VII._________________________________________________________________________
Table Three: Eight Constructive Principles of Composition (Arranged in Pairs)
Now I come to the most difficult part of this method. I confess that I myself have misgivings about how easily the rules I specify for the composition of musical notes can be used by others. Nevertheless I have decided to offer these to you until you have chosen others of your own and explained the principles guiding you. As my mother used to say, “You may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.”
After you decide on generative rules of your own for the sound of your contemplations’ notes, I will practice them (if you ask me to) as diligently as I practice my own. Though we may fail to master each other’s constructive principles completely, before we meet, the effort to do so will help assure our mutual good faith.
Direction is given after each exercise to create the mental sound and abstract duration of a musical note with which to hold the results of the contemplation clearly and securely in mind. Here is my generative principle: The resonance of a recounted event depends on the directness of expression by which it can be recognized and shared as true.
If this principle is true, history can be imagined within a syntax that has already betrayed its user. The goal is a true love song within New World narratives (mine is of fathers killing sons). There is a new limitlessness to the logic of possession in New World modernity along with the realist doctrine that things happen only once and in only one way.
No historical writ of justice extended beyond the marchlands that a free-holder or soldier in a joint-stock company’s pay needed to obey. Absolute possession creates new loves, new men. Jesuits out-Protestanted the Protestants and made plausible from inside events a rational sovereignty of absolute force. (My method is borrowed from theirs.) I claim both logics have been updated by the national security policy doctrine, C4 + I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers plus Intelligence).
CONSTRUCTIVE PAIRS
First Constructive Pair
i(a) [Positive]: The emancipative dimensions of bourgeois literacy and the politics of the Third Estate produced the individual by whom all determining secular value is to be measured and applied. Nationalism sacralizes individual liberty and instrumentalizes it on behalf of empire. Liberal New World history promised and still promises escape through reason from the constraints of what is without appeal to transcendence of any kind. Your written action and my cowardice undo the reciprocity promised by the lettered freedom of event and public narrative our Revolution began to make possible. History is not good-faith narrative of a failure to realize the public good. It is now the unacknowledged order of limitless force administered by an imperial logic of impunity and local Apocalypse.
i(b) [Negative]: Historylessness is now the condition of everyday life. Empire promises in every moment the ecstasy of absolute possession as compensation for a past and future of absolute loss.
Second Constructive Pair
ii(a) [Positive]: It is both necessary and possible to live the one true history of your one true love. Romance’s discipline must be exercised with the energies of religion.
ii(b) [Negative]: Under conditions of imperialism, everyone is forced to improvise reciprocity; every moment forfeit until justice can make its claims felt.
Third Constructive Pair
iii(a)[Positive]: The only serious philosophical question is the question of what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. What she sees determines the worth of his song. Mortality trumps aesthetics; lyric follows epic chronologically as form. The king of the dead knew, even as he was letting her go, that he was making a big mistake by being seduced by Orpheus’s song. Eurydice is asking what the future holds beyond absolute possession.
The story of honey’s origins—the taste of words’ sweetness in the mouth—goes like this: A farmer has lost his bees (they have swarmed), and he goes to his mother to ask what has gone wrong. By following his mother’s instructions, the farmer learns that Orpheus is punishing him for raping and then killing on her wedding day the girl Orpheus was about to marry—Eurydice. The farmer is told what he has to do to appease the husband who once sang so beautifully.
The remedy: Build a sturdy house, at least eight meters square, made of saplings and mud on a patch of waste, abandoned ground. Each side has to have a windowed opening. Inside beat a steer to death with a wooden club (no blood must show), a rope of hemp around its neck, and leave the carcass until the spring. Enter when the sun is warm, and there, hanging inside the curving cavity of white bone (loose strips of flesh will still be dangling down), you will find a hive overflowing with sweetest honey. Eurydice is forever gone.
iii(b) [Negative]: Temporalities of managed, stochastic determination have ruled events since 1945. Stochastics is that branch of mathematics that concerns random sets of observations each of which is plotted as a point on a separate distribution curve. This technique assures that knowledge has no way to distinguish truth from power: algorithms manage preference backed by force, mathematics suspends choice and replaces politics.
Fourth Constructive Pair
iv(a) [Positive]: The proper goal of an emancipative historical method is a society of equal historical selves (SOEHS).
iv(b) [Negative]: Attend the continuous sound of the roar of reproach from all the anonymous New World dead. (I heard it as a child, holding my mother’s yellow elephant-chained skirt.) Allow this sound to accompany your love song inside the hollows of a sparrow’s wing in flight.
Note for Table Three: It may prove helpful while practicing this method to use shorthand designations for the Paired Constructive Principles of Composition. Here are the words I have used to name the constructive principles I have chosen and to hold them carefully in mind:
i(a). Emancipative dimensions of bourgeois literacy; i(b). Historylessness;
ii(a). The one true history of your one true love; ii(b). Improvised reciprocity;
iii(a). What Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back; iii(b). Stochastic temporality;
iv(a). Society of Equal Historical Selves (SOEHS); iv(b). The reproach of all the anonymous New World dead.
When you have chosen your own constructive principles to use instead of mine in your practice of a method, list them in the spaces provided below.
Eight Constructive Principles Arranged in Pairs (Positive and negative)
i(a).___________________________________________________
i(b).___________________________________________________
ii(a).__________________________________________________
ii(b).__________________________________________________
iii(a)._________________________________________________
iii(b)._________________________________________________
iv(a).__________________________________________________
iv(b).__________________________________________________
First Historical Subject (and Master Narrative):
George Anderson
Dear David Kallen,
Let me now begin again. I hope you will not reject my request for a time and place to meet and speak with you in person. We share the same history. Our personal histories entitle us to positions of comfort and rule. I am an expert by formal training in our national narrative. Over my long career as editor I helped regulate a bourgeois ethical monopoly over the words by which we know ourselves and understand others as universal democratic citizens sharing a modern and Humanist