Rituals of Generation and Degeneration

The so-called feast of thanks returns each year, each succeeding year seemingly shorter by a month, as if twelve is shaved ever closer to zero. Then there was continued encroachment. A Key into the Language of America, 1643, by Roger Williams, written in Narragansett territory as a guide to that other language, the language of America, that must be translated, or over-written. The son of the King of the feast becomes King Philip and devises his devastating war; his head on display, his people indentured into colonial homes. Resignification is thusly inevitable, no matter the weight of power's survival. The formations and meetings become, however bloody, the scriptings of myth, the ever-layered template of ritual that act out the past as it can be, needs to be, and in that acting out, becomes actual.


"They have thirteen moneths and are content to settle for that many. The courage to grow organs in reply to want, the way a giraffe stretches her neck to mounting advantage. If seasons can force the day around the sun there is no end to threshold or shedding skin. The chief difficulty with nature's outline yields hand-held exposures such as Tashecautummo. How Many Years Since fatal expression, since semantics, since influence.

able

ing."

--Rosmarie Waldrop,
A Key Into the Language of America

A Postscript to The Company Kept

"Until we reveal to ourselves and revel in the true meaning of our acts we will go on suffering the double penalty of guilt and ineffectualness.

I am in a bad way as I write these words. My health is poor. I have a treacherous wife, an unhappy home, unsympathetic superiors. I suffer from headaches. I sleep badly. I am eating myself out. If I knew how to take holidays perhaps I would take one. But I see things and have a duty toward history that cannot wait. What I say is in pieces. I am sorry. I sit in libraries and see things. I am in the honorable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity. I name no names. You must listen. I speak with the voice of things to come. I speak in troubled times and tell you how to be as children again. I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

Tear this off, Coetzee, it is a postscript, it goes to you, listen to me."

--J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands

The Company Kept

November 6, 2007: Senator Arlen Specter on why Attorney General nominee Judge Michael Mukasey could not speak to the obvious truth that the controlled drowning technique known as waterboarding is illegal:

"And he said, in answers to my letter of October 24, that he was reluctant to put people at risk, and we know that a couple of weeks ago former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was served with legal process, unclear exactly what it was, perhaps a warrant of arrest. We know that some countries are exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction on crimes against humanity, that Prime Minister Sharon was under indictment from Belgium. And we know what happened with Pinochet, so that there is a risk factor. So I think he went about as far as he could go, and I think now it’s a matter for the Congress."