The false azure in the window pane

High today, here: 23. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpoint: 9.
High today in TO: 25. Dewpoint then: 3. High dewpoint: 11.
Low today on the balcony: 9.1. High: 24.3. Currently: 17.6.

3-for-8, and my Cup winner's gone. That's pitiful. Speaking of which, the Flames looked like a Pat Quinn team or something.

Oh well. If at first you make an ass of yourself, you've got nothing to lose the second time: Sharks over Oilers; Ducks over Colorado; Ottawa over Buffalo; Jersey over Carolina; Sharks over Ducks; Ottawa over Jersey; Ottawa over San Jose. The seas have parted for the Senators. I'll be shocked if they don't win it, but I've been shocked four times already (Colorado being just mildly surprising), so.

It isn't, actually, so much that I almost feel the leaves growing. It's that I look at them, and they've grown again, and it's like every time I turn my back, they grow. They're sneaky. Sneaking up on me. They're time, sneaking up on me. Always missing something. I noticed last night that when I look out the front window, the tree (at my window, window tree) glows green now.

One oozy footstep behind, I chanced upon waxwing peeping ambiguously from above in the WLU--what do they call it? quadrangle? It's been so long since I've actually seen one--I always hear them before I see them, and usually don't see them at all; they used to peep around the neighbourhood for a couple of weeks more or less every February, on their way from somewhere to someplace, and I don't know if I'd seen a single one since I moved on--that I was doubtful whether they actually were waxwings. But I spiralled around and finally caught sight of that distinctive Laurentian photo brown, with a fleck of yellow.

I don't know how it slipped my mind yesterday to note my distress at Laxer's identifying Red Tories as "fiscally conservative and socially progressive". I mean, I know it's too far gone now to do anything about it, but I would've hoped for better from someone like Laxer, who was, you know, there. (I wonder to what extent this Red Tory cross-up is attributable to the Reform wipeout of the Progressive Conservatives: I imagine the reasoning going, Red Tories weren't welcome in Reform and its offspring; Reform was a conservative party founded in opposition to the Progressive Conservative party; typical mainstream Progressive Conservatives through the '80s and '90s, like Clark and Mulroney, were more or less socially progressive and fiscally "conservative" (after all, there must be something to the name, right?--though I think that was basically Clark's anti-Reform fabrication); therefore Red Tories are socially progressive and fiscally conservative. The problem, of course, being that the Red Tories were already gone from, or at least severely marginalized in, the Progressive Conservative party by the Mulroney years.)

So, today I read a book. Now, you might think I read a lot of books, but that's not actually the case. I read in books. I read around, here and there. I hadn't really intended to read this book today; actually, while I was looking for waxwings on the way to the library, I'd as yet no idea that I would look at this book today--so, when I was about fifteen pages from the end, I thought to myself, wow, I'm going to have read a book, this book. How about that. It is, I believe, the second book I have read this year, after Beloved, unless you count plays, which you might as well, in which case I've read a few more.

The book was, of course, short, or else I could not have read it today, because I read very slowly, which is a large part of why I don't read many books. The book was Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, together with Strauss's "Notes" (Strauss likes to write "Notes") on it. When I got to the library today, I figured that if I'm going to go back through Strauss, I might as well go right back, and Schmitt seems to be the place to start. (In another book--something like The Hidden Schmitt-Strauss Dialogue--I read some letters from Strauss to Schmitt. Sadly, nothing like his letters to Kojevnikov. Points out some ambiguities and possible sources of misunderstanding in Concept of the Political, and thanks Schmitt for helping get him a fellowship in Paris.) Schmitt's Concept, like I'd feared, doesn't add much to the concept that Schmitt is identified with: that politics is all about the distinction between friends and enemies. Actually, it just hammers on that, tautologically, syllogistically, for its 70-odd pages: all politics is founded on the distinction between friends and enemies; therefore, if the distinction between friends and enemies--and the real possibility of war--is eliminated (and, says Schmitt, I don't know if it'll happen, and it's none of my business to say whether it'd be a good thing), there will be no politics. One interesting thing I learned from it: Greek has different words for enemies such as enemies of the state and enemies such as my personal antagonists; Schmitt says that Christ's injunction to love your enemies refers only to personal antagonists and, therefore, says nothing against the idea of Crusades and so forth.

Strauss's essay, fortunately, is much more interesting, probing into what it is that Schmitt might be hoping to accomplish, and why he can't or won't say it outright. Strauss contends that, obviously, Schmitt is for politics, for the friend/enemy distinction, and that he's for it because, without it, life becomes unworthy of human beings--it becomes a mere matter of need-satisfaction and entertainment (he doesn't say "the last man" here, but there it is); it lacks seriousness. People, Strauss says (waving at Plato), differ fundamentally and necessarily over how it is best to live; if they take their differences seriously, then they will be willing to kill each other over them.

This will to seriousness is something that has worried me about the Straussians; I've caught it in just the little bit of Bloom I've read, too. I haven't read Sartre closely enough to be sure what he means by the "spirit of seriousness" (and this is the thing I've been wanting to get back to you on, saintalbatross), but the way I'd like to understand it is that it's a matter of taking, in bad faith, something frivolous as if it were serious--as if one really believed it was serious. (The thing I think of is, you're having an argument, an angry, vicious argument, when suddenly you realize that, even if you really believe in your position, it's ridiculous to be so worked up about it--what you realize is that you've been caught up in the spirit of seriousness.) So to be against the "spirit of seriousness" is not to be for frivolousness.

The spirit of seriousness, in this sense, is what perplexes and appals me about Nazism: Nazism is ridiculous! I mean, particularly, the wild overblown ceremonious pomposity of it. How could anyone have taken that stuff seriously--let alone so seriously? (But maybe, when something is so ridiculous, you have to take it so seriously if you're going to take it seriously at all.) It's what attracts me to extreme movements, too, even if I (now, at last) could not be a part of them. The Taliban blowing up those Buddhas: wow, who in the world takes art that seriously? The trouble, of course, is to find somewhere between frivolousness and the spirit of seriousness--or, at least, to say what it is, when you've found it.

(It's always so easy to give the wrong idea. (I do not believe that this is the fault of writing. Nothing becomes clearer in speech, or at least nothing that is not about the relationship between the speakers.) You could get completely the wrong idea from what I said about Heidegger and chocolate, just the sort of wrong idea that Heidegger wanted to dispense with when he--so legend has it--introduced a course on Aristotle by saying, "Aristotle was born, he lived, and he died." You don't want to reduce the thinker to trivialities; you don't want to say, ah, poor Heidegger, thinks he's so big but really just wants some chocolate.)