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._________________________________________________________________________
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,
