by Peter Dimock
Extended notation from my practice: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bends towards his mother on a New Haven Street giving way to an image of Jesse Bishop’s beauty turning time into event in front of six white men). V. Truth Statement: Whenever events lose their independent value an abstruse exegesis is born. i(a). Constructive Principle (positive): Reciprocity as a communicative ideal stems from the Enlightenment tradition of bourgeois literacy. i(b). Constructive Principle (negative): Historylessness, when enforced by a managerial ethos of administering the coercions of empire, creates despair.
Colloquy: It does no good to be too hard on yourself when considering the facts of our complicity. Most of us lack your bravery and the competence with which you accomplished (and, I assume, still accomplish) your tasks.
Sixth Day’s Exercise: Place the moment of your decision to know the present as history within the governing scene of the master narrative you have chosen for practicing this method. For me this means joining what I saw during the music at Mary Joscelyn’s service with the narrative of the life of George Anderson published in the Trenton State Gazette on April 6, 1925. Do not be afraid. Music accompanies unjust narrative. Remember what Marion MacRobert says of George Anderson: “He can quote chapter after chapter from the Bible, and God is very real and very near to him.” What Eurydice saw in Orpheus’s face ensures words’ opening onto common speech to create an unformed future out of others’ experience. Refuse empire; create reciprocity.
Hold the results of this day’s meditation in your mind again with the mental sound of the second subject’s sixth note constructed from the following elements from the method’s three tables: II. VI. ii(a); ii(b). (Remember that the task of the exercise is to juxtapose the decision to live in the present as history and the governing scene of your master narrative.)
Extended notation from my own practice: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bends towards his mother. This picture gives way to and merges with an image of Jesse Bishop dancing her beauty in front of men). 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): Reciprocity, under conditions of empire, must be improvised moment-to-moment. Every moment is forfeit in a history based on principles of limitless possession and absolute loss.
Colloquy delivered to the accompaniment of the second subject’s sixth note: In New York State, in order to effect a citizen’s arrest a person may use such physical force as is justifiable pursuant to subdivision four of section 35.30 of the penal law. Once the suspect has been taken into custody, it is the citizen’s responsibility to deliver the suspect to the proper authorities in a timely fashion. I failed to obey this law on July 13, 2008 when I was in the presence of and in a position to apprehend an unprotected war criminal.
Seventh Day’s Exercise: Construct an event in your mind in which your second historical subject’s governing scene is interrupted by your need to declare your one true love. Sing a love song in imperial time. I never knocked on Jesse Bishop’s door. When the Special Forces trainers were torturing you at Fort Bragg, did you imagine calling out to your one true love? Have the results of this exercise in readiness for the next time you are asked to affirm the link between American freedom and absolute possession.
Hold in your mind the results of your second subject’s seventh contemplation with the mental sound of the note constructed from the following elements from the method’s three tables: II.VII. iii(a); iii(b). (Remember that the task of the exercise is to sing a love song from the midst of a historical method’s governing scene.)
Extended notation taken from my own practice: II. Historical Subject: Derek Takes (Governing scene: Derek bends down in New Haven morning light in front of a music store to rest his head playfully on his mother’s shoulder. This scene merges with the picture of Jesse Bishop’s beauty danced in front of men in Lexington, Kentucky in 1982 while the music is playing.). VII. Truth Statement: 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. iii(a). Constructive Principle (positive): The only important philosophical question is the question of what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. iii(b). Constructive Principle (negative): The stochastic character of contemporary historical time makes the truthful narration of a historical subject’s one true love uncertain and open to misuse even when properly framed as a matter of legitimate public concern. The problem of historical narration can be restated more formally in the following historical gloss Wikipedia gives to the term “stochastic”:
Any kind of time development (be it deterministic or essentially probabilistic) which is analyzable in terms of probability deserves the name of stochastic process. In the 1950s stochastic methods were used at Los Alamos for early work relating to the development of the hydorgen bomb, and became popularized in the fields of physics, physica chemistry, and operations research. The Rand Corporation and the U.S. Air Force were two of the major organizations responsible for funding and disseminating information on stochastic methods during this time, and they began to find a wide application in many different fields. Stochastic processes can be used in music to compose a fixed piece or can be produced in performance. Stochastic social science theory is similar to systems theory in that events are interactions of systems, although with a marked emphasis on unconscious processes. The event creates its own conditions of possibility, rendering it unpredictable if simply for the amount of variables involved. Stochastic social science theory can be seen as an elaboration of a kind of ‘third axis’ in which to situate human behavior alongside the traditional ‘nature vs. nurture’ opposition.
Colloquy delivered to the accompaniment of the second subject’s seventh note (I recite to you from memory the following words from the Trenton State Gazette article from April 6, 1925 written by Marion MacRobert):
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.
All stories of history that are to be called true deserve careful handling. Please send me, when you can, words you have chosen with which to memorize and hold onto the sounds of your master narrative, and I promise to try to make them my own, applying the arts of memory.
Derek’s history is not here. (Our failures of representation make valuable self-portraits.) Let that be my excuse for including this week’s improperly executed exercises here. In the sound of this seventh note let the dissonances stand out. I will do everything I can to establish, with your firm’s help, Derek’s entitlement as Judith Takes’s heir to a share of the royalties from “Light Years.”
I am valuable because she came back. What Eurydice sees in the need in Orpheus’s eyes establishes the worth of his song. Her action opens a place only the living can fill. I hope we’ve both practiced this method and will agree to speak to the people we imagine gathering beneath the mercenaries’ bodies swaying from Fallujah’s bridge. From these actions we may be able to create historical speech for what we have done in the New World.
FOURTH WEEK
Do you tell yourself our superiority derives from our talents or from our legitimate exercise of immediate rule?
Our wars are not declared. The events resulting from the force our empire requires
are not admissible evidence against us. It’s true our frames could hardly bear very much of it. This is how republics end.
In this first cycle of this method’s practice, the fourth week is reserved for the third historical subject. Choose it well. In subsequent cycles, the fourth week’s exercises will be devoted to the practitioner himself as historical subject—to autobiography as self-help—a practical, political guide. During this first cycle, the last two days of your practice may be allotted to the task of beginning to compose musical notes for yourself as historical subject speaking in the first person. But for most, these last two days of the first cycle are better spent reviewing and securing in memory the method’s tables of rules.
The object, when it comes to the fourth week of subsequent cycles, is to dissolve the imperial self and to trust those you find standing at the end of your vision.
In my own practice of this first cycle only, I chose Judith Takes as my historical subject for the fourth week. Again I use a governing scene assembled as a composite made from two moments. The first merges and then gives way to the second in each exercise’s actual practice. It is perfectly acceptable to use moments derived from your reading for your governing scenes rather than actual events. The goal is interpretive immediacy and perfect union between words and things, not legal standards of proof.
For the first moment of my third subject’s governing scene I use a mental picture of a young woman listening to a young man speaking publicly. He is narrating his experience as a child entering history’s literate clarity through what he calls “the bloodstained gates of slavery.” This moment occurs on a New England summer evening in a public meeting hall on Nantucket Island. The year is 1841. The second moment of my third subject’s governing scene comes from Judith’s account to me of the moment she and Jason Frears fell in love. She had gone to hear him play in Greenwich Village club on his birthday. This was in early September of 1963.
Remember that the goal of this method is responsible immediacy for historical thought. These exercises are intended to help rid us of our attachments to empire and undo the consequences of historylessness. (American exceptionalism is not exceptional.)
In philosophy immediacy is an inference drawn from a single premise and therefore arrived at without the intervention of a middle term. Immediate knowledge is the knowledge of self-evidence. We hold these truths.
At Nuremberg it was established as legal doctrine that immoral laws could not make crimes against humanity immune from prosecution. The urgency of universal justice, given the destructive powers unleashed by modernity, is simply too great. Justice within modernity is understood to mean universal entitlement to individual freedom within a society of equal historical selves. This is conservative legal doctrine—not radicalism. All our Harvard training can be marshaled to prove that this is true. Or were we also being trained to overturn doctrine according to the necessity of maintaining order no matter how extreme the injustice of the event? Were we being trained to demonstrate, as part of the legibility of order, the impunity of our election? What is the appropriate citizen response, knowing what we know, to the president’s statement to the nation delivered on July 5, 2004 that “Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right?”
In August of 2002 and again in late December of 2004, under the color of law and with the protection of the document you wrote and signed, the United States became the first nation to formally authorize the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes. There are no exceptions to the constraints placed by law upon acts of government officials under Common Article 3—not even immediate necessity, or national security. This article states that the following acts are prohibited under all circumstances: “Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” The person who violates Common Article 3 is an international outlaw, liable to prosecution under universal jurisdiction.
“Immediate” in the seventeenth century, could be used as a noun that referred to the person who was the recipient of an urgent, spontaneous act of sacred communication, especially if he was a faithful believer, as in: “Christ is speedy, and swift as a roe, especially in his immediates.”
You and I were trained for the same pleasures and responsibilities. The second moment of the governing scene for the third subject’s exercises is an image of Judith approaching Jason Frears as he is about to take a break during a performance at Greenwich Village jazz club in 1963. (It was his birthday and he was in the middle of a five-day booking.) Judith is saying, “I’ve brought you something for your birthday,” and Frears, a married man, laughs gently answering, “You’ve brought me you.”
Here is the first moment of the third subject’s governing scene. A young married man is speaking, remembering himself as a six-year-old boy seeing for the first time a slave being whipped. He is watching his aunt—his mother’s sister—being suspended, half naked, from an iron hook secured in a ceiling joist of an out-building by his master’s overseer. She is to be whipped for his rage and pleasure. In the meeting hall the handsome man is speaking as if, for the first time, his voice is experiencing the limitlessness of possession in the New World. He is saying out loud what he remembers seeing as a child: “He would whip her to make her scream and whip her to make her hush. It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.”
When he comes to write the words of this speech down a year later, this is how he describes what happened:
Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you damned bitch, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!’”and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the younger women. I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the plantation.
From what I know of Judith’s work on the audiences of the early abolitionists, I know she imagined herself in the audience as a young New England Protestant woman, nineteen or twenty, listening to a man speaking in public for the first time of his childhood vision of slavery. She told me she imagined the girl imagining herself as the master’s daughter and speaker’s playmate hiding in the closet with him. The girl listening, Judith said, was to be understood as a good student of New World New England light: The bloodstained gate was to be understood as history from the perspective of Apocalypse without an intermediary.
On the morning of June 19th, before the ceremonies, I will be speaking to the board of trustees on behalf of NCI and will announce the company’s commitment to provide the seed capital to establish an operating endowment for the just-completed Charles Jason Frears Memorial American Music Archive and Performance Center at the University of Maryland—New Carrollton.
Another speaker, later in the day, will be announcing the discovery—I and others made it while going through Judith’s papers at Derek’s request—of lyrics in Judith’s handwriting for Jason Frears’s signature composition, “Light Years.”
I have temporarily removed that original document from the archive. These lyrics were thought to have been lost. I will take responsibility for its safe keeping until its commerci
al value can be determined. It appears to me clear that Judith’s estate is entitled as co-owner of copyright in the work and to a share of back royalties. These might amount to a considerable sum. I will turn the document over to the law firm that handles this matter on behalf of Derek and Judith’s estate. I am recommending that Derek and his advisers consult you.
Last month I heard Leda sing “Light Years” in Toronto for her audition to be the artist in residence at the Frears Center this coming academic year. (She sang it in an arrangement she’d made of it as a melody without words scored for voice and flute.) When I heard and saw her singing, I knew I had found my one true love. From that moment I knew I was free to act on my desire.
I have declared my love to Leda. I was able to do so because of my practice of this method. From this experience I have learned to trust my method. That is why I now send you this letter.
My daughter, Lily Fales, will be at the dedication ceremonies on June 19th to hear me speak and to hear Leda sing. She is fourteen. I look forward to introducing you to her and likewise would be pleased to meet any members of your family who will be attending.
First Day’s Exercise: In the Jesuits’ version of this method, the fourth week is reserved for the events that establish the meaning of history by anticipating, prefiguring, and thereby enabling as historical event, its end: “Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me.” I have loved and made a lie.
Using the governing scene you have constructed for the third subject’s exercises, construct arguments your one true love will adopt as her own to refuse to obey illegitimate orders of the imperial state. True virtue consists in consent to being in general. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
When you align the historical master narrative you have chosen with the scene of the bloodstained gate, what narrative of justice now grounds your actions? If the history of experience in the New World was to make the logic of freedom and absolute possession one, how do you address those you meet at the end of your vision?