A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

by Will Chancellor

  Baudrillard was still looking down at his paper when Burr pulled out the chair, but he smiled.

  —You look well rested.

  —I heard some news about Owen last night. They found him. Or at least I know where he was three months ago. It’s a start.

  —Great.

  —He came in as a John Doe at a hospital in Berlin. An intern took the time to track him down. This was all in May, but the hospital just got hold of Owen’s surgeon this week. It seems as if Owen might have been drugged. He was admitted with advanced bacterial meningitis. There’s a direct flight to Berlin this afternoon. And I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel tonight’s speech.

  —Of course.

  —I’m sure it’s inauspicious to cancel one’s debut, but my son comes first.

  —Of course.

  —You understand?

  —Of course.

  —Of course he was in Berlin three months ago, and he left the hospital unofficially headed for god knows where, but I still have to see if I can find him.

  —Bien sur.

  —It could be argued that I would greatly improve my odds of finding him if I put up a flare so that he would know how to find me.

  —That was my thought. Sort of. He’s been gone six months in total, you say? And he could very easily find you if he wanted to, just by logging on to his e-mail. Or by picking up the phone. That technology has been around for a while. You can’t lose contact anymore. You shouldn’t presume otherwise.

  —There’s also a direct flight tonight that gets in a few hours later. Right after my speech. Either way, I’m afraid I’m going to miss yours.

  —There’s no great loss there. You probably don’t want to hear what I have to say about Liminalism anyway. I wasn’t kidding about that. Not that I think it isn’t the perfect thing for you to be preaching as a nonacademic philosopher.

  —Why do you say, “perfect thing for me”?

  —Why Liminalism, Joe? Because you were meant to sail, not anchor. I am old enough now to look around and see mainly waste. But I am still young enough to see potential. There’s a reason you’re here. You wouldn’t have been any more likely to find him by going to Berlin a day earlier—even weeks earlier; it’s already been three months since he was in that hospital. You also won’t be any more likely to find him by staying and firing a flare, as you say. It is impossible to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. And it is impossible to lead a search party when you’re staring at your shoes. You need to change your relationship, which is almost impossible to do. You know that. Which is why you want to stay.

  —That’s what kept me up last night. I want to stay and speak. And there’s no way I could get there faster. It’s just . . . I feel like I should be praying or something.

  —You should go breathe. Seriously. Go upstairs and take ten deep breaths.

  Burr excused himself because there was nothing left to say. He hung the Do Not Disturb sign on his door then fell onto the rayon comforter and stared at the lazy ceiling fan. He slept, then watched Scarface on the TV. He had never seen the film, but could see how the hyperbole would polarize a crowd.

  He opened his computer and chose his seat assignment for his evening flight to Berlin.

  Burr settled on an old black polo shirt, no logo, and khaki pants. He looked different in the mirror, less innocent. He was surprised to find a tan on his cheeks. He lathered up for a shave, paused, and washed it off. He grabbed his windbreaker and turned out the light.

  Tanned, stubbled, revolutionary, Professor Burr walked the stairs from his third floor room to the hotel lobby. George was waiting.

  —I’m ready to go when you are, Professor.

  —Let’s have a drink until everyone else is ready.

  —I’m afraid you are everyone else. Jean is wrapping up a speaking engagement at the University of Athens and will not be accompanying us to the Odeon.

  —Oh.

  —But let’s have a drink. It will help with the nerves. Beer?

  —Whisky. For a number of reasons.

  They doubled their drink order and then left for the venue. As George lifted the seat of the coupe and crammed into the backseat with two of his friends, he added:

  —Jean told us to be sure to record tonight—that your speech was going to be historic. No pressure!

  The whisky wasn’t helping with the nerves. His stomach had already been hot and jumped up. Now it was picking fights. He felt less present and more flushed. He tried to recollect himself, reconsidering his assumption that presence was a good thing. Perhaps this occasion demanded that he be absent. Like Owen.

  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-h
aired 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 some
one guilty. Instead, we must instill the ethic of shame and stop blushing when we say glory.

  Back to Tony. The man clearly has no comprehension of guilt. In this way he is ancient. Tony’s story is the story of a flipped coin spinning in the air: shame, glory, shame, glory, shame . . . He has a different coin than the other people of his world. This is enough to make him unstoppable.

  I want more Tonys.

  Here Burr removed a euro coin from his pocket and flicked it in the air. Rather than spin, it knuckled in the air like a Frisbee and fell off the front of the stage into the orchestra pit. He coughed.

  The more significant aspect of Tony qua spinning coin is not the fact that one side is shame, the other glory. The most significant fact is that the coin is spinning. And he has utter disregard for whichever side will end up on top.

  We are always at a crossroads. All ways.

  Tony inhabits a liminal space, poised between the poles of shame and glory. There are no other lights for Tony. Just these two. The word twilight comes from dwei, two, and light . . . light. Tony is a twilight dweller. You should all be twilight dwellers.

  Any revolutionary is a twilight dweller poised between the government that was and the government that will be.

  I’ll caution you before we go any further: Liminalism is a dangerous theory. Heard this one: “You’re either with us or against us”? Critique Guantanamo, fail to deploy troops to Iraq, run photos of Abu Ghraib, and you’re a terrorist. Democracy rests on people both with and against. But make no mistake, the war on terror is a war on the liminal.

  Jean-François Lyotard, really the only author you need to read on the postmodern condition—other than Jean Baudrillard [applause]—Lyotard posits that postmodernity is a Möbius strip. The metaphor is apt in pointing to the impossibility of ever being outside our hypercapitalist despotic world. The only escape is to embrace the contradiction and conflate inside and outside.