Тебе что не нравится советская власт?!

These days one is wondering about the fate of the Eastern borderlands of Europe - many not that eastern culturally at all. The soon to be leader of the Western world seems to have strangely retro dreams of pacts and spheres of influence with the other cleptocracy in Kremlin cheering on. Who knows what will happen in this unpredictable era of not so awfully funny clowns - or worse - but everything seems to indicate a return of history to Europe after 6-7 decades of stability. That does not bode well for small civilized nations. Strange landscapes these.

Emotion recollected in tranquility

Maybe not for the creation of poetry though. I find myself again returning to those furious affections that now seem both essential and, well, quaint, from the perspective of age. Essential as the colours never were so bright, the air never so clear and cold and only the moment so essential. Quaint as it seems that worries now are so much more profound, more serious, permanent. It's hardly the most original observation ever but it's is good to recollect that both assesments are simultaneously true: we can neither dismiss the past nor the present. I do miss the immediacy, the seriousness of those times (maybe not so much the searing pain), and I'm very glad that I got to learn and experience new things about life and love after leaving them.

Athens and Jerusalem

It is interesting to note that so far the attack has mostly concerned the Christian part of the twin pillars: the chipping away of the non-materialist universal values, of compassion and kindness, of charity. The cancer has also manifested in the many perversions of Christianity witnessed today (especially in the US), that have not much common at all with the old universal church and it's traditions variously kept and stressed in the traditional Western and Orthodox denominations (including the church of Rome which is no universal church). Instead there is a kind of mock-"Christianity" as fashioned by Capital: brutal and non-compassionate sanctioning all sorts of moral sacrileges.

Athens, I suppose, remains at the core: the rebellious idea of emancipation and personal liberty. But without the influence of Jerusalem it was a savage, barbarian creed - narrow to the very point of meaninglessness. And it might easily be the next target with this feast of greed and hatred and willful ignorance. For without christian-humanist values why should we be overly concerned with notions of citizens' rights and impartial justice, wouldn't they just be empty, undefended, uncomprehended past citadels then?

Well, this is history - we had lazy days of blind hedonism, minding our private businesses (as one should in a civilized society) but that might prove to be only a temporary pause and now those interested in maintaining the structures of enlightenment and reason might have to find another mode of passion and fighting to defend them.