribe meaning to words. But Baron goes on to draw our attention to the practice commonly referred to as the Miranda warning emanating from the 1966 Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona.

Only toddlers think they have unrestricted rights. Unlimited liberty is license, is Thomas Hobbes' law of nature where life is short, nasty, and brutish. Which does a good job of describing America where people are shooting one another willy-nilly, 

I am not sure why I signed up for Pinterest. I do not have time for it. Whatever was the reason, I have forgotten and now have these emails clogging my Inbox. See what you think of this. I have to admit Lew Wallace's study in Crawfordsville, Indiana caught my eye.

Transistor Sister #165 Birthday Special April 30, 2023 works well enough - for now.

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Weil, Gandhi, Cioran, and Mishima on humility also deserves a stand-alone post.

The book begins with a moment of panic in an imagined scenario in which a plane engine has caught fire and passengers face the possibility of their imminent demise. In this case, all are fine after a safe landing, but such scares, according to Brădățan, make us realize that our life is just a brief moment between “two instantiations of nothingness”: “Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly.” His premise is that the reality of death and the individual human’s smallness in relation to space and time—“We are next to nothing, in fact”—lies behind most of our endeavors, from religion to art, which “seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.” Yet many such endeavors only obscure the fundamental reality of things. Instead, Brădățan calls for an “eyes-wide-open approach” that can remove us from our immediate surroundings and allow for the contemplation needed to transform this reality. Far from being an occasional exception, failure is an inherent part of human life. He suggests that direct confrontation with failures large and small can provide a “failure-based therapy” to help us handle this fact.

The book interweaves philosophical meditations on the meaning of failure with stories of particular people who experienced notable defeats in their lives and in their thoughts. Each chapter focuses on a case that illustrates a particular form of failure: physical (French philosopher Simone Weil), political (Indian anticolonialist Mahatma Gandhi), social (Romanian-born French philosopher Emil Cioran), and biological (Japanese author Yukio Mishima). These minibiographies, and those of others whom Brădățan mentions more briefly, such as George Orwell, Leo Tolstoy, and Seneca, provide vivid illustrations, in all too painful detail, of the failures of their subjects and, by extension, humankind more generally. By turn, these chapters give attention to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, totalitarianism, and the rise of capitalism, status anxiety, and consumerism—and still other historical developments.

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But Brădățan’s argument in praise of failure rests on its ability to make us humble. We err. Others err. The world falls short. We will die. And knowledge of this liberates us from what? Seemingly from the notion that there is anything besides failure.

There is much there I could say that justifies my thinking these past 13 years. I did think I was a failure, and I sought to destroy my life. I even failed at suicide. Except, it gave to me the opportunity to examine my life more closely than I ever had. Which is why you are reading this - I found myself a fool and have tried to do better with the time left me.

Adding this feels right:

Smokey Robinson has a new album, Gasms, which Pitchfork gives a good review. Robinson has never been a soul performer that has inspired me - I am more Marvin Gave and Stevie Wonder. But he is 83, and I know he is great, so you might want to check him out.

Guardian book reviews: The Wounded World review: brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois at war and The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper review – reclaiming Shakespeare. Anyone claiming America has no systemic racism without having read Du Bois needs to shut up. Those who think Western civilization must be racist, without any self-critiques of European triumphalism, should consider this from the latter:

Historians including Miranda Kaufmann and David Olusoga have supplied ample examples of diversity in Tudor Britain, and Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise. Her critique is at its most absorbing and original when she shows how complicated his approach was. “Shakespeare often challenges us to hold two contradictory views simultaneously – it was how his mind worked,” she writes, and demonstrates how figures such as Shylock and Aaron were both defined by stereotypes as well as undermining them. Her arguments, cumulatively, come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work

Thinking about American Lit? Check out the interview,  Tyriek White on his acclaimed public housing novel. 

Cagibi 18 is out.

It 8:51 am. The sun is shining. I need to decide whether to do independent posts on two articles or not. Not. The links are above. I will add something that might get you to read the whole article, but I think I want to work more on the screenplay. Can anyone say "Great White Whale"?

That  religiosity and creativity are not mutually incompatible is what I got from The Scottish Review's Temple and Tartan: a work of many starting points:

From his book Temple and Tartan: Psalms, Poetry and Scotland (Handsel Press, 2022) I was taken, in particular, by his focus on Psalm 114, which deals with the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and how he links this with Dante's reference to the same psalm in the Purgatorio; we can bear in mind that Dante himself had been an exile. Here, then, is that understanding of migrancy, of uprootedness, which is such a leading leitmotif in Jock's book. He cites many instances of the plight of refugees in our own time: 'Zabiullah sips tea in a tent; / stench of sewage hangs around / him and seven thousand others, / waiting for news of asylum. / watching a rat scuttle past'.

David the Psalmist is the spiritual ancestor of Dante and other poets, such as George Herbert, cited by Jock Stein in Temple and Tartan, as well as of Jock himself, and of his Scots predecessor as a makar-minister, Alex S Borrowman. David was both poet and prophet, at the nexus of those two great forces of spirituality, poetry and religion. Jock's canonical catholicity allows him to include Hugh MacDiarmid, that professed atheist and communist, who has long been considered as both a (philosophical) materialist and a mystic.

Similarly, it cannot be denied that the poet of Faust left us one of the most profound works of Western literature: Stephen Spender said of Goethe that 'in his beliefs, he was a humanist, often siding with the pagan as against the Christian world, but with an obsessed preoccupation with Christ and a pietas that extended beyond the churches to ancient pagan and modern Oriental religions'. Poets can often be found at the meeting of opposites; it's part of their job description. MacDiarmid was often moved to quote that magnificently wayward Christian, Søren Kierkegaard, as much as Karl Marx, if not more so.

Let me also point you writers reading this to A collection of the unexpected, also from The Scottish Review:

'Balkan Bombshells Anthology', translated by Will Firth (published by Istros Books)

As the translator Will Firth says in his introduction, there are many different styles and themes in this anthology of stories from 17 Serbian and Montenegrin women writers. What struck me most about this collection of different writings was the unexpectedness, the singularity of each one, there was no sense of conformity to an idea of what a short story should be. Some of them are excerpts from longer works, and some are uncategorisable texts, which I particularly like because they clearly feel they do not have to conform to any style or formula.

This sense of the unexpected can come from topic or from form, as almost all the stories have a determined trajectory of their own. They will not bring you the happy ending you might desire, and not necessarily the 'twist at the end' either. Some of these writings are like impassioned cries or pleas; sometimes, like cleverly camouflaged exquisite little parcels of revenge, and sometimes the kind of wandering path you might expect from a river, a path not determined in advance, a path that will take you through luxurious countryside or abandoned and beaten-up or partially destroyed urban sites. 

It looks like rain.

Odds and ends for the morning:

• Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" 
• Sherman Alexie's Substack
  
• Five Things I Learned in Creative Writing Class
• The latest Times Literary Supplement is full of interesting material (and I have run out of time for this morning)
  

I have had my two hot dogs. Time for me do my walkabout.

4 crashes. Even Chrome locked up. A mystery I will not try to solve now.

sch 10:04 am