by Peter Dimock
Again, the pairs of Constructive Principles you will be using in your own practice should be written down during the first week in the spaces provided on pages [page 40] of this manual.
Hold the results of your First Day’s contemplation confirming your choice of a master narrative with the mental sound of the first musical note: I. I. i(a); i(b). This is difficult to accomplish at first but will come quite easily and naturally with regular practice once you have memorized the truth statements and constructive principles and they have become firmly lodged in your mind.
Obviously vivid, sometimes unbearable pictures must spring to mind as a result of employing this meditative technique. This cannot be avoided and should not be held to be an impediment or failing of any kind, caused either by a fault in the method or a weakness on the part of the practitioner. Indeed, it is the bringing of the terror of scenes, from whatever source, under the command of disciplined, expressive, auditory, communicative form that implies reciprocity and therefore the promise of forgiveness and relief.
Written out in its extended notational form, I. I. i(a); i(b)., the first mental note’s sound, registering the immediacy of history as it appears in consciousness, can be represented as follows:
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.”
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.
i(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The emancipative capacity of bourgeois literacy to instantiate the universal freedom of the autonomous individual as the transcendent secular project of modern history.
i(b). Constructive Principle (negative): The strategically administered historylessness of contemporary daily life: Empire’s substitution of the promise of wealth for social justice as the basis of the consent of the governed.
Colloquy: I cannot improve upon the description in the Jesuit version of this method of the colloquy’s purpose: “The colloquy is made by speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant speaks to a master, now asking him for a favor, now blaming himself for some misdeed, now making known his affairs to him, and seeking advice in them.” At the end of most days’ exercises you will be asked to address directly someone for whom you care a great deal. Once you have established the sound of the day’s note, permit yourself to enter freely into a colloquy with any person of your choosing, imagined or real.
Colloquy for I. I. i(a); i(b): Eels in the sweet water’s net—this Eastern Shore: the fresh smell of the stripped bark of the new ash post set in the yard yesterday by Mr. Vane. We own as much as we can hold—a stewardship wedded to a New World surveyor’s eye. Authority is distant. Tell me what you see when you think of fathers killing sons. My master was a minister. He was a strict man who preached every Saturday and Sunday and on other days gave his attention to the farm. There is one subject of conversation of which he never tires. He is a devout Christian and his faith is beautiful. He can quote chapter after chapter from the Bible, and God is very real and very near to him. If our demands were not so extreme, there would be no need for musical sound.
Third Day’s Exercise (Historical Subject: George Anderson): Begin by practicing again calling to mind your master narrative and its governing scene. After you have done this for the space of several minutes, create the mental sound of a second note for what you have just seen. Adjust the sound of the first subject’s second note (timbre, pitch, duration, and volume) according to the promptings of the juxtaposition and simultaneous temporal overlay of the following elements from the three tables: I. II. ii(a); ii(b).
Here, taken as an example from my own practice, is the sound of my first historical subject’s (George Anderson) second note:
I. II. ii(a); ii(b).
Extended Notation:
I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began to beat him early in the morning . . . etc.,” combined with “When I knew I had found my Savior . . . etc.”)
II. Truth Statement: The most important principle 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 by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.
ii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): It is both necessary and possible to live the one true history of your one true love. This is fidelity.
ii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Under conditions of historylessness reciprocity must be improvised moment to moment.
Colloquy: This section is intimate spontaneous speech addressed in imagination to an equal. (The Colloquy should come at the end of each day’s contemplation and should be engaged in without self-censorship or self-blame. It should be delivered as imagined accompaniment to the sound of the day’s note. This will give your immediacy of speech a necessary reflective distance and allow you to think from a position where you are not. Leave time for the Colloquy each day no matter how busy your schedule. Generally it is best to allow twenty to forty minutes each day for the contemplative practice of a historical method. You will find yourself devoting more time to it as you progress.)
In the event you called it torture—in your mind, with your voice, and in the pain and panic in your body. You had bravely decided you wanted access to experience to enable you to define the words of the statute. Then, by adding the footnote you included later, you declared torture legal when used on those we held within our control. Did you do so out of a sense of devotion to the duties of your office to support the executive branch—or did you do so as the result of a direct, illegal order? The jurisprudence created at Nuremberg ruled there was no justifiable defense for such an action—power is not truth and therefore cannot be law. Do we know now how to state the positive version of this truth and act on it without restraint?
I am the beneficiary of the order you enforced. I enjoy the pleasures of empire and did not act when I had the chance to make a citizen’s arrest on July 13, 2008. I edited and helped write a war criminal’s self-laudatory memoir. Every moment is forfeit in a history of absolute loss. If successful, practitioners of this method may choose a motto for their collective action to superimpose upon all the inscribed stones bearing the military command: Ad majorem gloriam dei.
Every moment forfeit/In this 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/Among equal historical selves.
Fourth Day’s Exercise (Historical Subject: George Anderson): Memorize the eighth footnote of your December 30, 2004 legal finding: “While we have identified various disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum, we have reviewed this Office’s prior opinions addressing issues involving treatment of detainees and do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.” What does this mean?
In the event, your footnote confirmed, instead of withdrew, torture as official policy approved in American law. Would you have signed this document if you had not been given a hand signal by which the torture you endured would be stopped immediately at the pleasure of your will? To how many bodies, lacking such control, was torture applied as a matter of justified legal procedure between 2002 and 2008 in pursuit of American happiness and within a rhetorical enforcement of perfected, exceptionalist history? When you and I take responsibi
lity for what we have done, what narrative of purpose should we use?
I realize I commit here the fallacy of making you into a representative man. But isn’t that what our training prepared us to do as a sign of our class’s right to exercise stewardship and universal rule?
Hold the results of this exercise in mind with the imagined sound of the week’s third note: I. III. iii(a); iii(b).
Extended notation: I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began . . . etc.,” merging with “When I knew . . . etc.”). III. Truth Statement: 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. iii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The only serious philosophical question is what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. What Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back determines the worth of his song. iii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Events under imperial rule unfold according to a technocratic logic of stochastic determination. The outcome of events gains unanswerable authority from the logic of their determination. Stochastics is that branch of statistical mathematics that concerns random sets of observations, each of which is plotted as a point on a separate distribution curve.
Colloquy (delivered to the accompaniment of the mental sound of the first historical subject’s third note): Moment to moment our moral compass is overthrown by the violence by which we prosper. Knowledge is given back as spectacle that promises ecstasy but fuels the rage of unacknowledged dispossession. We took the same American history courses at Harvard. What logic or narrative of democracy now validates the conduct of our rule? What would happen if we gave each other the true results of a disciplined contemplative practice of the present as history?
When we worked on his book together, Fred Avery and I came up with a rhetorical shape for a narrative account of his years as Director of Central Intelligence between 1998 and 2005 with which we, the agency, and NCI were all happy: The conscientious family man keeping the country safe by all means necessary, making sure no secret, extra-legal violence was used that was not absolutely necessary—protecting all such knowledge from harming the reputation or moral resilience and resolve of the nation—protecting with adequate power and patriotic piety the innocent sources of American good faith—indulging as a necessary cost of democracy the contemptible, irresponsible criticism of dangerous ideologues with the assurance of vindication by a grateful posterity’s enjoyment of unmatched American power and wealth. The book has sold nearly two hundred thousand copies. I could not resist the enjoyment of my contribution to this success.
Power’s pleasures were written as self-sacrifice in the public interest. Devotion to family and country were written to suggest they entailed the burdens of atrocity in fighting savage wars a moral man could not refuse. Frederick Avery’s strength and discipline, we implied, spared the ordinary citizen the moral consequences of dominion.
When I learned from Fred Avery what you had done, I knew I had to return to the moment of vision I had had at Mary Joscelyn’s service a year before. I knew I needed to devise a formal method for living another history.
Fifth Day’s Exercise: In the Jesuits’ version of this method, the fifth day of the second week is given to the contemplation of Jesus’ journey from Nazareth to the river Jordan to be baptized. I give you here the scene I use in my own practice on this day. If our meeting on June 19th is successful, I hope someday you will give me yours.
On the fifth day of the first historical subject’s meditations, I assign myself the task of meditating upon the character (from the evidence provided by his choice of written words) of Marion C. MacRobert, the reporter who interviewed George Anderson in 1925. I have memorized these words to make his speech my own:
He is George Anderson, colored, a former slave, whose records show him to be 108 years old. He lives with his daughter, Mrs. Fanny Coleman, who was a little girl when the Civil War ended, and whose grandchild, Cora Edna, a plump little kiddie with feet forever keeping time to some imaginary tune, is “Uncle George’s” constant companion.
Uncle George is unable to walk because his poor old legs crumple up when he puts the weight of his feeble old body upon them, so that he spends the greater part of his time sitting on the side of his bed. But his eyes are bright and his memory very good. Now and then during a conversation his mind will wander off into by-paths and must be brought back sharply, but with careful handling he can tell a straightforward story of his youth and of the years before and after “the surrendah,” as he speaks of the end of the Civil War.
Now attempt this contemplation of character using the mental sound of your own voice and using the words from something you have said or recently written as evidence. Attempt to discern from this exercise the relation of the speaker to the legal application of limitless force.
Hold in mind the results of this exercise with the imagined sound of the following note constructed from the method’s three tables: I. IV. iv(a); iv(b).
Extended notation: I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began . . . etc.,” combined with “When I knew I had found . . . etc.”). IV. Truth Statement: 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. iv(a). Constructive Principle (positive): Create or join with others to form a Society of Equal Historical Selves (SOEHS); iv(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Attend to the sound of voices behind the words of your thoughts filled with the reproach of all the anonymous, New World dead.
Colloquy to accompany the fourth note’s sound: I will be proposing when we meet in person that we plan to travel to Fallujah together to talk to people there about what we have done. We gave ourselves the right to perpetrate collective punishment upon an entire city to be enjoyed as a pleasure without limit because we said a photograph of dishonored bodies of Americans offended us. I cannot tell if I mean my proposal to visit Fallujah together metaphorically or literally—my method attempts to make the two into a single form of knowledge as sometimes happens in dreams or visions. I want us to stand on the bridge where the mercenaries’ bodies were hung and begin another history. People will say this can’t be done. But you and I were educated for rule. Surely we can use the authority empire gives us to insist that after knowledge must come forgiveness. And after such forgiveness what knowledge can we afford to be without? Not even impunity is beyond the shape given it by the voices of all the anonymous dead.
Sixth Day’s Exercise: Repeat, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, when possible, the fourth and fifth days’ contemplations. (In my own practice these are: The memorization of the eighth footnote of your memorandum legally establishing torture as a legitimate instrument of American policy to be used at will by officers of the executive branch of the American government; and meditation upon a speaker’s character from the perspective of that speaker’s words concerning the limitless application of force.)
Hold the results of your contemplations during this exercise in mind with the imagined sound of the following note constructed from the following elements from the method’s three tables: I. V. i(a); i(b). Note: In imitation of functionalist principles of stochastic determination and the application of statistical mechanics to human command functions, the serial order of the application of the elements of the method’s three tables in the construction of mental sounds for musical notes is strictly adhered to throughout these exercises. As illustrated here, therefore, the construction of the mental sound of the fifth n
ote is accomplished by the application of the fifth truth statement (Whenever events lose their independent value, an abstruse exegesis is born), as you would expect, but then by the application of the first pair of Constructive Principles (Emancipative capacity of bourgeois literacy and Historylessness). This is because there are only four pairs of Constructive Principles in all so the next in the series after the fourth must be a return to the first in imitation of the temporal linearity of historical duration (“time’s arrow”), despite the continued incidence and determining influence of cycles of repetition.
Extended notation: I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began to beat him early in the morning . . . etc.,” combined with “When I knew I had found my Savior . . . etc.”) V. Truth Statement: Whenever events lose their independent value, an abstruse exegesis is born. i(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The emancipative dimension of bourgeois literacy. i(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Contemporary historylessness.
Colloquy (delivered to the accompaniment of the first historical subject’s fifth note): Midstream—there is nothing to lose—not even an angle of vision. How have we managed to attain such safety? Your one true love chooses you among all the rest. How does she discern your value among all the men pursuing her? I am valuable because she came back.
This method has taken me years to develop and assemble into a useable shape. Sometimes now I’m happy with it. When I recently separated from my wife of thirteen years, the method helped me know how to care for Lily, my teenage daughter. My method helps me attend to the beauty of Frears’s music. I wouldn’t be able to hear it accurately otherwise.
I will retire in due course. My official corporate leave from McClaren Books expires at the end of this year. I hope to be invited to serve for another term on the Frears Center’s Board of Trustees.
All stories converge. All this because Owen Corliss refused to give me his equivalent scene when I came to the end of myself in that vision during the music at Mary Joscelyn’s service. I’m confident I know the mistake I made and am determined not to repeat it. I’m determined there shall be no more inaction as the result of failures of historical narration.