Memory is the fertile soil of a time capsule;
It is what propagandists have every reason to fear,
For they must know theirs are but imposed forms
That for a time only are the cause of our ceasing to be.
Here, as in Pound’s “Histrion” (1908), the possessive determiner “our” references a retrievable tradition. It is what broadens our stance beyond apoplectic presentations of the ongoing carnage targeting civilian women and children as unprecedented in its manner of unfolding before our eyes on the world stage, something never before having been witnessed within our lifetimes.
And yet, here is Edward Said cataloguing the “stock and trade” military tactics of Israel against Palestinians in a much anticipated lecture delivered to an audience gathered at UC-Berkeley in 2003:
Torture, assassinations, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, the annexation of territory, the transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass killing, the denial of free rights to passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid; the use of civilians for human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlements, economic pulverization, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, the killing of U.S. personnel…
All these have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States, which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but has also given Israel upwards of $135 billion of economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by our government on its own citizens. (“Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights”)
A greater intelligibility is discoverable in the light of Said’s lecture. A discernible pattern is evident. I borrow these descriptors from Peter Allan Dale’s work on an idea of history attributed to Victorian inheritance as a ‘likelihood of finding’ “a logical pattern or law and an overall goal that gave it some gratifying intelligibility” (In Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past). The reasons among historians to regard 19th century models of “linear change” as outmoded notwithstanding, the recollection of the Said lecture makes plain the routine workings of an institution as not only not unprecedented but not justifiable as merely isolated cases of “justified self-defense.”
To quote Daniel Byman quoting William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What Said summed up as “stock and trade” methods of state sanctioned violence, Byman in his article on post-war stability refers to as a “repertoire of violence” during post-Reconstruction in the American South and a sameness of ‘scripted political violence’ in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, what is to be done with our being rudely awakened yet again to banal forms of greed and iniquity covered over by claims to inheritance, this “repetitiousness in a repetition of men and flies,” to quote Wallace Stevens? War profiteering is hardly an improved condition for humanity, yet it’s unlikely this will be the last genocide, and not only because it justifies resource management arguments for the same people who normalize private jets and beachfront condos. At the same time, what else could a return to “business as usual” be other than cold comfort for change, a structurally rigid and low-level adaptation that Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget contrasted with higher forms of intelligence?
Piaget prefaced his book The Psychology of Intelligence as based on lectures delivered in 1942 at College de France “at an hour when university men felt the need to show their solidarity in the face of violence and their fidelity to permanent values.”
In one place he writes, “from the point of view of the structural mechanism, elementary sensori-motor adaptations are both rigid and unidirectional, while intelligence tends toward reversible mobility.” He writes reversible mobility is “the essential property of the operations which characterize living logic in action” and “Reversibility is the very criterion of equilibrium.”
For me, the relevance in these comments resides not in a withholding of intelligence from “lower” sensori-motor forms, but in the central role intelligence plays in the organism and in mental life, which is to say, in memory. With memory, intelligent beings can attain greater stability, a grounding and a sense of equilibrium, by drawing a conceptual line connecting their point in space with a far point in the universe. Memory is this distance in time. A greater distance would give a wider base, which would effect a greater gravitas and countervailing force.
At the same time, this reversibility doesn’t seem to call for any additional expenditure of energy when exerting an attractive force, as Rupert Sheldrake has explained elsewhere, which incidentally complicates the popular notion of enormous amounts of energy being required for time travel. As well, if the greater attractive force of an enlarged memory can be effected without any additional energy expenditure, non-human and human animal sacrifice become liberated from the pretense of some greater purpose. They can rightly take their pure forms as gleeful sadism. It would be a “slam dunk,” to quote former CIA director George Tenet.