cannot distinguish myself from you. That’s why I ask now for the chance to meet in person and to speak with you formally but without restraint.
How do we devise a method for living the present moment within a frame of redemptive, universal history? (Our training gave us the rhetorical means to make the case that this was both possible and necessary.) Weren’t we taught well that it was our duty to use our power and privilege to dispel all temptations to the contrary? The community of equally valuable free selves was and is the final goal of the American state under our stewardship. The brightness of American summer air—over Bar Harbor or Nantucket—confirms each year the naturalness of our authority.
I know I have no right to ask you to answer these questions sincerely and truthfully unless I am willing to give an accurate and true account of myself.
I have been trying to find a way to do this responsibly during the past few years—to devise a method that won’t waste time or encumber others with false, awkward, or wasted mental steps.
During this same time, I am confident I have adequately met my obligations as Senior Executive Editor for McClaren Books, even serving briefly as Executive Vice-President of the education division for our parent company, NCI Corporation (formerly Newmark Communications International). Now I am sending you my historical method so that my request for an hour to meet in person this coming June 19th will be understood by you as made with a carefully disciplined and rigorously practiced good faith.
Even if you find that you cannot honor my request, my method, if you engage the exercises it prescribes in an active way, will give you a reliable technique with which to weigh the value of my arguments against your own experience. I can say in its favor that there have been moments in my practice of its exercises when I have been able to find myself outside the cycle of owning everything and of fathers killing sons. I rely upon the trust and good faith instilled by our training. I am confident you will take this letter seriously. At my method’s end I hope both of us will have a way to approach the people waiting in Fallujah to talk with us about the common history we have made.
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Like a name—like empire—this happens all at once: some new speech, some new immediacy of obedience and rule.
By historical method I mean every exercise possible—physical and mental—by which the self can learn to rid itself of inordinate attachments to empire and, once they have been removed, search and find ways to refuse empire and create reciprocity among equals.
This is what happened to me:
This intrusion of a sense of harm in the moment: this complicity of presence. There are lots of ways of being protected—this system of alarm at the way we rule: all the colors of the world fly loose—they fly calmly toward the screen, then suddenly return to narrative purpose but establish rule by traveling in the wrong direction.
I promise that I’m trying to say what happened as clearly as I can. What happened has determined my system of composition. Without a way of saying it adequate to the occasion there will be nothing but confusion.
This presence of harm:
Mary Joscelyn took a job straight out of Fordham College in the publicity and advertising department of McClaren Books (this was in 1964), a well-regarded mid-sized New York book publisher known for its excellent American history titles. She never worked for any other company and died of a sudden heart attack on a Sunday afternoon in 1995 in her Queens home at the age of sixty-five. She had risen to the position of director of print promotion and was in charge of all print reviews and print media relations for the McClaren imprint. I myself was taken on at McClaren Books as an acquiring editor in 1984 after a ten-year reading binge. (I was a graduate student in American history at Yale.) I was expected, because of my background, to acquire titles in American history and politics. I was permitted to acquire fiction in addition if I could find the time for it. Mary and I did not know each other well. I cannot really say we were friends. How I wish that I could. I like to think we shared a belief in the virtues of elegance and restraint: Jamaican and New England light—so piercing it can sing. That’s what I like to think now. This thought needs discipline.
By 1995 McClaren Books had been bought by NCI. McClaren Books and then Lessing & Company Publishing had been added and combined under the McClaren name to become NCI’s high-end trade book publishing division worldwide. NCI’s human resources department had chartered a bus to take any employee who wanted to go to Mary’s memorial service to Saint Sebastian Roman Catholic Church in Queens. Everyone who spoke—daughters, sister, a brother, pastor, Frank Braithwaite, NCI’s Vice-President for Media Relations and Mary’s boss—spoke of Mary’s religious devotion. I had not known of it during all the years we spoke and joked. We enjoyed each other’s company and helped each other do the best for the books we worked on together.
Toward the middle of the service—the choir was singing—I felt myself enter through the gates of a vision into my real history. (Tears were streaming down my face; I noticed but did not feel them.) Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to me before. I was raised a secular, upper-class, Protestant child of the American Enlightenment. This precluded all Old World burdens of inherited superstition or the contagion of the unrequited failure of indenture not lived out to term. In my vision I was suddenly four years old again standing behind by mother, clutching in my fists the folds of her black and yellow skirt. The black was the same deep black as a storybook’s ink. Across the cloth’s billowing undulations marched the most beautiful yellow elephants. In their shining majesty they spiraled around my mother in horizontal lines—strung out according to a joyful informal symmetry of cloth and air—graceful, lifted trunk to delicate, curling tail.
High above—above my arms’ ability to reach my mother’s waist—appearing in the doorway, was a woman’s radiant face—piercing, dancing light shot from behind her head, her hair framed in radiance that flooded the doorway of my parents’ New Haven basement apartment.
The woman’s eyes were already looking for mine as my mother’s body politely blocked her entrance. How did I know suddenly that the elephants were part of a triumphal procession my mother wore to celebrate her absolute powers of politeness, rage, abandonment, and loss? The woman’s eyes found mine there where I stood behind my mother’s skirt. They asked without using words—without fear—(they assured me she was willing to bear the knowledge of whatever answer I gave without restraining the reach of my infant terror and glory)—“How are you?”
It was the first empirical question I understood as important. I knew it was urgent beyond sentiment or calculation. In the event (I learned later I had not yet begun to speak though I had just turned four) I answered with my gaze—I could feel the shining elephants marching through my hands—that I was valuable and full of light because she had come back.
In the moment my mother disappeared. (Was this what she had always feared would happen?) I knew she would not let the woman cross the threshold. That would never happen now, nor did the woman expect it. But in the light of Jamaica and New England (or wherever it was my mother had gone and whether or not I would ever be able to find her again) I saw that a New World history of true love was both possible and inevitable. At Mary Joscelyn’s service I saw a true vision of another history I had forgotten to live in a way that could be stored and then retrieved from memory.
Then I made a serious error, though I trust not a fatal one. As soon as the service was over, in the joy of my vision’s new immediacy, I urgently asked my boss and best friend, Owen Corliss, to give me—then and there—the equivalent scene from his own life. I asked him to tell me what he had seen during the singing. No American lacks this moment: recognizing the person we meet when we come to the end of ourselves and know that everything can be possessed. My vision and now my method have taught me this. Still, I also
