Misery in November

Today was a strenuous day, where I did intense work and also had to analyze how and where things went wrong, answered questions as usual (which was mostly enjoyable), and compiled reports on our progress on various tasks until 6:30 or so, which wasn't terribly late. I ate lunch and talked with the colleagues in my team, and even read a little news during the lunch hour; and because I ate only for 20 minutes also drafted an appeal letter related to an Amnesty International 'urgent action.' The hard, environmentally unfriendly and humanly exploitative work of preparing for the frenzy of Black Friday has made me so uneasy that I feel the need to do something in between just to rebalance my senses of proportion and of worthy aims, and to connect to a real and humane need.

In the evening I realized that a task I thought was done was not done. After standing at the window in the kitchen to gather myself and think how to tackle the task independently, I decided that I was rational and strong enough to ask for advice from the older-brother-ish colleague. In the end, the discussion will be postponed to tomorrow.

That said, I felt guilty in retrospect because of a remark I'd made earlier today to 'my' team: we were speaking of the weather, and I said (more or less) that doing work for the task-that-was-not-done-after-all client more or less replaces the necessity of seeking warmer climates amid these winter days, because being in hell is warm enough. It was perhaps more truthful than professional. And perhaps I was tempting fate.

At 6:55 p.m. I went outside in the dark to do the 30 minutes of walking and running for this week. Now I am at intervals of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of walking. It was snowing, and at first my spirits lifted, but then I realized that the snow was melting in my hair and that I was cold; also, I had relatively low energy. Like drinking alcohol liberally, I suppose, endurance sports (if one can dignify my beginner's training by that name) are more terrible and painful if one's spirits are already drained or made aggressive by negative thoughts. Toward the end my run, the knee that I bruised falling on the sidewalk on Mehringdamm hurt, but so little and it could have been so much worse that I pitied myself just half-heartedly. There were many other joggers out, so I wasn't alone.

It has been bad for my morale to think that no matter how hard I work before Black Friday, what I have to anticipate after that is a forensic inspection of my team. It is suspected of being inefficient by the management. The inspection is being postponed until afterward because everyone is so busy. It feels like one harrowing ordeal will be followed by another. While I always feel insecure about whether I'm doing things precisely and enough, in this case I'm not certain the inspection is deserved or if it's based on misunderstandings. I don't like to defend myself, especially because I don't want to force people to take my word when the facts speak for themselves, and because I don't want to justify myself if it might mean throwing doubt on other colleagues' descriptions of the situation; and I don't want to waste brain power on that drama when I could be making sure that the workload is done instead.

Anyway, as I told myself during the run, there are things in life that you can comfortably know that you can do; you just need to realize that at the same time you shouldn't expect them to be easy and be surprised if they aren't.

Before I left, the only other two colleagues in the office left together and wished me goodbye, but I had the distinct impression they were displeased about something, which is awkward because they were the managers. Then I went out into the cold, too. The U-Bahn had a Betriebsstörung, I left the warmth to walk to the nearby S-Bahn station, the S-Bahn came promptly, I missed the connecting train by 20 seconds or fewer, and therefore walked the last ten to fifteen minutes home rather than wait 9 minutes in the frosty temperatures. It was not my day. I have to admit that I am also cranky and angry in general. But I did make progress in the Sartre.

Also, Ge. had cooked cream of wheat pudding for dinner, Mama and I watched (in my case) excerpts of Miss Fisher's Mysteries, and an ex-colleague wrote me a beautiful email that I just discovered this evening. And I'm really glad to be at home, but trembling in my boots at the thought of tomorrow. I also need to make sure that everyone in the team has plenty to do, because today there was speak of being at a loss, and I definitely get in trouble if people are at a loss for things to do even if we are supposedly buried under work. The problem is just that there are tasks that are so intricate that sometimes I don't even know if it's 'my' team that should be working on fixing them.

Sartre and Communist Party Plots in Fiction

After finishing Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne extracts from the Larousse volume, I've begun reading Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd never heard of it before.

The premise of Sartre's play is intensely interesting: The client king of Illyria (~Yugoslavia) bypasses his weakening Nazi hegemons to reach across political lines to the establishment liberal democrats and even to the communists. The communists partly wish to ally themselves against the Nazis with the other political parties, as the king requests, but other communists resort to assassination to prevent the alliance from forming.

A young communist party member who has grown tired of his prosaic work as a writer for the party's newsletter, and wants to emulate the violent activists amongst his comrades, becomes the instrument of this faction. He is the protagonist of the play.

While the plot, as described, has far-reaching historical and political implications, the scene starts small in the utilitarian lodgings of Olga, a devoted female communist party member, with various conversations about ways and means. As Sartre was a member of the French Resistance movement, I wonder how much the conversations and plottings of his fictional characters reflect the methods and discussions of his experience.

Sartre published this play in 1948, I think, about imaginary events in the previous five years. His exploration of contemporaneity is not made vague or distorted through excess subjectivity, and his matter-of-fact lack of reinterpretation or emotional overlay in his depiction of wartime political agitation is something that I think most filmmakers, etc., began to lose in the 1950s as one began to kitschify, retouch, or moralize more.

And the 'tableaux' are scripted with perfect tension — Agatha Christie might feel envy. The words (each, at times, seems to let fall a new insight or a new turn of the plot) have even greater weight because of his basically worded yet impeccably aimed French. The film is ripe for a film adaptation; I could imagine one in the vein of Witness for the Prosecution. I think Sartre's conscious exploitation of suspense verges on the sensationalistic, but the play is not a chore to read.

I haven't greatly enjoyed Olga's character. She is superficially tough. But whether Olga is an 'idealized' figure who sets forth Sartre's wishes or whether she represents an observation of gender roles in that milieu and at that time, either way this idea that a woman is a handy party-political tool is depressing.

The main gripe I have is that 'disappearing into the 1940s' in imagination before and after work, is a weird feeling and not a nice thing. To be both preachy and prim, the murder and mayhem should not be enjoyable because the playwright repeatedly raises and gratifies curiosity about these intrigues that take place as part of an especially gruesome moment in history. In Sartre's time, people would have lived this world firsthand, but through the buffers of the intervening decades I think it is too easy for the reader to feel detached, as if these things didn't happen to people like you and me. Sartre's fictional Illyrian communists also make use of death squads, however, and in the year of Jamal Khashoggi's murder this is as immediately nauseating and grim as ever.

Lastly, I suppose it is a commentary on the twists and turns of history that the only other time I've read a play or any work set in Illyria, it was a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night?). And, riddled with poverty and the Armada and other strife though Shakespeare's era was, his Illyria was infinitely more cheerful and innocent.

Pumpkin Cookies and a Pas de Chat

This morning I went to work as usual, and for lunch we had an Asian-style dish of pudgy udon noodles with chicken or beef (I can't remember which), perhaps ginger, and certainly miso, with a few curls of spring onion on top. That said, I don't think I know what miso even tastes like. There was also a salad with spinach and beet greens in it, and I really like the colour and the earthy flavour of beet greens. They also remind me of the time (a really long time ago) when one of my grandfathers grew beets in the garden. They looked like overgrown radishes and they had a real, fresh, lively, comforting flavour, and you could also taste a hint of the dust that they were caked in before they were washed and cooked.

Anyway, in the evening I went to the ballet class. Thanks in part to the rush hour train traffic, I arrived over 15 minutes late. The preliminary floor exercises had ended, and so I began with the barré. We practiced tendus, pas de cheval, ronds de jambe, and glissades; then went over to the floor exercises that were less about turnout directly and rather for strengthening the abdominal muscles and the muscles along the insides of the legs; and finally performed the usual sets of four pliés followed by four jumps. Today was one of those rare but appalling days where I jumped like a potato sack, and did not suggest springiness and grace in the least. We also ended the class by trouping across the floor diagonally, two at a time, in a sort of Noah's Ark of pas de chat, and it would require time and consideration to determine where I disgraced myself less.

Either way, I'm afraid that I consider that my inflexibility and un-ballerina-like stature give me a carte blanche. I try not to bring my teacher to tears with how horrible everything looks, and to achieve technically what I am capable of doing. But in return, I happily suppose that nobody demands that I become a new Margot Fonteyn.

Then I went grocery-shopping, almost weepy with gratitude at having the leisure to do this given the schedule of the past weeks. And I bought frozen berries with quark; eggs and bacon and other ingredients for a quiche lorraine; as well as dark chocolate to chop up and add to vegan pumpkin-and-oat cookies that I am thinking of trying to bake for a colleague.

In the U-Bahn I read more of the Politics and De la littérature. Altogether I felt that this day was an islet of peace and sanity in the ocean of Black Friday.

Then, of course, tomorrow (or the day after, due to the time zone differences and the length of time it takes to count ballots) we will know what happened in the midterm elections in the USA...

Aristotle and a Few Sonatas

This weekend I did overtime work again, so I have to squeeze as much weekend into one day as possible. The weather is not particularly holiday weather. It is as if a watercolour grey is soaking the sky, and the absence of light that manages to get through the clouds has made it gloomy even at quarter to 4 in the afternoon. In contrast the tree leaves are very bright and steeped with colour, but there aren't too many of them left.

Because I have been playing a lot of shorter pieces on the piano in the past few months — Spanish Dances by Enrique Granados, Hungarian Dances and waltzes by Brahms, the theme from the Third Man arranged for piano, children's pieces by Tchaikovsky, an arrangement of "La Vie en rose," ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin, Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," etc. — I decided last weekend to begin playing longer pieces again.

Beethoven's later sonatas are less approachable, as I've said before, than his earlier ones. I think it is easier to plumb the young and confident Beethoven who had in some respects a popular conventionality; it is harder for me to figure out what he was thinking of when he composed his later music, which feels more abstract and personal or introverted. At times his later music still has elements of the 'classical' style. But it is classical through the lens of romanticism, or nostalgically classical: so I feel that to really understand it, one needs to scrape beneath the surface and capture the ambiguity in one's interpretation.

Today I tried passages of his 'Halloween Sonata' (i.e. his last sonata; I might be the only person who thinks of it as Halloweenish, but I think it has aspects of the magisterial and gothic Bach organ toccata about it) as well as the Sonata appassionata and the Waldstein Sonata. The last time these I looked at these sonatas regularly must have been around 2008 to 2010. I think I was finally able to hit on a reasonable, original approach today, aside from stumbling over the notes; whereas it quite annoyed me a decade ago that I could only manage bad imitations of excellent performances I had heard on YouTube. When I was a turbulent teenager I found Beethoven's early music quite soothing as it reflected what I felt, and his twilight music might become a friend and companion now.

I've slowly reached the point where I think I need to go 'underground' with my current dissatisfactions in life. It would be too boring and annoying to keep filling people's ears with them; and generally a good way to avoid that is to 'talk' with composers and instruments, instead of with family and friends, and to transmute those thoughts into harmless art.

The other thing is that I have a strong sense that I just need to keep going, and things will become better, and I'll be annoyed in future if I give up now.

Tackling the intellectual culture of Beethoven's sonatas reminded me of reading Aristotle in the U-Bahn lately. Their breadth and gnomic style are, at least, traits that the composer and the philosopher both have, and I suppose that Beethoven's art partook of the political. In Aristotle's Politics he is of course trying to cover a vast subject: political organizations and history in the Greek city-states. He might get a few things wrong. Despite his systematic method, other people might arrive at radically different interpretations from his own; there is more than one truth. It is clear that he is writing as one of many theoreticians that he knew, and not expecting anyone to accept his version as the only version. In that respect I think that 18th-century and other interpreters did him a great disservice in taking his Poetics as dogma rather than suggestion. Not to over-interpret, but this is one reason why I adore what I know of Greek culture much more than what I know of Roman culture: Greek culture often acknowledges that one might be wrong about things, and that even the gods don't always know what they're doing.

In the Politics, in my view, Aristotle even begins to contradict his own words after the first three books or so: I find that he undermines the orthodoxies he has set up about the aristocracy's superiority to the rabble in the first book, by being a passionate advocate of the relative wisdom of the people and a passionate critic of oligarchs' and tyrants' abuses in the later books. Also, the more he tries to define what a polity is, or an aristocracy, etc., the less I am sure what his definition really is, and if he has actually kept the same definition that he used earlier in his work or has changed his mind about it. It makes me feel stupid because I cannot remember his exact thoughts for comparison.

As for Madame de Staël's De la littérature, I have to admit that in weak moments I did agree with her argument that Aristotle's work is partly more a synthesis of accumulated wisdom than a development of own ideas.

"Ce qu'il écrit en littérature, en physique, en métaphysique, est l'analyse des idées de son temps. Historien du progrès des connaissances à cette époque, il les rédige, il les place dans l'ordre dans lequel il les conçoit. C'est un homme admirable pour son siècle; mais c'est vouloir forcer les hommes à marcher en arrière, que de chercher dans l'antiquité toutes les vérités philosophiques; [...]" (pp. 75-6, Paris: Charpentier, 1860, via Google Books)

=~ 'His writing on literature, on physics, on metaphysics, is the analysis of the ideas of his time. A historian of the progress in the various types of knowledge at that time, he edits them; he places them in the order in which he conceives them. He is an admirable man for his century. But searching in antiquity for all the truths of philosophy, is wanting to force men to regress.'

One weak moment occurred when I was reading these pearls of wisdom:

"Es müssen entweder alle über alles, das genau unterschieden ist, urteilen, wobei sie entweder durch Wahl oder durch das Los eingesetzt sind, oder alle über alles, einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl; oder daß eben im Hinblick auf einige identische Fälle die einen durch das Los eingesetzt sind, die anderen aber gewählt. [... Und] entweder sind die Richter über alles wiederum aus einigen bestellt durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los oder einerseits durch das Los, andererseits durch Wahl, oder einige Gerichte sind über dieselben Angelegenheiten aus durch das Los Bestimmten oder aus Gewählten eingesetzt."* (p. 243, Book IV, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989)

I felt like dashing my brains out on the walls of the U-Bahn train to end the torment, after trying to understand all the grammatical and logical twistings and turnings, in that terrible and intellectually unfruitful paragraph.

(* In English: "[...] they must either appoint from all by vote, or from all by lot, or from some by vote, or from some by lot, or partly in one way and partly in the other—I mean partly by vote and partly by lot [... F]or here again the judges for all cases may be drawn by vote from a certain class, or for all cases by lot from a certain class, or some courts may be appointed by lot and others by vote, or some courts may be composed of judges chosen by lot and by vote for the same cases."

[Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944. via Perseus.tufts.edu]
Rackham's English translation is much more lucid than the German one from Reclam, if one fills in the places where I've put ellipses; so here is a disclaimer: I'm doing his text a disservice.)