by Peter Dimock
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EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)
This same notebook entry must be read differently when it bears different template markings. The November 7, 2004, entry typed on the loose sheet of paper Tallis left for me to find in the fall of 2015 must be read not against the association with Audubon’s birds and childhood on a sugar plantation in Haiti, but against the associations with Tallis’s testimony on the morning of April 28, 2010. In the autograph of the notebook in which this entry appears, Tallis inserted three typed pages containing the transcription of the testimony of a witness who had spoken to the committee before him, Kenneth Anderson, a legal and policy expert on national security law. His testimony reads:
Legal Adviser to the State Department, Harold Koh, in his recent speech on March 25, 2010, said four things concerning the legality of the use of armed drones by US personnel: 1) that the targeting of individual persons beyond an active battlefield was not illegal because it was US military practice to do so during World War II; 2) that the sophistication of new technologies had no bearing on the ethics of the use of weapons with the possible exception if it increased the indiscriminateness of casualties (the opposite he found to be the case with drones); 3) that the use of drones against targeted individuals without legal process or due warning did not constitute the war crime of extrajudicial execution because in fighting terror the United States has the right to defend itself with lethal force in an international context separate from armed conflict as a technical legal and constitutional matter; and 4) that there has long been a ban on domestic political assassination but that “assassination” has never been legally or legislatively defined.
Beneath this transcription of testimony Tallis has typed the following long note: “Elsewhere Anderson said he had been heartened in his testimony before the committee by the opinion of a former Legal Adviser to the State Department who in a lecture at a law school in 1989 had said that ‘targeted killings in self-defense of the state as the object of terrorism have been authoritatively determined by the federal government to fall outside the assassination prohibition.’ But no such international legal justification of self-defense exists in the wording of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which speaks only of the right of self-defense against ‘an armed attack against a member of the United Nations.’ The preemptive right of self-defense, established by the Caroline case, requires that there must exist ‘a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation,’ and furthermore that any action taken must be proportional, ‘since the act justified by the necessity of self-defense, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it.’ No conceivable meaning of threat to the American nation posed by terrorists meets these criteria for justifying the lawless, agentless impunity of the anonymous murder of unidentified individuals beyond the battlefield now being systematically perpetrated by persons acting in the name of the United States through the use of drones.”
Immediately following the transcript of Professor Anderson’s testimony, Tallis has typed more testimony from another witness at the hearing, Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on the law of just wars. This was the testimony he read verbatim at the hearing instead of reading from his own prepared text. Aloud, he told them: “Drones are not legal for use outside active combat zones … Restricting drones to the battlefield is the single most important rule governing their use. Yet, the United States is failing to follow it more often than not. The United States Congress has not declared war. We would have it that we are a peaceful nation pursuing foreign enemies who have attacked us. At the very time we are trying to win hearts and minds to respect the rule of law, we ourselves are failing to follow its most basic rule…. But the battlefield is a real place. Battlefields and armed conflicts are not fictions created by lawyers…. Outside of a war or an armed conflict, everyone is a civilian when it comes to the use of lethal force. Armed conflicts cannot be created on paper, in a legal memo that then translates into the right to kill as if you were on a real battlefield…. Only a lawful combatant may carry out the use of killing with combat drones. The CIA and civilian contractors have no right to do so…. We know from empirical data, and this is my final point, that the use of major military force in counterterrorism operations has been counterproductive. A Just War doctrine teaches that we should always and only use force when we can accomplish more good than harm.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)
Early on in my editing of his notebooks, I joined Tallis and our father, Justin, in learning by heart the first three cantos of Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian—a language I too never formally learned and have never spoken out loud. (All of us, perhaps, are trying to bring our fathers home inside a language whose sound of immediacy and ground of truth are unrelated to translation.) In memorization I sometimes sense the mind being given access to language’s spontaneous and unbounded generation of the next word within another duration of continuity. I sometimes feel the memorized phrases fighting assimilation by an algorithm in the present generating a violence of determination whose logic of thought as monetization overrides the lines’ original oral duration of potential reciprocity. I took it upon myself to add the following exercise of verbatim memorization to juxtapose against our father’s doctrine of “no translation”: “The concept of algorithm is used to define the notion of decidability. That notion is central for explaining how formal systems come into being starting from a small set of axioms and rules. In logic the time an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related to our customary physical dimension. From such uncertainties that characterize ongoing work, stems the unavailability of a definition of algorithm that suits both concrete (in some sense) and abstract usage of the term.”
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FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON November 8, 2004
—How, in our cowardice, are we to inhabit the next word now?
Poscia ch’ io v’ebbi alcun riconosciuto,
vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui
che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto.
Incontanente intesi e certo fui…
[from Inferno, Canto 3]
(After I saw and recognized some of them / I saw and knew the shade of him / who through cowardice made the great refusal. I suddenly understood and knew with certainty…)
[I.1; II.3; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.1]
1.1: As soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words….
II. 3: On Burdicks Hill
III. 3a. The history we are living is being narrated as a military emergency. 3b. Structural change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments of the metamorphosis of literary time …
IV. 3: The piles of heads disappear in the distance. / I am diminished there. No one / will remember my name. But in the sound / of the rustle of pages and children’s games / I will rise from the dead to say / “the sun.” (Osip Mandelstam)
V. 1: St. Michael in Trees at the head of his armies …
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EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)
My personal association to this entry: my vision of Sari on first meeting her as a child. Her worth. This cowardice: my father’s, my brother’s, and now my own. How are we to remake my father’s doctrine into something valuable after all this time?
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EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)
January 25, 2018
Late in assembling this volume of selections from Tallis’s notebooks, I made the decision to introduce to my practice of his method a terza rima of rhymed thoughts instead of Dante’s rhyming sounds (in which our father so strongly believed). I use this rhyme scheme as my personal accompaniment to the noise of the helicopter’s rotors over my brother’s head during his vision in Sheep Meadow. With this additional mental noise I sense I will be able more accurately to track my brother’s descent into silence. Dante’s scheme of “chained” end rhymes for his eleven-syllabled lines can be represented like this:
a,b
,a; b,c,b; c,d,c; d,e,d; etc., ad infinitum
My scheme for meditating upon my brother’s entries is made from three sets of rhymed thoughts as a backdrop against which to interpret his entries’ progress toward his present agitated, sometimes catatonic silence:
a,b,c; c,a,b; b,c,a; a,b,c; c,a,b; b,c,a; a,b,c; etc.
To more accurately reproduce the noise in my mind against which my reading of my brother’s notebooks takes place, I employ the overlay of the cross-rhythm (using the same sets of thoughts) established by hearing their serial simultaneity, three over four, within the same duration as an entry’s contemplation. Like this:
a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a,| a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | etc.
a,b,c,c; | a,b,b,c; | a,a,b,c; | c,a,b,b; | c,a,a,b; | c,c,a,b; | b,c,a,a; | b,c,c,a; | b,b,c,a; | a,b,c,c; | etc.
(This exercise takes patience at first. Of course, you must choose thoughts of your own if you find mine to be inadequate to the task of creating in the mind an accurate accompanying sound for a just American history.)
Here are my three sets of a terza rima of thought:
1.
a: Donald J. Trump is a mirror not an aberration.
b: We lack a language adequate to the history we are living.
c: This has happened many times before and has often generated new forms of thought and expression.
2. a:
a: The undecidability of the word.
b: The exterminatory productivity of global capitalism.
c: The intuition of a universal mutual intelligibility and therefore of a potentially universal historical justice implicit in the fact of the natural human language faculty.
3.
a: The frayed scrim of continuity made from clichéd fragments of an American exceptionalist triumphalism. (One of these is: “We the People.”)
b: The intuition of an ecstatic history of universal reciprocity as a counternarrative to accounts of New World slavery motivated by its beneficiaries’ perceived interests in minimizing the continuing enormities of its harms.
c: A new history of print-culture literacy as the anticipatory creation in the midst of material abundance of a nonmonetized duration of thought for the practice of an unbounded reciprocity among equally valued lives.
Why do we still lack a popular vernacular form for the truth of the news of the exterminatory history we are living with which successfully to refuse it?
Everyone will readily agree that it is of the greatest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Does not lucidity, the very openness of the mind upon the true, consist of catching a glimpse of the permanent possibility of war?
(Emmanuel Levinas)
Entries from Tallis Martinson’s Notebooks:
April 5, 2010
—Lyrically—lightly—does it—St. Michael in Trees; St. Stephen getting even: The child shot by American soldiers from the helicopter after the journalists were killed: the left leg severed just below the knee: “This one will live.” This question of knowledge; this question of fact; this question of act and its disclosure. [I.7; II.3; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
April 18, 2010
—Every moment flows evenly toward a white field filled with commonplace thoughts and the sound of untranslated—suddenly untranslatable—speech. [I.4; II.2; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
August 2, 2010
—Sweet Lord: This hand toward her in the New World light: This destruction was not planned. I swear this by what I know. This mechanical revolution—this absence of help: Now this lust amid the screams of the heathen: This perfection of Grace lying behind what we did: I will guard admittance through its door: A lasting joy. A coyote lopes across a field bordered by stone walls that were made and abandoned years ago—the last time Englishmen pushed this far into the alien land. [I.5; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
August 18, 2010
—The November sun, this warmth of wind heard in the upper branches—against nature, as if the birds were speaking their enormous happiness in human tongue—untranslatable by anyone. Then, after we begin to hear it, we realize that it is the sound of helicopters’ rotors that we have been waiting for all along—ever since we left Saigon. St. Michael in Trees. [I.6. II.2; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
August 19, 2010
—The wind when it comes will counsel caution and bring a plague. Your armies are scattered. Bright metal reflecting a child’s perfect will and purpose. We caused this, and it happened: there will be no time soon in which to remember—no place from which to know the perfection of its logic as a sweetness of mind. [I.1; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.1; V.3] [I.1; II.3; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
November 4, 2010
—A fall into history—this book of November reveries from gardens of earthly delight: a Puritan drone against the play of interpretations: a master narrative for the sake of lyrical presence—an opening onto absolute power. An event—however inconsequential—has to imply a redemptive logic to be coherent—listening to birds without distraction, listing their sightings with a pencil in a battered notebook; St. Michael in Trees—rumors of his promised victory. [I.2; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.1] [I.2; II.3; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
January 27, 2012
—Print literacy’s fixed point of view enforces the deferment of justice until some narrative end to all of history. Until then, we victors are off the hook—accidental enablers of perfection behind the back of our own actions in collusion with the state—however criminal its official acts formally may be judged to be at the end. By then we will have learned to repent and achieve the reconciliation necessary for final victory. [I.3; II.4; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
August 16, 2012
—There is goodness too in history. It shouldn’t be so hard to find: this ability to create wealth out of flows through the body—and flows of bodies—in time. Why does love give way to the rage to possess beyond the limits of a just reciprocity? In the moment of thought we are each other. Unlimited possession is also a lasting duration we have made no provision to survive.
Our father, Justin, falsely gentle—a fierce child; our father, against translation—believer in the immediacy of the word, bringing his father home in his mind from France in June of 1919 before a child has access to word-logic, aetat eighteen months: all the guns in Europe exploding in both the infant and his father’s failing thought. [I.4; II.4; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
March 2, 2015
—No peace beyond the line. Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange [There is a blessed lady in heaven who feels such pity] / Haiti just above my head: These painted birds. [I.5; II.4; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
April 5, 2015 (The Notebooks’ last entry)
—Birds at an angle of flight—something is falling there beneath them—inside a place of thought: St. Michael will lead all God’s armies of light—by what sign will his certain victory over every evil be made manifest? Oh, to be among his foot soldiers on that day! [I.6; II.5; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
April 28, 2004
First airing by CBS of report documenting systematic torture by US personnel of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib
November 7, 2004
The Second Battle of Fallujah begins and lasts until December 23
April 2, 2005
Battle of Abu Ghraib prison
April 5, 2010:
Release of gunsight footage from July 12, 2007, of an air-to-ground attack by two US AH-64 Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed seven unarmed men, including two journalists, and severely wounded two children
April 18, 2010
Iraqi Special Operations Forces kill ISIL’s leadership, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. A US Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter supporting the operation crashes killing a Ranger sergeant and injuring the aircrew
August 2, 2010
The New York Times announces partial withdrawal of US troops
August 18, 2010
The official end of US effective combat operations in Iraq
August 19, 2010
Operation Iraqi Freedom officially ends
November 4, 2010
Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens new attacks on the US
January 27, 2012
A suicide bomber in Baghdad kills 33 people and wounds 65 others
August 16, 2012
A series of bombings kills more than 90 people across Iraq
March 2, 2015
Coalition of Iraqi Armed Forces and militia numbering around 30,000 launch an offensive against Islamic State positions in Tikrit
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON
November 5, 2010
—I have decided, in the midst of my practice of my new method of historical justice, to draft, in the liberal manner, an essay titled “The American Dream as Secular Transcendence.” I want to state in the old way (without my template’s scaffolding) the truth, to which this essay’s way of speaking has contributed, that the enormities of practical transformation (including self-transformation) required for the enactment of the universal equality called for in the Declaration of Independence are of such a scale and such a fundamental nature as to render the idea of their actual achievement either hallucinatory or derisory in the opinion of most beneficiaries of the nation’s values and institutions. The essay will go on to argue that in the violence of the incoherence issuing from such fundamental contradictions between vision and reality lies the ground for a new language of reciprocity that bears inside it a new history—and therefore a new experience and valuation—of equality. American neoliberalism’s astounding success in global wealth creation through capitalist extraction (the sheer monetized quantity of worth, interpreted cooperatively, proves that dearth has been abolished) has now been revealed to be exterminatory. The sudden immediacy of the apocalyptic crisis of duration, meaning, and value now facing us renders derisory the coerced optimism of gradualist incremental reform. Equality as intersubjectivity no longer has an unlimited unaccomplished future into which it can be projected and postponed. The present universal crisis overflows the thought that thinks it. Are new thoughts and acts within new durations of reciprocity already amongst us? How will we enact the new history such thoughts make possible?