by Peter Dimock
Frears’ music teaches that there is a politics of lyric behind each moment’s breath to which words are never adequately accountable. This creates a politics of expressive presence that education appropriates for instrumental purposes. The promise of absolute possession in the New World had to be fulfilled before it could be abandoned. You will find other people standing there when you come to the end of yourself: Refuse empire; create reciprocity.
The flutist and composer, Charles Jason Frears, when he was twelve, watched his father dying of untreated stomach cancer. Every day he came home from school to find his father sitting in the middle of his bed surrounded by instruments— cornet, guitar, violin, and drum. When his father died, Frears stopped speaking for a year. He played his flute instead. When a musician who later played with him first heard Frears’ sound on a recording, he was shocked to realize he was listening to music made from the sound of someone crying.
Frears’ compositions often came to him first as words. When the music arrived, he discarded them. History as unbearable presence can take no other accurate, empirical form. A sparrow’s freedom converges in New England’s and Jamaica’s unsponsored light. A psalm’s praise for being that our training teaches us to mouth with confidence now lacks all conviction. Imagine the sound of a lyric creating a politics for refusing empire.
Seventh Day’s Exercise: Juxtapose in the mind the governing scene with which you quickly bring to consciousness your master narrative and one of the photographs of the mercenaries’ bodies hanging from Fallujah’s bridge. You know the ones I mean. Devise a narrative with which these bodies are taken down, made whole, and laid beside the three thousand dead in the city we destroyed to revenge civilian self-knowledge of the limits and moral texture of impunity.
Hold the results of this exercise in your mind with the mental sound of the first historical subject’s sixth note assembled from your method’s three tables: I. VI. ii(a); ii(b).
Extended notation: I. Historical Subject: George Anderson (Governing scene: “So they began. . . .” etc.). VI. Truth Statement: 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. ii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): It is both necessary and possible to live the one true history of your one true love. ii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Under conditions of empire, reciprocity among equals must be improvised moment-to-moment and dissolved in the immediate, managed violence of competitive interest and private advantage.
Colloquy (delivered to the accompaniment of the first historical subject’s sixth note): This sound of a flute played inside the hollow bone of a sparrow’s wing in flight. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? You wrote in your memorandum legalizing torture: “Because the statute does not define ‘severe,’ we construe the term in accordance with its ordinary or natural meaning. The common understanding of the term ‘torture’ and the context in which the statute was enacted also inform our analysis. 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.”
When you wrote these words, what images did you attach to them in your immediate thought?
Note: During most weeks of historical contemplation you will be composing the mental sounds of seven notes. Because the first day of the first historical subject’s meditation is devoted to the choice of an overall master narrative and its confirmation without chance of revision, construction of the sound of particular notes does not begin until the second day of this week. This is why only six notes have been composed so far. If this creates a sense in the mind of an uncompleted musical scale, so much the better in that it shows that the mind is already constructing an architecture available for memory’s reflection on lyric’s spontaneous melodies.
THIRD WEEK
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.
The goal of a historical method in our present is the disciplined dissolution of an imperial self in the interests of the possibilities of democracy. You and I have been taught speech for two sides of an American imperial coin: Roman peace like a desert and English jurisprudence on one and the narrative realism of an enlightened end to history on the other. “But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such is now the Necessity which constrains us to alter our former Systems of Government. For support, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, let us mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
The abundance of capitalism can be completed as either atrocity or the fulfillment of its promise of material freedom beyond the coercions and crimes of domination.
I once heard a historian of the Enlightenment, prating of his own commitment to empirical reason as the enemy of despotism, hurl from the academic podium the dictum that history happens only once and in only one way. He was making the case for the United States as the indispensable nation. From all things, one purpose, one empire, one happy ending—no matter what atrocities were unfolding.
Our foremost philosopher died from a smallpox vaccination before he could write what he announced as the great American book: A History of the Work of Redemption in the New World. He intended, he said, to hasten and beneficially affect (with the assistance of Divine grace) the fulfillment of God’s plan by considering all parts of the grand scheme in their historical order. Scripture and event had never been made one through the practice of revealed religion until history and the work of redemption had been made one in experience. This logic of form produces the popular genre of personal narrative.
Grace redeemed time in New England through the enlivening word (past and future were fused on the page). Nothing was to intervene—not history or memory—between words and things. Geometry can be made to show that true virtue consists in consent to being in general.
In my own practice the historical subject of the third week is Derek Takes, Judith Takes and Charles Jason Frears’ son. Derek was born January 31, 1965. Judith and Frears began an affair in the summer of 1963 when Judith was twenty-five and Frears was thirty-seven. (Jason Frears died suddenly in 1967 at the age of forty at the height of his creative powers.)
In the Jesuit version of this method the third week of contemplations treats the life of Jesus from the time he travels from Bethany to Jerusalem (this is during the day of the last supper) until his crucifixion as a criminal and his burial in the sepulcher by Joseph and Nicodemus in the presence of his mother. (Armed guards were posted by the authorities at the tomb to watch through the night to prevent Jesus’ followers from robbing the grave and thus to fulfill the prophecies.)
First Day’s Exercise: Choose someone you know to be the historical subject of your third week’s practice of these exercises. Practice with the thought of someday telling that person that you once enlisted them in your mind in the project of living the present as history.
I have told Derek of my plan to develop this method and what his father’s music means to me. For the past two years we have served together on the Board of Trustees of the new Frears center. (Its official name at the insistence of the university is The Charles Jason Frears Memorial American Music Archive and Performance Center at the University of Maryland—New Carrollton.)
Derek as historical subject did not appear clearly during my practice of these exercises despite my best efforts. His mother was my friend and colleague; his father’s music produced this method; I saw him grow into manhood. My investments in his pr
esence block the gates between word and vision. All visions must fail along the way if they are to succeed at all. History’s great gift is time itself—an emptiness of contemplation untouched inside a note’s duration by the logic of our class’s preemptive strikes upon it. Words, it is said, will fill time at the end and make us whole in retrospect. Derek is not present here. The vision brightens. I reserve judgment and listen to his father’s song.
Derek is both a musician and an educator overseeing middle school social science curriculum development in the New Bern, North Carolina public schools. Derek has been generous in his encouragement of my attempt to use his father’s art as model for a lyric rhetoric of historical presence.
Once you’ve chosen someone you know to be the historical subject for your contemplations during the method’s second (third if you are just beginning) week, construct a governing scene by which to call your investment in that person’s story to mind easily and vividly. (Many of this week’s exercises will call upon you to juxtapose this governing scene with the governing scene you chose with which you bring immediately to mind your overall master historical narrative.)
Here is the background you will need to follow my own practice of this week’s exercises. Derek is Judith and Charles Jason Frears’s son. On the birth certificate from New Haven Hospital Judith gave Derek her own last name and gave him his father’s last name for a middle one.
The governing scene I have constructed for Derek as the historical subject of my third week’s contemplations is a composite one derived from two separate events. They became linked in my mind before I had time to question them. Neither is honorable. I would have them be different if I could. Historical vision must begin from where we find ourselves.
I give you this governing scene without hesitation in support of the request I am making that we meet in person when we are both in New Carrollton on June 19th:
I arrived at Yale Graduate School in the fall of 1976 to study early American history with Professor Charles Andrews Quick. I was twenty-seven. Judith Takes was two years ahead of me. She was writing her dissertation with Quick on the audience reception of early abolitionist rhetoric. She wanted, she told me, to try to relate levels of literacy to American self-understandings concerning the distinctiveness of American nationality and economic dependence upon slavery.
Judith was in her mid-thirties, having interrupted her academic career to raise Derek alone. His father was absent. She had financial support from her parents and the executors of the Frears estate. Frears’ wife Corrine generously fulfilled the provisions Frears had asked her to make for Derek’s up-bringing just before he died.
I met Judith during a dinner for graduate students at Quick’s house and we became friends. Judith was beautiful in a New England way I was used to. She had a beauty of reticence people remembered. (She was tall with the grace of the reed the heron stands next to at the head of the lake in early summer before the sun burns the morning mist away.)
I got the chance to know Derek slightly when he was a child. I once spent a whole day with him when he was eleven. (Judith was struggling to meet a deadline for a paper she was scheduled to deliver at a conference and accepted my offer to take him for a Saturday while she wrote.) As I remember it, Derek and I visited the Dinosaurs in the university’s natural history museum and then took baseball gloves and a tennis ball and watched two softball teams play a pick-up game on the Yale playing fields off Dixwell Avenue.
Eventually, sometime in the mid-eighties, Judith got a full-time teaching job at Concord Community College. (We are still in touch, but we have not talked lately.)
The first element of the governing scene I use for this week’s practice comes in a moment of mid-morning spring light. This must have been in 1983 or 1984. I was walking toward the green on Whitehall Street on my way to pick up music I had ordered when I was jolted by my sudden violent reaction to something I had just seen without knowing what it was at first.
In front of the music store (the shop’s entrance door was two or three steps below street level) I saw a tall laughing youth with long, curly, unkempt golden hair bending with the litheness of a just-discovered height to lay his head on a smiling woman’s shoulder. She was looking up at him with a playful joy. I stood transfixed by an instant, limitless rage at what I had witnessed (American nationalism is made from the refusal to say accurately what it is to be white).
Of course what had registered before thought had been turned into speech in the mind was that who I was seeing were Judith and Derek. This American fact, and its refusal, of a white woman and her black son—their happiness—outshone the sun. The white possession of the self is untenable.
The second element of my governing scene for the second historical subject comes from the event in my life of which I am the most ashamed. Two days after the scene I had witnessed in front of the music store I attended a history conference in Lexington, Kentucky. I was delivering a paper on the last day on the invention in the early nineteenth century of an American national historical narrative.
The night of the first day of the conference I went to a strip club on a side street not far from my hotel. I drank whiskey and fell in love with one of the dancers. Her beauty struck (and seemed to me) beyond anything I had ever known. Her name was Jesse Bishop.
When I first saw Jesse Bishop, she was naked on a table in front of six white men sitting there around her. (I was at the bar.) The men’s lust transfigured them. I heard crying in the room I couldn’t see. The room seemed filled with it.
I thought I saw the men feel in her movements the truth of their own desire of which their fear deprived them and for whose sudden public display and knowledge, I thought their smiles and money said, they would never forgive her.
I thought I saw her answer their money with the abandon of her contempt. She was very young. Her gaze was like an instrument and felt fluent as a touch.
When the six men left, I paid her to dance for me as long as I could. Although it was against the rules, she allowed me to drive her home.
While she sat with me between dances, the bartender handed her a corded phone. It was her six-year-old son who couldn’t sleep. His name was Robert. Jesse said Robert was allowed to call her twice a night if he couldn’t sleep but no more than that no matter what. (There was no one Jesse could afford to pay to stay with Robert the hours that she worked.)
When, near dawn, we reached the driveway of her small home in a new development on the outskirts of Lexington (we had driven in my rented car), I asked if I could come in. I said I wanted to see Robert sleeping. She said she must be crazy, but she let me. There in a narrow child’s bed I saw a child’s untethered breathing—and realized it was a discipline I had never learned and didn’t know how to steal.
I took my leave of her and went back to my hotel. The next afternoon (the day before my presentation), after many hours of driving, I found her house again, and walked up to her door. I did not have the courage—though I knew I had found my one true love—to knock. There was no bell.
The second element of my governing scene for the method’s second historical subject is myself watching Jesse dancing on the table in Lexington, Kentucky to the accompaniment of the lust of seven white men.
You wrote in the legal finding you signed in December of 2004, “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.”
While pretending to withdraw the previous August 2002 opinion’s findings (when did you realize you had failed at accomplishing this?), your signature made legal and exempted from prosecution the perpetrators of the actions described in the following document granting the executive branch permission to commit war crimes:
You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that y
ou intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. . . . Finally, you would like to use a technique called the “waterboard.” In this procedure, the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual’s blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breath. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic,” i.e., the perception of drowning. The individual does not breathe any water into his lungs. During those 20 to 40 seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches. After this period, the cloth is lifted, and the individual is allowed to breathe unimpeded for three or four full breaths. The sensation of drowning is immediately relieved by the removal of the cloth. The procedure may then be repeated. The water is usually applied from a canteen cup or small watering can with a spout. You have orally informed us that this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even through he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning. You have also orally informed us that it is likely that this procedure would not last more than 20 minutes in any one application.
Note: Here is how an instructor who oversaw hundreds of waterboarding sessions and underwent the experience himself explained to a reporter his objection to descriptions in the press of it as “simulated drowning”: