He looked over the city and then down at the little bugs of cars way down on the street below. It was a lot easier to get there from here than to here from there. Maybe that’s why so many jump. It’s easier that way.
Crazy! He backed off from the concrete railing. What puts thoughts like that in a person’s head?
Culture shock. That’s what it was. The gods. He’d been watching them for years. The gods were the static culture patterns. They never quit. After trying all these years to kill him with failure, now they were pretending they’d given up. Now they were going to try the other way, to get him with success.
It wasn’t the crazy wind or the rain-blurred light along the sky across the park that was making him feel so strange. What caused the culture shock were these two crazy different cultural evaluations of himself -two different realities of himself — sitting side by side. One was that he was in some kind of high voltage celebrity world like Redford. The other was that he was at ground-level like Rigel and Lila and just about everybody else. As long as he stayed within just one of those two cultural definitions he could live with it. But when he tried to hang on to both wires simultaneously, that’s when the shock hit.
If you get too famous you will go straight to hell, a Japanese Zen master had warned a group Phædrus was in. It had sounded like one of those Zen truths that don’t make any sense. Now it was making sense.
He wasn’t talking about anything Dante would have identified. Dante’s Christian hell is an after-life of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can’t participate in it. You’re forever a stranger from your own life because there’s something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.
You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell.
It’s like a hall of mirrors at a carnival where some mirrors distort you one way and some distort you another. Already he’d seen three completely different mirror reflections this week: from Rigel, who reflected an image of some kind of moral degenerate; from Lila who reflected a tedious old nerd; and now Redford who was probably going to cast him into some sort of heroic image.
Each person you come to is a different mirror. And since you’re just another person like them maybe you’re just another mirror too, and there’s no way of ever knowing whether your own view of yourself is just another distortion. Maybe all you ever see is reflections. Maybe mirrors are all you ever get. First the mirrors of your parents, then friends and teachers, then bosses and officials, priests and ministers and maybe writers and painters too. That’s their job too, holding up mirrors.
But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way. Phædrus could see how this celebrity could get to be like some sort of narcosis of mirrors where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. The mirrors take over your life and soon you don’t know who you are. Then the culture controls you and when it takes away your mirrors and the public forgets you the withdrawal symptoms start to appear. And there you are, in the Zen hell of celebrity… Hemingway with the top of his head blown off, and Presley, full of prescription drugs. The endless dreary exploitation of Marilyn Monroe. Or any of dozens of others. It seemed like it was the celebrity, the mirrors of the gods, that did it.
A subject-object metaphysics presumes that all these mirrors are subjective and therefore unreal and unimportant, but that presumption, like so many others, seems to deliberately ignore the obvious.
It ignores the phenomenon of someone like Redford walking down the street and observing that people, in his own words, goon out when they see him. His manager said it’s almost impossible for him to attend public meetings because when people see he’s there they all turn around and watch him.
Phædrus remembered that he himself had started to goon out when Redford came to the door. All that Charlie Chaplin stuff with the coat. What is this goon-out phenomenon? It was no subjective illusion. It’s a very real primary reality, an empirical perception.
It seems to have biological roots, like hunger or fear or greed. Is it similar to stage fright? There seems to be a loss of real-time awareness. A fixed image of the famous person, like the Sundance Kid, seems to overwhelm the Dynamic real-time person who exists in the moment of confrontation. That’s why Phædrus had so much trouble getting started.
But there is much more than that.
This whole business of celebrity also had something perceptibly degenerate about it. Vulgar and degenerate and enormously fascinating and at times obsessive, very much in the same way that sex seemed to be vulgar and degenerate at some times, and enormously fascinating and obsessive.
Sex and celebrity. Before Phædrus got his boat and cleared out of Minnesota he remembered ladies at parties coming over to rub up against him. A teenage girl squealing in ecstasy at one of his lectures. A woman broadcasting executive grabbing his arm at lunch and saying, I must have you. I mean you. You’d think he was a sandwich or something. For forty years he’d wondered what it took, that he was so obviously lacking, that made women look at you twice. Was celebrity it? Was that all? He thought there was more to it than that.
There’s a parallel there, he thought. There’s something slightly obscene about the whole celebrity feeling. It’s that same feeling you get from sex magazines on the newsstands. There’s something troubling about seeing those magazines there. And yet if you thought no one would notice you might want to take a look in those magazines. One part of you wants to get rid of the magazines; one part wants to look at them. There’s a conflict of two patterns of quality, social patterns and biological patterns.
In celebrity it’s the same — except that the conflict is between social and intellectual patterns!
Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns. Now he was getting it. This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn’t. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive bioIogical patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
Funny how a question can just sit there and then suddenly, at a time you least expect it, the answer starts to unfold.
Celebrity was the culture force. That was it. It seemed like it, anyway.
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.