Letter from Dawson Gage to Carli Brosseau, The Assembly

Dear Carli,

Below you find the history of “Paytel text messages” between me and “embedded social worker” Allison Waters, who has been a quiet hero of this story. It was a remarkable experience to be able to “text someone from jail who is sitting in an office at the courthouse”, and her regular Friday visits basically kept me alive in otherwise abject circumstances.

The question we must answer, Ms. Brosseau, is whether the “Paytel company” in Greensboro, or for that matter the “law enforcement organizations” which it “partners” with (in my case, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office): do they still have copies of my “Paytel messages”? Because if they have not destroyed the messages yet, we need to GET ON IT: I wrote an absolutely astonishing BOOK in jail over the course of a year. The title I would give it, should it prove to still exist, is…. “The Angelic Commentaries”. 

(Or: “Commentaries on the Laws of England” + “Look Homeward, Angel” + “The Satanic Verses” = “The Angelic Commentaries”)

(Note: this is a somewhat obscure triple-reference, but clever enough that it’s worth illustrating. Like so.)

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William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England which was written during the “colonial period” of North Carolina, and which became a beloved book among North Carolina’s lawyer-leadership in the years just prior to the American revolution, is considered “the authoritative statement of English law”. But before Blackstone came along, there was a great deal of uncertainty and controversy about fundamental questions. In such circumstances, where the law is uncertain, the Crown (“the State”) inevitably takes advantage by interpreting law in its own favor. In fact, there is even a clause in the “Charter of the Province of Carolina” of 1663 which says as much, that “in case of ambiguity, choose the interpretation which is most congenial to the interests of the lords proprietor.”) Blackstone’s achievement was to conjure authority and consensus using his own intellect and gift for putting the law into English phrase. 

In the Orange County Detention Center the “tablet” had the FastCase law Library which is a very rich resource which I used to maximum possible extent, and so my knowledge of some matters of North Carolina law is superior to any living “lawyer”, not because I’m so much smarter or whatever but because I have studied a set of cases and that no one else knows about. I was very diligent, and pursued certain lines of thought wherever they led. The result was that I was able to do something like Blackstone, which was to “cut through the confusion” and simply “lay down the law” in an attractive and elegant fashion. My form and format were limited by the “Paytel software”, so I had to type on the “jail tablet keyboard” and fit my discourse into 1000 character chunks for which I paid $0.10 each, but like haiku and other strict poetic forms such as “the tweet”, this “spatial limitation” in fact opened up new possibilities. So the first part of my book is “discussions of North Carolina law” which also touch on national and international questions such as “human trafficking” or “the case of Qi Tailei” (just wait til you hear that one.) 

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The second part of “The Angelic Commentaries” is “the angel”, which is to say the novel Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, North Carolina’s greatest writer. If you know the story of this book, you might recall that it is an novel of autobiographical type whose characters closely resemble various real persons, mostly in Wolfe’s home city of Asheville. While reviewers in the great Northern literary magazines marveled at Wolfe’s genius or mocked his excesses, the reception of the book in North Carolina was dominated by the folks who “only read the book to find themselves in it”. Typical letters to Wolfe on this front went something like “You vicious monkey you! Your book is the filthiest slander I have ever seen! You should be ashamed of yourself!” The result was that Thomas Wolfe had to leave North Carolina, never really to return. There is an echo or resonance of this episode–“Wolfe gets run out of Asheville”–and what happened later with Wolfe’s story “I Have a Thing to Tell You”, which resulted in the author’s banishment from Germany (the Nazi Third Reich, that is) and the prohibition on his books, which were much beloved in that country. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie of Asheville, North Carolina had something in common with the literary wing of National Socialism: they both couldn’t handle Thomas Wolfe, because his aim was true, and his arrows were plentiful. 

Look Homeward, Angel may have used “real people”, but it did use fictional person and place names, so there was at least a thin veil over the “true story”. The “other Thomas Wolfe”, that is “Tom Wolfe the Virginian”, the bringer of “the New Journalism”, took the experiment of “truth in writing” to the next degree by using ingenious and careful reportage and interviewing separately all the different people who were present “at the scene of the story”, thus to produce the precious works of “avant-garde non-fiction prose writing” which made such a mark upon my own style. So Look Homeward, Angel is “based on a true story”,  while The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is just “a true story”. 

Truth being a defense in actions for libel in the United States, we ought to be able to employ Tom Wolfe’s approach to controversial matters and stories in North Carolina in 2024, so long as we are faithful to “the truth”. In other words, “the truth means using real names in all cases”. (Why exactly are “crime victims”, “inside sources”, and “the judges of the three-judge-panel” exempted from the general expectation that “names” are a matter of public and not private life?) 

But the truth does not appear but for the language in which we tell it, and thus there is an aspect to truth which derives from “literary style”. What I’m getting at, Carli, is what my master Kojin Karatani calls “the perspectival configuration of literature”. You will know from your own experience that different “outlets” or “organs” not only have a certain political and ideological “zone” which they rarely if ever leave, and this isn’t just about “what facts we report” or “which stories we choose” or (as Tom Campbell would say) “what’s the correct spin”. It is just as much about the ways in which “reality” is filtered out of “journalism” and “non-fiction” through ingenious literary artifice. It is my gift and my curse that I have never been able to color within these lines, and that both the style and substance of my journalism place it outside the limits of the supposedly-free press. (Here one might mention Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model” from Manufacturing Consent and media-critical terms like “concision”, which refers to the idea that “brevity affirms the status quo, while criticism has too high a word-count”. In “The Angelic Commentaries”, I was able to defy the logic of Chomsky’s theory and tell difficult truths in concise fashion: the trick is that “being in jail” is the best “perspectival configuration” for seeing “the straight-up truth”.

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All of this does seem to be related to the struggles of “politics and law” in North Carolina 2024, since we are dealing with an environment where journalism, literature, and academic scholarship are all being tamed and compromised by the new totalitarian order which Joshua Stein has wrought, and continues to wreak as we close in on election day. The problem, Carli, is gravely serious, because people can call me “schizophrenic stalker” or other such slurs all they want: my apprehension of North Carolina politics and law is all-too-sound, and what people call “harassment” in my cases is, more often than not, a synonym for “the unwelcome truth”. But as you know, there is also that “truth” which is “beauty”, and the two figures of truth and beauty, said to be interchangeable by some, might better be understood as complementary. Truth must be draped in the garments of language because “the naked truth” is too bright for our mind’s eye. (It’s like “looking upon nakedness” in the Old Testament, or perhaps what Zora Neale Hurston evoked when she wrote, of witnessing a hurricane in the black of night, that “their eyes were watching God”. )

“Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy” writes Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, which I first began to read in San Francisco back in 2012, but which I did not properly read until late 2023 in jail in Hillsborough. On 6 February 1989, the “Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran” pronounced his so-called fatwa upon the imaginative novelist Rushdie, calling upon “all Muslims” to “execute Rushdie” should they ever have the opportunity, and that Rushdie’s life was forfeit because he had “insulted Islam”. All through the secular liberal “free world” came the book stores banning The Satanic Verses, which seems to count as an escalation compared with the Nazi ban on Thomas Wolfe: the Ayatollah could have just banned Rushdie’s works in Iran (which of course he did, and the story of “The Secret Translations of The Satanic Verses Into Farsi and Their Underground Publication in Iran” actually turned up in “the FastCase Law Library” when I searched for it.) Imagine if Adolf Hitler had pronounced a death sentence on Thomas Wolfe? But wait, remember? The Buncombe County Bourgeoisie had pronounced its death sentence already. In any event, one may observe that “The Satanic Verses Affair” revealed that even back in 1989 there was already a profound and widespread “counter-free-speech” perspective which equivocated and justified the suffering which was inflicted on Salman Rushdie with reference to the “sensibilities of Muslims” who were “offended” by the book (which of course they mostly had not read.) 

The story of “The Satanic Verses” refers to the legend which says that certain passages of the Holy Quran were illicit or unsound, because instead of being “dictated by the Angel Gabriel” to Muhammad, it is said that Muhammad briefly started “taking dictation from Satan”, thus resulting in “The Satanic Verses” which were not the words of Allah, but of his enemy. No one has ever determined which verses are “the Satanic verses”, but here is a suggestive parallel. 

In reading through “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina” last week, I came across a tiny footnote on “Number 96” which said that this section had been interpolated by someone other than John Locke, but that Locke was powerless to do anything about it, so the section survived and became “law”. (Amusingly, “Section 96” concerns “Government subsidy for the Clergy”, so you can guess who might have added it.)

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To recapitulate, “The Angelic Commentaries” was a book (and if it hasn’t been destroyed, still is one) which attempted to state “what the Law really is in North Carolina”; it is a “true story about real people” which is “too true to publish, and too real to read”, but which I nevertheless undertook to write using real names and social-historical facts; it is lastly a work of imagination which uses figures of religion and faith (which are the essence of “love”, “marriage”, “sex”, and “romance”, or used to be) to render the story (“his”-“story”) of my own life and times in the manner of sacred scripture, without relinquishing one’s hold over that which is profane. With that as an adequate introduction to this missing and unpublished work, I once again express my hope that our meeting will take place in time to sway the election. 

For your thoughts and your sympathies, my most sincere thanks.

Yours truly,
Dawson Gage