A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (23 page)

Burr had logged thousands of hours of public speech and laughed at the idea that people could fear a speech more than a snake—let alone death. But tonight he was terrified. And he was terrified that he was thinking in clichés.

It was the paucity of imagery that made him nervous. He was slated for an hour-long performance and was going on cold. There was no PowerPoint to fall back on. Perhaps he could open up the last quarter hour to the crowd. Q and A.

The driver smoked. Burr wished he could find relief in that act, in any act.

They drove past a wall-size poster advertising tonight's speech. His name was every bit as big as he had imagined, but nearly every letter was different from what he had anticipated:

Modern Greek, a mystery every time. The text was red, the background black. Baudrillard's name, unlike Burr's, required no transliteration. First and last name were on different lines, so big was their font. Someone had graffitied an

into the three A's of JEAN BAUDRILLARD. Graffiti in itself made Burr nervous. Anarchy on the page was one thing, safe and contained; the larger-than-life billboard, however, made distressingly clear that this concept was far more potent, far more alive. This was a higher-stakes game than he had imagined. The proof was emblazoned in Krylon, dripping down in red through the white letters of his name.

Once he caught sight of the Odeon, he began to breathe more regularly and his hands stopped shaking. The harmony of form was why he'd first studied classics, something that made a scintilla of fucking sense in this world: you want to get people together for a speech, a play, a dance? Carve out a beautiful stone ampitheater on a brightly lit hill looking out to the sea. Seems pretty simple. And an elegant way to live. You couldn't see the Aegean anymore, because of the smog, but the symmetry of these classical shapes was still arresting. The sweeping curves, the mating lines, the balanced mass; this was the resonant push, the enthusiastic kick on the downswing of his life that brought him higher than a determined universe could have predicted he would ever rise.

Tracks of hot floodlights cut through the descending skies. The car curved away from the theater to find parking. Losing sight of the Odeon hurt nearly as much as being torn from a dream of Caroline. Usually, if she came in a dream he would sleep in, ignoring whatever morning responsibilities were nudging his subconscious. Occasionally, however, he would have to leave the dream and hate himself afterward for not surrendering to any glimpse of her thrown to him in the quaking light of aether. Turning away from the floodlit Odeon was that same swerve into the light of morning.

Caroline came back to him.

She didn't want to leave yet. She never wanted to leave. She was everywhere, but she'd always be here. After Mravinsky, she floated away down the slope, bobbing and sweeping away as if she'd been caught in an overflowing river. He trailed after her, skating down the slope of the Acropolis. She waited in a patch of coreopsis. And that was their last foreign kiss.

Burr put his head in his hands.

—Relax. We're only parking.

They unpacked from the hatchback and fell into the rank-and-file of general and soldier. Burr led. Burr was the general. A performer, but in absentia, watching himself backstage nodding to all of the young people who came up to ask him questions and offer him water, espresso, juice.

Burr parted the curtain and looked out on a crowd of thousands of long-haired or shaved heads.

—Can you get them to turn down the blue lights? It's a bit intense, and I'm not sure I'll be able to read my notes.

The audiovisual technician had no idea what he was talking about, but said she would try. George Spirados had left his side and was introducing him to the crowd.

—I present to you professor of classics at Mission University, Joseph Burr.

Burr made it to the rostrum before he had time to process what he was doing. He shook George's hand and thanked him earnestly. George tried to free his grip, but Burr held on. Eventually George had to use two hands to free himself. By this time, the once enthusiastic applause had died.

The mic creaked as Burr adjusted the segmented neck. He cleared his throat and heard that correction horribly amplified before a vast and eager public. He swallowed.

—I know what you're thinking. Mission University? But don't worry, I'm not a Mormon.

He waited for laughter, which leaked from the crowd in drops rather than crashing in the torrent he had hoped for. It sounded more as if a couple of people were suppressing sneezes. Surveying the audience, he was reminded of the Catalogue of Ships in the
Iliad
: the Darfur fleet with captains in all directions, Anti G-8ers, Anti NATO, Anti NATO Expansion, Pro Chiapas, Puppet Head Bush, Puppet Head Berlusconi, Man Dressed as Tree, Zapatistas, Gandhian Socialist Farmers League of India, Argentinian Teachers Union, Kuna of Ecuador, Peoples Global Action, Association of Sri Lankan Fisherfolk, Anti-Rwandan Genocide, No Off-shore Drillers, No Iraq Bombers, No Afghan Bombers, No Sudan Bombers, No Chechnyan Bombers, Pink Flag Flyers, Rainbow Flyers, Hemp Flag Flyers, Kosovo Flag Flyers, Palestinian Flag Flyers, Disco Dancers, signs for Free Tibet, Fair Trade, Less God, More Sex . . .

—Let me amend that. I'm not a Mormon, but like a good missionary, I'm going to begin by questioning the natives: What is the difference between shame and guilt?

Shit
. He'd forgotten his intro about the Century of the Liminal. And here he was opening himself up to a well-grounded postcolonialist critique. And he'd said “missionary,” which made him sound like a pervert.
Shit. Shit. Shit
.

—I look around and see a lot of signs. We'll return to those later.

Shit
. It was getting quiet. The blue gels over the floodlights made the crowd appear to gather in a giant wave, those seated near the stage sucking back to that inflection point somewhere just above his head. Soon they would all crash down.

—It's always seemed wrongheaded to me to try to teach Greek to the Greeks. But that is precisely what I'm here tonight to attempt. However, I am going to attempt to do so through the peculiar idiom of
Scarface
.

A few people in the audience cheered.

—I want to begin with a scene of decadence . . . I suppose I need to narrow it down. Drug lord Tony Montana, smoking a cigar at the conclusion of a sumptuous feast, addresses his best friend and wife, two necessarily distinct people for our hero, mind you. “Her womb is so polluted, mang.”

In the history of bad impressions and embarrassing things older people do to relate to the younger generation, that “mang” was easily top ten.

           
Probably shouldn't have attempted that impression. Tony's sentiment is no doubt familiar to you as miasmatic theory.
Miasma
is universally translated as
pollution
. Tony, however, is tapping into a different definition.

                 
Pollution, for Tony, is an all-pervading mood. We can see this mood when he speaks. Pacino is a fine actor, but we are not concerned with his ability to deliver dialogue, we are interested in the dialogue's ability to inhabit him. This is not Pacino speaking. We are listening to an ancient man.

                 
Tony relates to the world in a way that can only be described as Heideggerian
Stimmung
; he swims in the mood of Lust, Capital, Drugs, Power, Violence. Everything in this world is polluted. Not his world of cocaine, mind you, but his wife's world of quaaludes. Tony cannot have intercourse with the stultifying quaalude world. After realizing his checklist of Money, Power, Women, he sees the contamination, the pollution, of this world as all-pervasive and damned. Continuing to navigate this world is not stepping in a pile of shit. It is swimming in a sewer.

                 
What is the difference between shame and guilt? Look one word up in a thesaurus, and you'll find the other. I hate thesauri. Every word is a world. There are no synonyms. Shame opposes guilt. Shame is a self-directed standard. It is the bar that we raise in our soul; fail to clear it, and we suffer. Guilt, however, is externalized. There is no guilt without the Other. The last man—who unfortunately may inherit his kingdom quite soon if our current policies are not radically reversed—the last man cannot feel guilt, because there is no one left to infringe upon.

                 
A fallacy persists that guilt is a feeling resulting from our actions, shame from our thoughts. Bullshit. This dichotomy serves to keep the fiction of shame alive. Shame is dead.

                 
Shame vanished around 450 BC with the death of Heraclitus, and has yet to return. But I'm not here to argue against our guilt-based, hyperlitigious, slip-and-fallen society. Nor am I here to bemoan the shamelessness of Paris Hilton. I know. Cheap joke. This administration? [
Cheers
.]

                 
Postmodernity is so lost from this center that we think only of the negation of the negation. We think only within the guilt paradigm of capitalism—not the shame paradigm of anarchism, where every woman is her own queen. Why does capitalism side with guilt? There is profit in the enterprise. Period.

                 
That's getting closer to the point, but it's not the point. The point is that capitalism is a structural economy of negation. So inured are we to the system that we've forgotten the obverse of shame. Glory. The word is embarrassing for us to even say. Glory? Is this guy going to show me his war medals next? We feel shame at voicing the opposite of shame. I am using the word
glory
in the sense of
timay
, public esteem. As you know, the ancient poets say that
timay
is stored in the
thumos
. The
thumos
was here. [
Burr pounds his chest right at the xiphoid process. Winces
.] Today we have no repository of
timay
, but that makes no difference because there is nothing left to store. The obverse of shame is glory, the obverse of guilt, innocence. Tell me, how is a society whose greatest goal is innocence capable of anything?

                 
Raise your hand if you want to be remembered for innocence. See? By framing innocence as our highest aspiration, global capitalism, which is to say, the modern world, has made us not only forget but forgettable.

                 
Right there [
points to the Olympic complex
] is the only locus of glory permitted by capitalism. Athletic glory is a Kay Fabian, however, an achievement meaningful only after we suspend disbelief. We allow athletes glory, but realize we are in a symbolic order where putting a ball through a hoop has significance.

                 
Capitalism is a bad penny that keeps showing up. The two sides of this penny: guilt and innocence. Unfortunately progressivism operates under the false consciousness that we can use this coin to acquire things of worth. This isn't economics, it's alchemy.

                 
The coin of the realm must be scrapped. Their pennies must be traded for gold.

                 
István Mészáros's contemporary reading of Marx reminds us that as soon as you introduce capital, you introduce capitalism. So perhaps we should dispense at once with my metaphor of coins. Here I would follow the Slovenian Socrates and say that in order to collapse a system you must issue an impossible demand, using the logic of the system against itself. This would be step one: demand an accounting of shame. Reject innocence as an ideal.

                 
This brings me to the signs. The naming of the ships from Book 2 of
The Iliad
comes to mind. The parallel is not trivial. Why the myriad of protestors? Because there is no locus of power to protest against. We are all protesting against global capitalism, but that's like protesting against the air. There is no “against.” As soon as we think of against, we are trapped in a binary, us/them, which is exactly what allows the beneficiaries of capitalism to rest easy on their huge pillows. Every protest sign is accusatory. No news there. The act of protest itself is accusatory. We will not stop environmental devastation by finding someone guilty. Instead, we must instill the ethic of shame and stop blushing when we say glory.