A historical method of true virtue is necessary to create love songs out of music that comes to you first in words whose syntax has already betrayed you. It will permit you to sing, in the midst of empire, a universal history that includes your one true love.
Through contemplation, memorization, and meditation, begin to practice this historical method by learning its exercises and absorbing its principles as explained below.
Rules for a Historical Method
Master Narrative :____________________________________
Governing Scene :____________________________________
My master narrative is the history of George Anderson, former slave, born on a plantation near Danville, Virginia in 1817 and interviewed by Marion C. MacRobert for an article in the Trenton, New Jersey State Gazette, published on April 6, 1925. The entire article is included at the end of this method.
Table One: Historical Subjects
List here the four subjects you have chosen for the four weeks of this historical method’s meditative cycle.
I.____________________________________________________
II.____________________________________________________
III.____________________________________________________
IV.____________________________________________________
Note: During the first cycle of your practice, the first week must be devoted to learning the rules of the method. You will not therefore be able, during your first cycle, to undertake a full meditative engagement with your fourth subject. I have found it best, when beginning the method’s complete cycle for the second time, to begin with the first subject and work through the historical subjects in the same order in which they were listed originally. All of us list last the subject in which we place the most hope. For that reason, the fourth subject is the one to which it is important that we bring the most practiced discipline each time we arrive at it.
I have recorded the results of my own practice of this method’s exercises during one cycle to provide you with examples against which you can juxtapose your own. This will allow you, when we meet, to have a reliable way to answer or refuse my good faith. I have not been able to say this to anyone before now (I hope to say it to you in person when we meet): The coerced complicity of presence enforced in every moment by our class’s rule is unbearable. Patriotic constructions of nationality cannot substitute for justice or justify postponement of history’s enlightened dream of natural, universal equality: Freedom is not free when it is used for domination.
Table One: Theo Fales’s Historical Subjects
I. George Anderson, 1817 – 1926 (?)
II. Derek Takes, 1964 –
III. Judith Takes, 1939 – 1999
IV. Theo Fales, 1949 –
Table Two: Truth Statements
When in my vision I came to the end of myself and found other people standing there, it never occurred to me that others would not believe my account of what I saw. I was un-prepared. The truth of vision always appears self-evident. In my relief and joy I made the mistake of demanding from my close friend and colleague there in the church in front of witnesses his account of the equivalent scene from his personal history. The truth I saw in my vision (I was convinced of it then and am convinced of it now) was that every American has his or her own true version of the moment I heard and saw. Another history will be made possible if we say it aloud: Limitless possession in the New World and universal freedom cannot be reconciled.
Speech as persuasion must be used for good. Speech must be grounded in truths the speaker has tested in the body offered in the service of reciprocity. Memorization helps. Memorization assures familiarity with the words when someone speaks of matters held in common by everyone.
In the event history—like empire, like music—happens all at once. This is presence. Meditations on how to act in history occur within historical structures of emergency. The national security state suspends democracy.
The words of our love songs will not mean anything until we find the music with which to make them true. The words with which we collude with empire are used for advantage, not reciprocity.
I have found it useful to memorize seven truths. The application of these truths to the scenes in my mind produces knowledge I hold onto. I hold them in the present with the mental sound of a musical note. This note sounds according to the juxtaposition (early in the morning) of three things: a true master narrative, a historical subject, and a governing scene. Their juxtaposition is arranged and applied in the presence permitted by each day. Presence is made from the promptings of a pair (one in a prescribed sequence of four) of constructive principles. Each pair contains one positive principle, one negative. The eight principles, arranged in their prescribed order and pairings, are given below.
But before I list these pairs, I will provide you a table of the seven truths I myself use in the practice of this method. These seven statements have stood the test of time. I insist these truths have never been contradicted either by reason or experience. A dogmatics of justice in the midst of empire is necessary when a love song is found still to be missing its words.
Table Three: Seven Truths
| I. | 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. |
| II. | The most important element 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 through their actions that they are happy or the reverse. |
| III. | 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. |
| IV. | 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. |
| V. | Whenever events lose their independent value, an abstruse exegesis is born. |
| VI. | 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. |
| VII. | 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. |
List on the lines provided the truth statements you will be using in your own practice of this method.
Table Two: Truth Statements
I._________________________________________________________________________
II._________________________________________________________________________
III._________________________________________________________________________
IV._________________________________________________________________________
V._________________________________________________________________________
VI._________________________________________________________________________