by Peter Dimock
i(a). Emancipative dimensions of bourgeois literacy; i(b). Historylessness;
ii(a). The one true history of your one true love; ii(b). Improvised reciprocity;
iii(a). What Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back; iii(b). Stochastic temporality;
iv(a). Society of Equal Historical Selves (SOEHS); iv(b). The reproach of all the anonymous New World dead.
When you have chosen your own constructive principles to use instead of mine in your practice of a method, list them in the spaces provided below.
Eight Constructive Principles Arranged in Pairs
(Positive and negative)
i(a).___________________________________________________
i(b).___________________________________________________
ii(a).__________________________________________________
ii(b).__________________________________________________
iii(a)._________________________________________________
iii(b)._________________________________________________
iv(a).__________________________________________________
iv(b).__________________________________________________
SECOND WEEK
First Historical Subject (and Master Narrative):
George Anderson
Dear David Kallen,
Let me now begin again. I hope you will not reject my request for a time and place to meet and speak with you in person. We share the same history. Our personal histories entitle us to positions of comfort and rule. I am an expert by formal training in our national narrative. Over my long career as editor I helped regulate a bourgeois ethical monopoly over the words by which we know ourselves and understand others as universal democratic citizens sharing a modern and Humanist historical good faith.
Who were you when you gave the signal that stopped the trainers at Fort Bragg from torturing you any further? Your action was brave beyond those of anyone else in your or any similar position within the Executive Branch of the American government.
You called torture by its name with the knowledge and authority your body gave you. You wrote a draft of an official finding, writing as acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel whose words had the force of law. You ruled torture to be illegal under U.S. law and treaty obligations no matter what was claimed by historical actors of the executive branch to be the requirements of empire. You then added a footnote—was it forced on you? If so how was that order enforced?—that undid your memorandum’s asserted intention to withdraw legal protection from the torture that had been inflicted for years on persons within the control of the U.S. government and, in secret, had been made official policy in August 2002.
Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness). The purpose of this method is to allow us to speak freely when we meet. I write these words and send them to you now to demonstrate my good faith and the sincerity of my request.
The master narrative I have chosen for my own practice is the true history lived out in the biography of George Anderson. Reading is generative—it is a meditative act. Take the time to read again and begin to memorize the Trenton State Gazette article from April 6, 1925 that I have enclosed at the end next to the text of your official legal finding. The article begins, “Up at 501 Calhoun Street there is a little weather-beaten frame house that sets back from the sidewalk.”
Republican government is founded upon the principle of the immediacy of communicative reciprocity.
I very much look forward to our meeting in which we will have the chance to talk. When that time comes, I may ask you for your law firm’s legal services on my own behalf, and also, perhaps, on behalf of NCI. I have removed from the papers Judith Takes left in her will to the Frears Center the original of the page, written in Judith’s hand, containing previously unknown lyrics to Jason Frears’s composition “Light Years.” Frears once reported in an interview that “Light Years” came to him first in the form of words. He had written the words down, but they had subsequently gotten lost, and he could no longer remember them.
This often happened, he said. He considered the originating words irrelevant once he had found the music for them on his instrument and had taught the notes and the intervals to the musicians he played with. The music would take care of itself.
I have temporarily removed this document because of the potential for litigation I see arising over legal ownership of the document and the licensing rights to the lyrics themselves. Both Frears and Judith’s estates have valid claims, I believe. Since you left the Office of Legal Counsel (Why were you not confirmed as head? Were you not sufficiently compliant?), I know you have made intellectual property your specialty.
The continuous present we impose insults the dead to no good end. It’s all forgivable—it’s just that the forgiving must be done with the immediacy of a note sung inside the hollow bone of a sparrow’s wing in flight. I’m valuable because she came back. This original New World light—in Virginia, Jamaica, or New England—comes neither too quickly nor too late. I look forward to June 19th. Words for your actions could restore the happiness of all the anonymous dead and resolve it into presence.
I know that NCI, by the terms of its commitment to provide sustaining financial support for the Frears Center (NCI is an active corporate participant in Maryland’s Public-Private Partnership Arts Initiative Program), holds the licensing and recording rights to all Frears unpublished musical materials owned by the Center’s archives. It was always assumed there would be very little of this, given the care Frears took to secure the copyright in his own name to all his compositions in all the recording and publishing contracts he signed. I simply do not want this clause in the corporate giving agreement to unfairly deprive Derek Takes, Judith’s son, of income due him as the beneficiary of his mother’s estate, if it turns out that “Light Years” was originally composed as a song with lyrics that should be legally credited to both Jason Frears and Judith Takes. In your firm’s published biographical profiles of partners, you are credited with recent court victories featuring large awards to plaintiffs in intellectual property trials.
I am hopeful that with your firm’s help a negotiated settlement over the licensing rights to the newly-discovered lyrics to “Light Years” can be quietly reached satisfactory to all the parties. I will be happy to do what I can to bring the board of trustees of the Frears Center on board regarding any changes that need to be made in the corporate sponsorship agreement between NCI, the Center, and the University of Maryland as a result of the settlement. Meanwhile I will keep the original document safely in my possession.
I have not yet shared the lyrics with anyone, including Leda, though she intends to perform “Light Years” at the dedication ceremony as a song without words in her own arrangement for flute and voice.
After these preliminaries, it is now time to begin this historical method’s daily practice in a systematic way.
During the second week the task of the contemplative exercises is to master the form of your master narrative and make it your own by applying it to daily life. Others have succeeded at this in the past; this used to be common practice. Readers took direction from Thomas à Kempis or Ignatius Loyola or Jonathan Edwards and applied these authors’ historical methods to the motions of their hearts. They had the advantage, of course, of time shaped to the rhythm of a biographical template for an exemplary life. We lack that resource. In the New World we committed ourselves to redemption through the freedom of material possession. We asserted the ecstasy of possession without appeal to transcendence of any sort.
I will illustrate this truth from my own experience. George Anderson was one of the persons I found standing at the end of myself when I came to the conclusion of my vision during Mary Joscelyn’s funeral in the spring of 1995.
I first read the article about him in a history graduate seminar at Yale with Professor Charles Quick in 1978. I was assisting Quick in compiling for a university press
a volume of first-hand testimony by former slaves concerning the experience of slavery in North America. The tentative title of my dissertation (never completed) was “Historical Narrative and the Subjectivity of New World Slavery.”
Professor Quick’s response to my proposal was sympathetic but skeptical. Once, when I was talking to him about my argument, he laughed freely and called my position “Neo-abolitionist.” I felt suddenly unmasked—but why did I also feel disabled?
It’s true I’m a Northerner—a New Englander after all—despite all the years I have spent in New York City.
I had already been listening to Frears’s music in a desultory way when I came across the 1925 Trenton State Gazette article. I was then far from being able to commit myself to lyric as a principle of historical composition. I know now that it’s our investments in slavery—I mean investment in each and every one of its forms—that makes us confuse freedom with empire. Investments in slavery and its legacies prevent any accurate narrative of democratic New World enlightenment from which to create reciprocity.
First Day’s Exercise (Historical Subject: George Anderson): The first day’s exercise is to confirm through meditation within an un-coerced discipline of thought your reasoned choice of a master narrative. The method’s rules insist that you stick with your choice for the entire month’s cycle, however difficult your thoughts may become during any day’s exercise.
The purpose of this rule is to give you direct experience in refusing the master narrative offered by empire’s ordinary day. Success comes with your ability to develop a governing scene, no matter what is happening, with which to bring your master narrative urgently to mind whenever it is needed. This holds true whether you are in the midst of contemplative exercise or going about your ordinary business.
By way of illustration I offer below my own governing scene constructed from the published version of my master narrative that you have already read. (I am not trying to impose my own imaginative procedures on you. I am looking to construct a common place of understanding—to make possible a mutual duration—a place holding made from words. This will save us both considerable time when we speak in person.)
The governing scene I use to summon my master narrative to consciousness is a composite image derived from two moments in the Trenton, New Jersey State Gazette article published on April 6, 1925.
Here is the first moment:
My master was a minister. He was a strict man who preached every Saturday and Sunday and on the other days gave his attention to the farm. If he thought a black man needed flogging he’d tie him to a post and do it himself if the overseer was busy. One day my brother stole something. It was not the first time; he had been punished for it before, and the master said that this time he should have a lesson he would never forget. So they began to beat him early in the morning. . .”
Some splintering of new light in which the day came to him—a new post in the yard—the post’s soft wood—something to witness but not to know. Our mother was ordered to attend as well as the rest of us. “Sparrow” in the Bible means any small bird: “Be not afraid. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.” Brown sparrows fly in a white sky. The sky may darken and turn to red. Listen for a song sung inside the hollow bones of their wings in flight.
Here is the second moment from which the master narrative’s governing scene is constructed:
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.
I diagrammed the battle of Antietam endlessly when I was thirteen (the year was 1963): a victory for the North—emancipation’s needed opportunity—all the dead lying in Maryland. True virtue consists in consent to being in general.
Here is an event that connects the two of us: Upon leaving the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City on July 13, 2008, after a routine check-up (I had had to have a hip replacement in the spring), I saw Donald Rumsfeld standing in the lobby. It was his notes and signature on the draft of a previous Office of Legal Counsel memorandum, written by others in 2002, authorizing torture, that your legal finding was intended officially to withdraw. I read your document, even with footnote 8, to require the arrest and trial for crimes against humanity of those at the highest levels of government who ordered torture in August 2002.
I saw no bodyguards protecting him. His wife, concerned and loving, hovered near. Nothing prevented me from action. What true speech do we have for the weather of our fear?
Your training in law and mine in history have been superb. Why did neither of us attempt to make a citizen’s arrest? How else are we supposed to define the duty of true citizenship?
Once you have chosen your master narrative, commit it carefully to memory with vivid scenes that will allow you to bring your master narrative to conscious attention for reflective use under any circumstances whatsoever.
Second Day’s Exercise (Historical Subject: George Anderson): Practice summoning and holding in mind the master narrative you have chosen. Develop as necessary the governing scene with which you bring it to mind. The object of a historical method is to make the present available for a virtuous action. Remember that the project of American history is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
At the end of each meditation address your words in imagination to an equal. Petition that person directly for understanding. This section of the method is called the Colloquy. Here is an example from my own second day’s exercise: Colloquy: I witness the governing scene of my master narrative with a child’s eye: George Anderson did not feel any special resentment against the master; my voice grows softer still as I tell you of one episode from his life: “By and by, late in the afternoon, my brother did not cry out anymore, just swayed from side to side, side to side going lower all the time until he went down and did not come up again.”
I have made these words into my own speech for another history in the New World. Do not think me presumptuous. I have no alternatives. We have whispering knowledge among us that Robert is the master’s son. This knowledge has been acted upon but not given its emancipative historical form: a moment of reciprocated speech between equal historical selves.
Notes for a Love Song
Before pictures in the mind are worn away by inattention, they may be converted into the mental sounds of musical notes. This procedure is designed to preserve the capacity of the governing scene to create new understandings and put them into a rearranged reciprocity of words.
The first exercise of the method’s complete cycle should be devoted to the goal of producing imagined sounds (timbre, pitch, duration, and volume) for individual notes. Melody will come easily once you have achieved the technical mastery behind the production of each note. With these notes and melodies together, we will imagine a New World reciprocity with which to live another history.
Directions on how to hear and reproduce the mental sound of my first note are given below. I have developed an easy notational system that I will now ask you to learn by heart.
The first musical note resulting from my practice of the second week’s first exercise is written in the following way: I. I. i(a); i(b).
The first Roman numeral’s position refers to the week’s historical subject. (A list of the four historical subjects of any complete cycle of this method’s practice are to be written down on the first day of the first week. (See Table One.)
The week of the first historical subject’s meditations (this will be second week the first time through this method and the first week of the method’s cycle thereafter) is given over to the master narrative itself. The notation for the first element of the sound of the first subject’s first note is formally written as Roman numeral “I,” accompanied (until familiarity with the rules of the method makes this no longer necessary) by the note’s explication.
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So, from the example of my own practice, in expanded form, the notation for the first element of the sound of my first note appears as: I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began to beat him early in the morning. . .” merging with “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.”).
The middle position and middle capital Roman numeral are reserved for the truth statement that informs the sound of the note being constructed. Again, the list of truth statements your method uses will have been written down during the first week in the spaces provided following the explanation of Table Two. (See p. 36.) It is crucial for the sake of fluency and ease of composition that these truth statements be memorized and refreshed daily as much as is necessary through silent recitation.
The middle position of my first mental note’s transcription is correctly read as: I. Truth Statement: 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.
The third position of the musical note’s designation is reserved for, first, a lower case Roman numeral followed by the lower case Latin alphabet letter “a” and then for a second lower case Roman numeral followed by the lower case Latin alphabet letter “b.” This position of the note’s designation is reserved for the pair of Constructive Principles being used to create the sound of each note. In each case one positive and one negative principle are used together to generate the sound. Only one pair of principles is used to create the sound of any given note. It is best to restrict yourself to four pairs of constructive principles during any given month’s meditative cycle. (See Table Three.)