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Popular Culture Review
and Icelandic are unanimous on this point: the word hustings, which originally
meant ‘‘general assembly,” is one of the signs of their undeliberate consensus.
Yet it all goes back to ancient Rome—to the strangely simple Latin word res,
which has many meanings in its own right, which could occupy us for a lifetime,
until we found everything about it as strange yet oddly familiar as ourselves.
1 mention all this because I think it offers a clue to Steeves’s subject
matter. Steeves is full of wonder, of child-like curiosity tempered by scientific
rigor. The thing he is most interested in is life. What else is there? Well, death—
alas, they go hand in hand. As Billy Pilgrim says, apropos of Charles Darwin, on
earth if not in heaven or other planets, “corpses are improvements. And so it
goes.”* But more gruesome than that, more gnawing than life and death is the
space-time between them—an infinity of solitude. As Steeves exclaims at the
very end of the book, while waiting for Godot (aka La Chinita) on a deserted
Venezuelan street, “1 say her name out loud and I am alone” (219). A cry of the
heart, the infant separating from the womb, the trauma—or thauma—of birth, as
well as death. We’ve all been there, or are going soon. There’s the rub. For we
all have loneliness, fear and trembling, and existential angst in common. That is
what unites us, even as it divides and conquers us. Hence there must be a way to
turn solitude into society, to engineer an Aufhebung (self-surpassing) that does
not leave us even more lonely and depressed than before. What Steeves seeks is
transcendence: not personal salvation, which is both vain (in Ecclesiastes’s
sense) and in vain, but genuine community—and the communion with fellow
travelers that it bespeaks. But genuine community should not be totalitarian, nor
individualism rugged, or we will fall apart from too much togetherness. “So the
world is a jumble—let there be chaos” (46). Better chaos than Ordnung muss
sein, the sacrament of genocide.
When asked what makes black people different from white, Toni
Morrison, no stranger to suffering, said “we’re not different. We live, we love,
we die.” If that’s not a universal truth. I’ll resign my commission as a lover of
wisdom. Yet there’s no unanimity, even among people who ought to know
better—or just know. Foreshadowing Derrida, a vengeful Lear gmmped “I’ll
teach you differences.” But if there’s one thing Steeves teaches us, it’s that
we’re all in it together, we poor, bare, forked animals (20) who huddle in
Platonic caves for warmth, companionship and the comfort of believing in grand
illusions. That used to mean religion; today it’s television. A common fate is no
ground for shared faith. But archetypes arise from alienation, just as Steeves’s
own loneliness is an echo of the God-forsaken savior on the cross. We need each
other, not just in the sappy sentimentality of Barbara Streisand’s elevator
Muzak, but for real. And we need a society that doesn’t drown, disown, or
suffocate its members. We cringe at the thought of losing our identity yet we are
so massified and (not so) gently coerced that we have none to cherish or protect.
We must gather the spiritual strength to burst our invisible bonds or else we will
chain ourselves to anomie. What democracy demands is citizenship, a reign of
free spirits, not broken hearts, much less a tyranny of torture (and tortured