Scholars of the Order have in recent years taken an interest in attempting to recover/reconstruct the slates of discrete “Tactics” used in past times by practicing communities of Birds in different locations. Detailed accounts of past Actions remain rare (even in the documents of the W-Cache), however, and this makes the enumeration of specific ways of performing the different phases of a Practice extremely difficult. Published references, even if only oblique or glancing, must be used to supplement the available archival sources. A correspondent from Ohio recently sent the above excerpt from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), with the following note:
Colleagues:
I thought many of you would appreciate this moment at the beginning of Book Four, where Nietzsche as much as blurts out, in one of his ecstatic trumps, his commitment to a kind of “affirmative” negation, achieved through simple aversion of the gaze — a kind of negation-by-obliquity. The beautiful cry — “Let looking away be my only Negation!” — summarizes what, I think, many members of the Order have felt as they attempt to pry themselves from their attentional cathection to the object at the end of the Attending phase. Not that I would know. I am just guessing, of course.
With a sweep of the Feather,
AE