George Anderson

by Peter Dimock

  Master Narrative:

  * * *

  Governing Scene:

  * * *

  Second Day’s Exercise: Now that you have chosen your master narrative and its governing scene, identify the sources you will use in making reasoned arguments to justify your actions in the present. This is the art for which we were trained. (Of course you are welcome, instead of creating a master narrative and governing scene of your own, to adopt mine and adapt them as you wish. Again, the documents upon which the present I am living depend (the longer one was written by you) are both included here at the end. How can we rely upon our words to mean themselves when we meet in person unless we know how our rule is explained as just? The bravery of your action to decide the meaning of words, my vision two years ago, and my daily practice of this method give me hope that we can create the present of another history.

  The present, a waiting for justice, takes the form of a love song. It sounds like this:

  Every moment forfeit/In a history of absolute loss./I am valuable because she came back./If you see Leda before I do,/Sing her this song/So she does not choose another./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.

  Third Day’s Exercise: If you do not already have them by heart, memorize now the words of the Declaration of Independence. This will assure that the master narrative of our empire will be brought closer to you, giving you a secure place to begin. If you feel the powers of memory waning, memorize as far as the lines “and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes.” This much will give you a safe and accurate way to proceed. Here are the words again:

  When, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes;”

  Exercises for Days Four through Seven: The rest of this first week will be quite difficult. Do not underestimate the demands its tasks impose upon your concentration, stamina, and intellectual discipline. Devote days four through seven to mastering the rules (by memorizing you will also begin to practice them) by which you both choose and commit yourself to live the present as history.

  You will be asked, at first, only to align in contemplation your governing scene with the week’s assigned historical subject. The goal is for both the scene and subject to be revealed through the day’s exercises in their emancipative dimensions. This goal will be framed and eventually brought to completion by inserting yourself into the master narrative you have chosen.

  The most difficult task during these days is the following: The rules of this method prescribe precise procedures for converting contemplative juxtapositions (these are designed to strengthen the powers of memory) into the internal mental sound of a single musical note being sung by a human voice. Each note’s timbre, pitch, and duration are fashioned from the application of this method’s logic to your meditations using prescribed elements from the method’s three tables. (This instruction will become second nature to you after a few days’ practice.) You will become intimately acquainted with these tables (and make them your own) during the next four days. This will appear difficult, at first, but I assure you that creating a note’s sound in your mind creates the basis for reciprocity upon which another history can proceed.

  A historical method of true virtue is necessary to create love songs out of music that comes to you first in words whose syntax has already betrayed you. It will permit you to sing, in the midst of empire, a universal history that includes your one true love.

  Through contemplation, memorization, and meditation, begin to practice this historical method by learning its exercises and absorbing its principles as explained below.

  Rules for a Historical Method

  Master Narrative :____________________________________

  Governing Scene :____________________________________

  My master narrative is the history of George Anderson, former slave, born on a plantation near Danville, Virginia in 1817 and interviewed by Marion C. MacRobert for an article in the Trenton, New Jersey State Gazette, published on April 6, 1925. The entire article is included at the end of this method.

  Table One: Historical Subjects

  List here the four subjects you have chosen for the four weeks of this historical method’s meditative cycle.

  I.____________________________________________________

  II.____________________________________________________

  III.____________________________________________________

  IV.____________________________________________________

  Note: During the first cycle of your practice, the first week must be devoted to learning the rules of the method. You will not therefore be able, during your first cycle, to undertake a full meditative engagement with your fourth subject. I have found it best, when beginning the method’s complete cycle for the second time, to begin with the first subject and work through the historical subjects in the same order in which they were listed originally. All of us list last the subject in which we place the most hope. For that reason, the fourth subject is the one to which it is important that we bring the most practiced discipline each time we arrive at it.

  I have recorded the results of my own practice of this method’s exercises during one cycle to provide you with examples against which you can juxtapose your own. This will allow you, when we meet, to have a reliable way to answer or refuse my good faith. I have not been able to say this to anyone before now (I hope to say it to you in person when we meet): The coerced complicity of presence enforced in every moment by our class’s rule is unbearable. Patriotic constructions of nationality cannot substitute for justice or justify postponement of history’s enlightened dream of natural, universal equality: Freedom is not free when it is used for domination.

  Table One: Theo Fales’s Historical Subjects

  I. George Anderson, 1817 – 1926 (?)

  II. Derek Takes, 1964 –

  III. Judith Takes, 1939 – 1999

  IV. Theo Fales, 1949 –

  Table Two: Truth Statements

  When in my vision I came to the end of myself and found other people standing there, it never occurred to me that others would not believe my account of what I saw. I was un-prepared. The truth of vision always appears self-evident. In my relief and joy I made the mistake of demanding from my close friend and colleague there in the church in front of witnesses his account of the equivalent scene from his personal history. The truth I saw in my vision (I was convinced of it then and am convinced of it now) was that every American has his or her own true version of the moment I heard and saw. Another history will be made possible if we say it aloud: Limitless possession in the New World and universal freedom cannot be reconciled.

  Speech as persuasion must be used for good. Speech must be grounded in truths the speaker has tested in the body offer
ed in the service of reciprocity. Memorization helps. Memorization assures familiarity with the words when someone speaks of matters held in common by everyone.

  In the event history—like empire, like music—happens all at once. This is presence. Meditations on how to act in history occur within historical structures of emergency. The national security state suspends democracy.

  The words of our love songs will not mean anything until we find the music with which to make them true. The words with which we collude with empire are used for advantage, not reciprocity.

  I have found it useful to memorize seven truths. The application of these truths to the scenes in my mind produces knowledge I hold onto. I hold them in the present with the mental sound of a musical note. This note sounds according to the juxtaposition (early in the morning) of three things: a true master narrative, a historical subject, and a governing scene. Their juxtaposition is arranged and applied in the presence permitted by each day. Presence is made from the promptings of a pair (one in a prescribed sequence of four) of constructive principles. Each pair contains one positive principle, one negative. The eight principles, arranged in their prescribed order and pairings, are given below.

  But before I list these pairs, I will provide you a table of the seven truths I myself use in the practice of this method. These seven statements have stood the test of time. I insist these truths have never been contradicted either by reason or experience. A dogmatics of justice in the midst of empire is necessary when a love song is found still to be missing its words.

  Table Three: Seven Truths

  I. Every ruling minority needs to numb, and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.

  II. The most important element of poetics is the structure of events, for tragedy is the mimesis not of persons but of life and action. Happiness and unhappiness consist in action and the goal is a certain kind of action and not a qualitative state. It is by virtue of character that persons have certain qualities, but it is through their actions that they are happy or the reverse.

  III. I would like to arrive at the point where I am able to grasp the essence of a certain place and time, compose the work, and play it on the spot naturally.

  IV. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future that replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear very much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

  V. Whenever events lose their independent value, an abstruse exegesis is born.

  VI. When the whole world is a computer and all cultures are recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture will be irrelevant and impossible no matter how valuable.

  VII. At first I was afraid. This familiar music demanded action of the kind of which I was incapable, and yet, had I lingered there beneath the surface I might have attempted to act. Nevertheless, I know now that few really listen to this music.

  List on the lines provided the truth statements you will be using in your own practice of this method.

  Table Two: Truth Statements

  I._________________________________________________________________________

  II._________________________________________________________________________

  III._________________________________________________________________________

  IV._________________________________________________________________________

  V._________________________________________________________________________

  VI._________________________________________________________________________

  VII._________________________________________________________________________

  Table Three: Eight Constructive Principles of

  Composition (Arranged in Pairs)

  Now I come to the most difficult part of this method. I confess that I myself have misgivings about how easily the rules I specify for the composition of musical notes can be used by others. Nevertheless I have decided to offer these to you until you have chosen others of your own and explained the principles guiding you. As my mother used to say, “You may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”

  After you decide on generative rules of your own for the sound of your contemplations’ notes, I will practice them (if you ask me to) as diligently as I practice my own. Though we may fail to master each other’s constructive principles completely, before we meet, the effort to do so will help assure our mutual good faith.

  Direction is given after each exercise to create the mental sound and abstract duration of a musical note with which to hold the results of the contemplation clearly and securely in mind. Here is my generative principle: The resonance of a recounted event depends on the directness of expression by which it can be recognized and shared as true.

  If this principle is true, history can be imagined within a syntax that has already betrayed its user. The goal is a true love song within New World narratives (mine is of fathers killing sons). There is a new limitlessness to the logic of possession in New World modernity along with the realist doctrine that things happen only once and in only one way.

  No historical writ of justice extended beyond the marchlands that a free-holder or soldier in a joint-stock company’s pay needed to obey. Absolute possession creates new loves, new men. Jesuits out-Protestanted the Protestants and made plausible from inside events a rational sovereignty of absolute force. (My method is borrowed from theirs.) I claim both logics have been updated by the national security policy doctrine, C4 + I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers plus Intelligence).

  CONSTRUCTIVE PAIRS

  First Constructive Pair

  i(a) [Positive]: The emancipative dimensions of bourgeois literacy and the politics of the Third Estate produced the individual by whom all determining secular value is to be measured and applied. Nationalism sacralizes individual liberty and instrumentalizes it on behalf of empire. Liberal New World history promised and still promises escape through reason from the constraints of what is without appeal to transcendence of any kind. Your written action and my cowardice undo the reciprocity promised by the lettered freedom of event and public narrative our Revolution began to make possible. History is not good-faith narrative of a failure to realize the public good. It is now the unacknowledged order of limitless force administered by an imperial logic of impunity and local Apocalypse.

  i(b) [Negative]: Historylessness is now the condition of everyday life. Empire promises in every moment the ecstasy of absolute possession as compensation for a past and future of absolute loss.

  Second Constructive Pair

  ii(a) [Positive]: It is both necessary and possible to live the one true history of your one true love. Romance’s discipline must be exercised with the energies of religion.

  ii(b) [Negative]: Under conditions of imperialism, everyone is forced to improvise reciprocity; every moment forfeit until justice can make its claims felt.

  Third Constructive Pair

  iii(a)[Positive]: The only serious philosophical question is the question of what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. What she sees determines the worth of his song. Mortality trumps aesthetics; lyric follows epic chronologically as form. The king of the dead knew, even as he was letting her go, that he was making a big mistake by being seduced by Orpheus’s song. Eurydice is asking what the future holds beyond absolute possession.

  The story of honey’s origins—the taste of words’ sweetness in the mouth—goes like this: A farmer has lost his bees (they have swarmed),
and he goes to his mother to ask what has gone wrong. By following his mother’s instructions, the farmer learns that Orpheus is punishing him for raping and then killing on her wedding day the girl Orpheus was about to marry—Eurydice. The farmer is told what he has to do to appease the husband who once sang so beautifully.

  The remedy: Build a sturdy house, at least eight meters square, made of saplings and mud on a patch of waste, abandoned ground. Each side has to have a windowed opening. Inside beat a steer to death with a wooden club (no blood must show), a rope of hemp around its neck, and leave the carcass until the spring. Enter when the sun is warm, and there, hanging inside the curving cavity of white bone (loose strips of flesh will still be dangling down), you will find a hive overflowing with sweetest honey. Eurydice is forever gone.

  iii(b) [Negative]: Temporalities of managed, stochastic determination have ruled events since 1945. Stochastics is that branch of mathematics that concerns random sets of observations each of which is plotted as a point on a separate distribution curve. This technique assures that knowledge has no way to distinguish truth from power: algorithms manage preference backed by force, mathematics suspends choice and replaces politics.

  Fourth Constructive Pair

  iv(a) [Positive]: The proper goal of an emancipative historical method is a society of equal historical selves (SOEHS).

  iv(b) [Negative]: Attend the continuous sound of the roar of reproach from all the anonymous New World dead. (I heard it as a child, holding my mother’s yellow elephant-chained skirt.) Allow this sound to accompany your love song inside the hollows of a sparrow’s wing in flight.

  Note for Table Three: It may prove helpful while practicing this method to use shorthand designations for the Paired Constructive Principles of Composition. Here are the words I have used to name the constructive principles I have chosen and to hold them carefully in mind: