the first Frears Foundation artist in residence for the academic year that begins next fall. I had to recuse myself from voting when the board met. I attended the audition of the finalists held two months ago today and fell in love from the very first notes she sang. I know this is hard to believe, but I assure you it is true. Leda is my one true love. I declare it immediately. Desire must be acted upon. She sang “Light Years” in an arrangement for voice and flute without words.
Leda laughed kindly when I declared myself. She said there was time now that we were no longer young—time in which love could take many forms. I told her I would compose a love song that would prove her wrong. Love, I told her, could only exist in one true action whose independent value was as immediate as the hollow spaces inside a sparrow’s wing—all motion a way to cancel loss.
My method takes four weeks and two days to complete. It is divided into four sections, one for each week. The first time through, the first week must be devoted to learning by heart the meditative techniques that will be used throughout; also to memorizing the historical principles underlying the method’s effectiveness.
By historical method I mean every means by which a person rids the self of its inordinate attachment to empire and creates reciprocity. The goal is a reciprocity based on an ideal of married love serving as the basis for a just society of equal historical selves. The original logic of the abundance of capitalism was another way of being.
You ordered special forces trainers to torture you so you could establish the legal meaning of the words “severe pain or suffering whether physical or mental.” You did this in order to place yourself in a position to revoke beyond appeal your office’s previous legal opinion granting permission to the President, Vice-President, and Secretary of Defense of the United States to order torture without fear or threat of prosecution for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Your act was brave beyond anything I have ever done. It made and makes another history possible.
But the document you wrote and signed granted immunity to torturers. The document you wrote and signed permitted and continues to permit torture as official policy of the United States against all customary norms and statutes of both domestic and international law. The bravery of your act makes another history possible. (By history I mean some true narrative recounting events of pleasure, force, and love.)
Empire and democracy are not compatible. By what narrative logic do we reconcile them? Whom did you see standing there at the end of yourself as they tortured you? What did you say in your mind to your one true love? How will you declare your love when you read this and when we meet?
First Day’s Exercise: Choose some master narrative by which to live other than our present complacent fairy tale of destined consumer’s empire. Remember: Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of the unalienable natural rights that all people hold equally, it is the right of free persons to alter or abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them will seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
For my master narrative, I have chosen every moment and motion in the life of George Anderson, as these were represented in an article appearing in the Trenton, New Jersey State Gazette on April 6, 1925. (The article is reprinted for your convenience in its entirety at the back of this method. Beside it you will find the complete text you wrote and signed, including footnote 8, of your Office of Legal Counsel “Memorandum for James B. Comey, Deputy Attorney General” dated December 30, 2004 above the heading: Re: Legal Standards Applicable Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A .)
The master narrative I have made from these two documents using this careful historical method will serve both of us much better than any other I have seen to date. (I have not ceased looking at the ones others write just because I have written my own. I will, of course, be glad to consider any alternative meditative discipline combining these two documents that you propose.)
Essential to any historical method is a master narrative of presence in which the practitioner learns to sing an accurate love song to his or her one true love. Memorization of the notes of the melody is therefore essential to the task of mutual accountability. There is no other way to lodge an equally valued body inside the abstraction of nationality. Through careful practice of my method’s course of exercises, “George Anderson” is a master narrative now firmly lodged in my memory, and it is continually renewed and can be relived as needed through my method’s daily practice.
Here is how my master narrative now begins:
Up at 501 Calhoun Street there is a little, weather-beaten frame house that sets back from the sidewalk, huddled between two large properties as though trying to hide its shabbiness from the gaze of the passerby. The busy public has no time to take a second look at it, so few know its secret. It is the home of one of Trenton’s very richest men.
His wealth does not consist of anything so commonplace as money. If he wanted a dollar right this minute it is extremely doubtful if he could find it anywhere in those worn old clothes of his, but he has a store house, and in it are treasures that only a man who has lived a whole century may possess—it is the storehouse of memory.
While he pursued the humble calling of a farmer time went marching by, leaving in its wake the history of three wars and the advent of the greatest triumphs of a scientific age. Best of all, from his point of view, time brought the abolishment of slavery, treasure of treasures for the storehouse. Now that age has robbed him of his once healthy body he can fall back upon this wealth and distribute it to those about him, and, after all, no man is quite so rich as the man who shares.
Give your master narrative a textual foundation. Commit as many key portions of it as you can to memory so that it has a chance to feed your imagination continuously. Otherwise we abandon each other without restraint. My master narrative is filled with New England and Jamaican light. Our best American philosopher once proved beyond all contradiction that the nature of true virtue is consent to being in general.
The master narratives you and I choose need not agree. The only requirement is that they both distinguish freedom from the impunity of the American imperial state. Both must concede that an empire of liberty has not yet arrived—not in Fallujah, not in Kabul, not in White Plains.
As important as the master narrative you choose is the governing scene you give it. The governing scene is the picture you give your narrative in your mind so that you can hold your narrative in consciousness clearly over a sustained duration or summon it immediately for internal review as the occasion requires.
The governing scene I use is a composite made from two moments taken from the Trenton newspaper article:
George Anderson at the age of twelve is standing and watching—everyone on the Danville farm was ordered by the master to appear in the Fair House yard to witness a slave’s correction—from early morning until late in the afternoon, as his brother, older by four years, Robert Anderson, is whipped to death by two men, his master and the overseer. (They whip him continuously, taking turns, for having stolen something after previous punishments and warnings for the same offense had not reformed his character. It is well known by everyone present that Robert is the master’s son.) There is an April light in Virginia in which birds’ wings flash—Edenic it is called, and then American. I have captioned this moment with words from the Trenton newspaper article: “So they began to beat him early in the morning.”
This first scene immediately gives way and merges with the next one: To the accompaniment of the explosive sounds of the flapping walls of a revival’s canvas tent, George Anderson is suddenly standing twelve years after the end of the Civil War explaining to everyone around him that he has found his savior. He is animated and joyful and speaks with great confidence. I have labeled this moment and its duration with the words of the newspaper article, “When I knew I had found my Savior I got right up in that meeting and told everybody so.” (The passage in its entirety reads, “When I knew I had found my Savior I got right up in that meeting and told everybody so and since that time I have never been alone. I did not cast off the chains of slavery at the time of the