I was able to get your address through Frederick Avery, whose memoir about his time as Director of Central Intelligence I acquired and edited for McClaren Books. As I’m sure you are aware, McClaren and NCI published Storm Warnings: War and American Leadership after 9/11 a few years back. (It made it onto a number of bestseller lists for a few, brief weeks.) Fred first told me about what you did and I have read what’s been written about it since. Fred is a great admirer of yours. He disagreed, on pragmatic grounds, with the decision to withdraw the previous legal findings under which interrogations of detainees had been conducted, but said, given that decision, you had accomplished with skill, devotion to country, and with enormous courage a very difficult task.
I continue to enjoy the thought and feel amazed at the courage of your action—your decision to find an experiential ground with your own body to establish the legal meaning of the words in U.S. law upholding the enforcement of international sanctions against torture. It is your action that leads me to write to you now. Most people in this country, without acknowledging they are doing so, accept that torture must be used against our enemies because they believe there is no choice but to inflict limitless pain as the price of justified dominance. National security requires torture as a necessary tool to be used responsibly by those entrusted with the stewardship of the limitless, justified power of the American state—civilized empire of last resort.
I know now, because of my vision, that without your action, and others like it, we will not be able to prove to others and ourselves the necessary logic of our virtuous exercise of power. I have written a historical method with which you and I may prove to ourselves and to our loved ones our dedicated pursuit of the public good. Both in principle and fact, that pursuit permits our true love of them. I send you this method in advance of meeting you in person so that together we can devise another history that will repair what we have done.
After reading this, it will be difficult to reach me at my listed McClaren Books address. I have requested and been granted a leave of absence from the company. I needed some time to reconsider my future and to carefully compose this method. This decision comes after continuing difference between Owen Corliss and myself. At one time, I believe, both of us once considered my holding a slightly subordinate corporate title to be merely a formality.
The recent success of Fred Avery’s memoir makes me still valuable to the company. Inwardly I now insist on the necessity of acting on a just, historical vision (once its syntax was promised me at Mary Joscelyn’s funeral). Owen Corliss has told me this a misplaced personal luxury—one that he says he refuses to indulge at the expense of shareholders. You have done more than anyone else I know to make our present visible as history. With the help of this method and our actions, together I know we will be able to prove Owen wrong. We will be able to do this from within the good faith that clings to the remnants of our entitlement to rule. It’s from this that we will make our coherence sing—from this we’ll be able to join the logic of our rule to the natural equal rights of others.
Most days I am at my desk in the Reading Room in the Hollander Library at Pace University here in the city. The president and I know each other. We both sit on the board of trustees of the new Jason Frears Memorial American Music Archive and Performance Center whose magnificent new building is just now being completed on the New Carrollton campus of the University of Maryland on the Eastern Shore.
During my leave I have taken it upon myself to use my connections to the several parties to do what I can through research to lay the groundwork for possible mediation to resolve conflicting claims over the performance and licensing rights to some newly discovered Jason Frears recordings of high quality and other materials. These were found in the recent Judith Takes bequest of her personal papers to the Jason Frears Archive. They include the lyrics, once thought to have been lost, to Frears’ great four-movement composition, “Light Years.” NCI is the parent company that now owns the rights to the recordings Frears made during his most productive and creative years between 1959 and 1964. NCI is the major corporate sponsor of the Frears Center in partnership with the University of Maryland. (We are working on a capital campaign right now to raise an endowment.) Preparations are being completed for the dedication ceremony and public opening to be held in two months time on June 19th. I have been asked if I would make some remarks on behalf of NCI and have agreed to do so. You will be receiving an invitation to this event yourself shortly.
At my desk at the library I have unrestricted access to all the papers and other materials (including rehearsal tapes) from the still un-catalogued boxes given to the Frears Center last year by the terms of Judith Takes’s will. My offer to go through these papers and write a report concerning their contents addressed to NCI lawyers and Derek (Judith’s son and executor of her estate) has been gratefully accepted. Judith and I were in graduate school together in American history at Yale in the 1970s and 1980s and studied under the same adviser, Professor Charles Quick, a leading historian of early American slavery. I knew Derek slightly as a small boy (I took care of him one summer afternoon when he was six) and saw him occasionally as a young man.
This is how I spend my days now—preparing a preliminary catalog of these valuable new additions to the work of a great American composer. Frears reported that many of his most important compositions, including “Light Years,” came to him first in the form of words. He said that once he had found the notes of the music for the words that came to him, the words themselves disappeared from memory. He didn’t bother to preserve any record of them; their work was done. Only a few have survived and that appears to have happened by sheer accident.
I have adopted a variation of Frears’s compositional technique for this method: The words in which the history of the present we are living first comes to us, we have to assume, are unreliable. The betrayal built into the syntax in which most experience is steeped makes spontaneous speech unuseable for reciprocity. A historical method is necessary to live according to first principles. In the New World we have progressed at least this far: Every moment forfeit in a history of absolute loss.
Every moment forfeit in a history of absolute loss: I am valuable because she came back. Memorize this and you will be safe once you learn to create from it a republican, historical method of reciprocity. If I did not have your brave action to rely upon, I would not have any way to assert this or to approach you with any confidence when we meet in Maryland. This will prepare the ground for something to hold onto; some vision to report.
There is a limitlessness to possession of the New World; no settler soul survives intact. No citizen now survives possession’s continuance as a lawless entitlement to force.
This is how you began your Legal Finding:
December 30, 2004
Memorandum for James B. Comey, Deputy
Attorney General
Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 U.S.S.
2340 – 2340A
Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.
The following is from an early record of my own practice of this method: Bourgeois good faith finally rests on the ideal of a lasting community of love founded on the ideal of love between spouses. This love—along with autonomy and cultivation—founds a concept of a universal, shared humanity whose freedom of action and reciprocity constitutes the transcendence of modernity without appeal to religion of any sort. Bourgeois freedom establishes the ethical ideal of emancipating an inner realm (operating by its own laws) from extrinsic purposes of any kind. This is the necessary basis for a true history.
If you see Leda before I do, sing her this song so she does not choose another. I am valuable because she came back. 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 inside the present moment with which to build a society of equal historical selves.
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The Frears Center board of trustees has invited Leda Corot Rivers to sing at the dedication ceremony and public opening on June