George Anderson

by Peter Dimock

  Most days I am at my desk in the Reading Room in the Hollander Library at Pace University here in the city. The president and I know each other. We both sit on the board of trustees of the new Jason Frears Memorial American Music Archive and Performance Center whose magnificent new building is just now being completed on the New Carrollton campus of the University of Maryland on the Eastern Shore.

  During my leave I have taken it upon myself to use my connections to the several parties to do what I can through research to lay the groundwork for possible mediation to resolve conflicting claims over the performance and licensing rights to some newly discovered Jason Frears recordings of high quality and other materials. These were found in the recent Judith Takes bequest of her personal papers to the Jason Frears Archive. They include the lyrics, once thought to have been lost, to Frears’ great four-movement composition, “Light Years.” NCI is the parent company that now owns the rights to the recordings Frears made during his most productive and creative years between 1959 and 1964. NCI is the major corporate sponsor of the Frears Center in partnership with the University of Maryland. (We are working on a capital campaign right now to raise an endowment.) Preparations are being completed for the dedication ceremony and public opening to be held in two months time on June 19th. I have been asked if I would make some remarks on behalf of NCI and have agreed to do so. You will be receiving an invitation to this event yourself shortly.

  At my desk at the library I have unrestricted access to all the papers and other materials (including rehearsal tapes) from the still un-catalogued boxes given to the Frears Center last year by the terms of Judith Takes’s will. My offer to go through these papers and write a report concerning their contents addressed to NCI lawyers and Derek (Judith’s son and executor of her estate) has been gratefully accepted. Judith and I were in graduate school together in American history at Yale in the 1970s and 1980s and studied under the same adviser, Professor Charles Quick, a leading historian of early American slavery. I knew Derek slightly as a small boy (I took care of him one summer afternoon when he was six) and saw him occasionally as a young man.

  This is how I spend my days now—preparing a preliminary catalog of these valuable new additions to the work of a great American composer. Frears reported that many of his most important compositions, including “Light Years,” came to him first in the form of words. He said that once he had found the notes of the music for the words that came to him, the words themselves disappeared from memory. He didn’t bother to preserve any record of them; their work was done. Only a few have survived and that appears to have happened by sheer accident.

  I have adopted a variation of Frears’s compositional technique for this method: The words in which the history of the present we are living first comes to us, we have to assume, are unreliable. The betrayal built into the syntax in which most experience is steeped makes spontaneous speech unuseable for reciprocity. A historical method is necessary to live according to first principles. In the New World we have progressed at least this far: Every moment forfeit in a history of absolute loss.

  Every moment forfeit in a history of absolute loss: I am valuable because she came back. Memorize this and you will be safe once you learn to create from it a republican, historical method of reciprocity. If I did not have your brave action to rely upon, I would not have any way to assert this or to approach you with any confidence when we meet in Maryland. This will prepare the ground for something to hold onto; some vision to report.

  There is a limitlessness to possession of the New World; no settler soul survives intact. No citizen now survives possession’s continuance as a lawless entitlement to force.

  This is how you began your Legal Finding:

  December 30, 2004

  Memorandum for James B. Comey, Deputy

  Attorney General

  Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 U.S.S.

  2340 – 2340A

  Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.

  The following is from an early record of my own practice of this method: Bourgeois good faith finally rests on the ideal of a lasting community of love founded on the ideal of love between spouses. This love—along with autonomy and cultivation—founds a concept of a universal, shared humanity whose freedom of action and reciprocity constitutes the transcendence of modernity without appeal to religion of any sort. Bourgeois freedom establishes the ethical ideal of emancipating an inner realm (operating by its own laws) from extrinsic purposes of any kind. This is the necessary basis for a true history.

  If you see Leda before I do, sing her this song so she does not choose another. I am valuable because she came back. I will do the same for you if, while you are away, I meet your one true love and you teach me the words. Refuse empire, create reciprocity inside the present moment with which to build a society of equal historical selves.

  ≈

  The Frears Center board of trustees has invited Leda Corot Rivers to sing at the dedication ceremony and public opening on June 19th. Leda lives in Montreal now and has been invited to apply to be the first Frears Foundation artist in residence for the academic year that begins next fall. I had to recuse myself from voting when the board met. I attended the audition of the finalists held two months ago today and fell in love from the very first notes she sang. I know this is hard to believe, but I assure you it is true. Leda is my one true love. I declare it immediately. Desire must be acted upon. She sang “Light Years” in an arrangement for voice and flute without words.

  Leda laughed kindly when I declared myself. She said there was time now that we were no longer young—time in which love could take many forms. I told her I would compose a love song that would prove her wrong. Love, I told her, could only exist in one true action whose independent value was as immediate as the hollow spaces inside a sparrow’s wing—all motion a way to cancel loss.

  My method takes four weeks and two days to complete. It is divided into four sections, one for each week. The first time through, the first week must be devoted to learning by heart the meditative techniques that will be used throughout; also to memorizing the historical principles underlying the method’s effectiveness.

  By historical method I mean every means by which a person rids the self of its inordinate attachment to empire and creates reciprocity. The goal is a reciprocity based on an ideal of married love serving as the basis for a just society of equal historical selves. The original logic of the abundance of capitalism was another way of being.

  FIRST WEEK

  You ordered special forces trainers to torture you so you could establish the legal meaning of the words “severe pain or suffering whether physical or mental.” You did this in order to place yourself in a position to revoke beyond appeal your office’s previous legal opinion granting permission to the President, Vice-President, and Secretary of Defense of the United States to order torture without fear or threat of prosecution for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Your act was brave beyond anything I have ever done. It made and makes another history possible.

  But the document you wrote and signed granted immunity to torturers. The document you wrote and signed permitted and continues to permit torture as official policy of the United States against all customary norms and statutes of both domestic and international law. The bravery of your act makes another history possible. (By history I mean some true narrative recounting events of pleasure, force, and love.)

  Empire and democracy are not compatible. By what narrative logic do we reconcile them? Whom did you see standing there at the end of yourself as they tortured you? What did you say in your mind to your one true love? How will you declare your love when you read this and when we meet?

  First Day’s Exercise: Choose some master narrative by which to live other than our present complacent fairy tale of destined consumer’s empire. Remember: Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of the unalienable natural rights that all people hold equal
ly, it is the right of free persons to alter or abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them will seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  For my master narrative, I have chosen every moment and motion in the life of George Anderson, as these were represented in an article appearing in the Trenton, New Jersey State Gazette on April 6, 1925. (The article is reprinted for your convenience in its entirety at the back of this method. Beside it you will find the complete text you wrote and signed, including footnote 8, of your Office of Legal Counsel “Memorandum for James B. Comey, Deputy Attorney General” dated December 30, 2004 above the heading: Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A .)

  The master narrative I have made from these two documents using this careful historical method will serve both of us much better than any other I have seen to date. (I have not ceased looking at the ones others write just because I have written my own. I will, of course, be glad to consider any alternative meditative discipline combining these two documents that you propose.)

  Essential to any historical method is a master narrative of presence in which the practitioner learns to sing an accurate love song to his or her one true love. Memorization of the notes of the melody is therefore essential to the task of mutual accountability. There is no other way to lodge an equally valued body inside the abstraction of nationality. Through careful practice of my method’s course of exercises, “George Anderson” is a master narrative now firmly lodged in my memory, and it is continually renewed and can be relived as needed through my method’s daily practice.

  Here is how my master narrative now begins:

  Up at 501 Calhoun Street there is a little, weather-beaten frame house that sets back from the sidewalk, huddled between two large properties as though trying to hide its shabbiness from the gaze of the passerby. The busy public has no time to take a second look at it, so few know its secret. It is the home of one of Trenton’s very richest men.

  His wealth does not consist of anything so commonplace as money. If he wanted a dollar right this minute it is extremely doubtful if he could find it anywhere in those worn old clothes of his, but he has a store house, and in it are treasures that only a man who has lived a whole century may possess—it is the storehouse of memory.

  While he pursued the humble calling of a farmer time went marching by, leaving in its wake the history of three wars and the advent of the greatest triumphs of a scientific age. Best of all, from his point of view, time brought the abolishment of slavery, treasure of treasures for the storehouse. Now that age has robbed him of his once healthy body he can fall back upon this wealth and distribute it to those about him, and, after all, no man is quite so rich as the man who shares.

  Give your master narrative a textual foundation. Commit as many key portions of it as you can to memory so that it has a chance to feed your imagination continuously. Otherwise we abandon each other without restraint. My master narrative is filled with New England and Jamaican light. Our best American philosopher once proved beyond all contradiction that the nature of true virtue is consent to being in general.

  The master narratives you and I choose need not agree. The only requirement is that they both distinguish freedom from the impunity of the American imperial state. Both must concede that an empire of liberty has not yet arrived—not in Fallujah, not in Kabul, not in White Plains.

  As important as the master narrative you choose is the governing scene you give it. The governing scene is the picture you give your narrative in your mind so that you can hold your narrative in consciousness clearly over a sustained duration or summon it immediately for internal review as the occasion requires.

  The governing scene I use is a composite made from two moments taken from the Trenton newspaper article:

  George Anderson at the age of twelve is standing and watching—everyone on the Danville farm was ordered by the master to appear in the Fair House yard to witness a slave’s correction—from early morning until late in the afternoon, as his brother, older by four years, Robert Anderson, is whipped to death by two men, his master and the overseer. (They whip him continuously, taking turns, for having stolen something after previous punishments and warnings for the same offense had not reformed his character. It is well known by everyone present that Robert is the master’s son.) There is an April light in Virginia in which birds’ wings flash—Edenic it is called, and then American. I have captioned this moment with words from the Trenton newspaper article: “So they began to beat him early in the morning.”

  This first scene immediately gives way and merges with the next one: To the accompaniment of the explosive sounds of the flapping walls of a revival’s canvas tent, George Anderson is suddenly standing twelve years after the end of the Civil War explaining to everyone around him that he has found his savior. He is animated and joyful and speaks with great confidence. I have labeled this moment and its duration with the words of the newspaper article, “When I knew I had found my Savior I got right up in that meeting and told everybody so.” (The passage in its entirety reads, “When I knew I had found my Savior I got right up in that meeting and told everybody so and since that time I have never been alone. I did not cast off the chains of slavery at the time of the surrender, they fell off at that camp meeting.”)

  Without control the governing scene can produce the following undisciplined sound instead of a musical note: “No other sound beneath his screaming—this sparrow in morning flight—this white post’s new wood—a complicity of presence.”

  You proved torture with your body and then signed documents granting immunity and insuring that torture would continue as a virtuous policy of the American state. Writing this, I feel my acquiescence and lend my complicity to your signature.

  It never occurred to me to insist that Fred Avery deal in his memoir more conscientiously with the question of his responsibility for authorizing and overseeing the torture with which the agency he directed was tasked by those who appointed you to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the post you always dreamed of holding. Of course, he attended all the meetings of principals in which torture’s necessity was discussed. His high rhetoric (and boyish laughter)—the devotion of his public service—the stern kindness of his unpretentious command—my complicity—the fellowship of our birth and class—all this prevented it. The stillness surrounding the careful silence of authority is not kind. In the event we decided it was best that the text of his memoir emphasize the intensity of the good faith with which he protected the nation in a time of war. We agreed to stress, with the sound of modest words, his devotion to family and country in the exercise of his disciplined will and fallible moral strength.

  I did not question his rhetoric or his narrative. What did you think when you read the passage in his memoirs about lawyers (in a crisis “despite what Hollywood might have you believe, you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers”)? Are all the rest (the acts themselves as knowable experience) authorless events from a dead star committed by no one who need be held accountable so long as patriotic motives governed the speech that gave the order? Did it make present the perfection of the violence and the silence we bear so lightly and so drunkenly inside ourselves? Avery’s book sold more copies than any other title in bookstores its first week; it continues to sell well, I’m sure. I am your accomplice in our class’s alchemy of national impunity.

  Our force of rule, in every moment, extends beyond all law. This is the secret of all totalitarian government.

  I’m not blaming you. I have sworn to do the same as you or worse. Neither of us has ever resigned from anything for reasons of principle.

  By historical method I mean every means of examination of conscience, of meditation, of contemplation of vocal and mental speech and other acts by which a person prepares and disposes the self to rid its coherence and integrity of all inordinate attachments to empire, and, after their removal, by w
hich he or she creates reciprocity and joins with others in a society of equal historical selves (SOEHS).

  To begin is always hardest. The ending, I hope, will come easily and in good time once we have begun. Things happen only once and in only one way. If this were not the case we would not be listening like this to the just reproach of all the anonymous, historical dead.

  My father and his father before him fought, painfully, almost famously, in foreign wars. They both killed many men—women and children too. I never came close to doing anything as brave as you. My father was a gentleman and a scholar who said everyone, in principle, owed the state a life. Is this true? In the event, I told him he lied—that he held that doctrine out of self-interest and not to further emancipative, democratic reason. Was I right to make this claim—this buttressed argument? What appropriate action flows from such aggression?

  The choice of a new master narrative and a governing scene with which to refuse empire will come easily only for a few. For most it will come with difficulty.

  The First Day’s Exercise is to write on a loose sheet of paper (or on the line provided below, if you prefer) the master narrative you have chosen with which to live the present moment as history. Next, immediately below this, describe in as few words as possible the governing scene with which you will hold your master narrative in mind over a sustained period. The governing scene should be designed so that it can bring your master narrative immediately to consciousness whenever the occasion demands its use.