Fearless Speech- Bueti

8/12/2019 Fearless Speech- Bueti

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Fearless Speech in the language of nail polish

They sit next to each other, one left one right one upfront forming a triangle. A small brush thin like the shiny

black tail of a kitten, an army of coloured bottles, each with a different hat, a golden cap, and a new file. I

feel they are staring at me like witty eyes speaking the language of uncompromisable curiosity. I see their

head titling and their soft little tails drawing half-arch into the air. They are there, and seem to want to play

with me... with us, with those sitting around this table. They look at me, I look at them. Vigilant, curious,

dazed and confused. They speak the language of things, and the way they move their eyelashes like their tails

is an invitation to engage in a random conversation. Pick me up! Try me! Try me! I pick one, I lift the little

brush up, then I let it land down, on my thumb, while a large brushstroke covers the whitish nails surface. I

repeat the gesture. I look at my nail from a distance. I continue with the ritual. Up and down. Designing the

contours. I didnt bring nail polish, but there is enough on this table, where we slowly, and religiously gather

to celebrate the joy of creation in its most domestic form, to paint our nails and eat burgers together, to share

frivolities and a moment of conviviality. A kitchen table. There is such a variety of nail polishs colours that

it could be possible to satisfy the desire of an entire village. The guests are chilling, chatting, slowly moving

towards the table, touching the attractive bottles as one touches with curiosity the smooth surface of an

unknown thing, flirting with the many colours, then picking the favourite up and messing around with it. I

pick the orange bottle. I apply the colour on my bare long nails with the care and enthusiasm of someone

wearing a newly made dress. I look at them from a distance again, move the stretched out fingers to the left,

to the right. The colour looks terrible. I am disappointed. More often than not, things are not the way I expect

them to be. Why did I choose this orange? Nonetheless, I endure stroke after stroke patiently trying to

keep the colour homogenous, and the contours perfectly uniform. No mistake is forgivable here as ugliness

can only be accepted if it is perfectly ugly. I am not the only one struggling with finding the right colour

though, the guests around this table have a similar problem, but they are daring and try every imaginable

combination out. Grey and blue. Red matte and gold. Transparent with glitter, shiny purple, light pink,

velvet, green like a bush. Colours and brushes spin faster than thoughts. There is a grand confusion,

excitement, sound of laughters, and many, many busy hands. The black little brushes, like elegant cats

fingers, dance, pirouetting up in the air: left right left, and right again. Those blotted brushes look like

thousands of furry paws moving at fast pace. At turn the three protagonists, three reasons for all these fingers

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to be here brush, nail polishes, files sneer at these impudent whitish, small and big fingers and offer

themselves to them in their simplest form and purest joy: the graceful transparency of rainbows colours, the

intense, brightness of the landscape in the heat of a southern summer. Yet, I feel I choose the ugliest of them

all: shiny orange, a bit too intense, a bit too shiny, too acidic, too loud too arrogant. Orange is not red, its not

yellow. It is the undecided colour, between a pomelo and a mandarin. It stands between the kick of passion

and the softness of a friendly expression. Neither nor. Orange from the oranges that Portuguese brought with

them from the far East.

This orange makes me shrug my shoulders with despair, want to kick air with my feet, scream of horror. I

feel like a Monets painting at the end of a long day of repeated, energetic brushstrokes which the artist has

used to reinforce the dramatic effect. However, I feel I cant go back, I cant change the orange simply

because I realise it was a really bad idea. If things can be disappointing, one cannot deny their existence.

They ask one to deal with them. So, Brushstroke on brushstroke to make the colour ticker, give it some

character. I keep making the same gesture, from the bottom to the top, with the decidedness of an insecure

young cat who has just learnt how to walk on tiny paws. In the conceitedness of the moment, I hurt a bottle

and colour tips over.

I was invited to a nail paintings BBQ party. Something halfway between a tribal ceremony and a school

girls pijama party. Nail polishes and burgers are provided by the house. You just bring yourself as an email

invitation says. So I did. I join and after less than a hour the table glistering with colours is filled with rows

of glasses, beer cans, wine bottles, and cigarette butts dropping out the astray. I can hardly find my way to

look at the variety of nail polishes, to find the cream, get the file to shorten and sharpen my thumbs nail,

which are impressively long, someone suggests. Bodies, heads, faces, shoulders, arms, hands obstruct my

view, while a crescendo of voices like the bright colours with which they paint theirs nails fill the place. Red

tomatoes. Green salad. Brown chestnut. Grey fish. I am hungry. I interrupt the orange with purple thinking of

the juicy plumbs squashed on the flat, soft surface of a cake I saw baking in the oven. Next to me someone is

commenting on my elegant choice. I distractedly smile. I dont believe any single word. I disagree. I thank

in sing of politeness. A forced smile in which I show my teeth as cats do when feeling in danger. I imagine to

paint the eyelids of the person in question in the ugly elegant orange I am painfully starting to appreciate,

and then to apply green to the corner of his eyes. I want him to become an orange, with conspicuous, thick

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leaves falling from his fishlike, light-blue eyes. Unfortunately, my nails are still wet, I cannot move without

ruining their ugliness. So, I give up my dream and smile again. This time more friendly. I turn my head left,

and I see a distinct guy trying to paint his nails but with very little success. He is good looking though, so I

give up my opinions on his awkwardness and focus on his royal face. His hands are fine and delicate, his

fingers long and white. The way he hold the turquoise soaked brush make me shiver. Is he thinking of the

sea, of the beach where we will lay down naked, together, caressing each other in the warmth of sunrise? His

hands look like the hands of a fine painter. The idea of taking his fine, long fingers between my hands,

between my laps and kiss them, then squeeze, and eat them like one eats a juicy peach, cross my mind for a

moment. I renounce. I look up, then around, at my newly painted nails: three orange, two purple. Perfectly

symmetrical. The table is busy and noisy, and it has become our centre of gravity:

negotiations, exchanges of opinions, animated conversations, also some unwanted suggestions. It feels like

being at the village market, where people bargain all kind of goods, included juicy oranges, colours and nail

polish. In the 14th Century Venices market must have looked like this, colourful and loud with traders from

all around the Mediterranean regions gathering in the city to sell beautiful carpets, precious stones and textile

from Alexandria, almond, ivory, spices, handmade books from Constantinopolis, the pricy vermilion from

Afghanistan, salt, wood, linen, wool, velvet, Baltic amber, Italian coral, fine cloth. And of course, oranges

from the far East. Everybody doing business. Everybody following his/her faith. The table around which we

have gather tonight resembles one of those busy markets counters where business is made, friends and

enemies are decided and fights will eventually explode unexpected. Merchants from Mediterranean regions,

traveling for days or months, would come to Venice to sell and buy not only goods, but a piece of their future

and a place in paradise. Their trades interrupted by a visit to the Byzantine San Marco Cathedral, to the local

fortune teller for a quick update on the annual horoscope, perhaps pay a visit to the Doge to ensure the

powerfuls benevolence. Then, after a long day the last visit to one of those dark, dirty and noisylocandasby

the Laguna, facing the beautiful Venitians palazzos (some of them must have been under constructions by

then). All around many faces and accents as varied as the faces, accents and colours punctuating the crowed

Nail polish BBQ party. I shift a little on the chair. Someone hurts me with a bowl of vegetable. Apology. I

say nothing. The space between me and the nail polishes is like an animated timeline. It must be the alcohol,

the confusion, and the heated exchanges, but I cant get the image of the market out of my mind. So, I keep

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shifting from one edge to the other of my chair as if I was a gondola lazily drifting along with the current,

slowly proceeding across the canals. A thought crossed my mind. How did these traders communicate? How

did they ask their food? How did they show their respect, admiration and ask for favours? Whats the

language of politics, commerce and diplomacy? It was international Italian, with words borrowed from

ancient Greek, Arabic, Old French, Occitan. It was like the international English we speak today, around this

table, a lingua franca with which it is possible to order a meal at the Korean restaurant in Seoul, insult a

neighbour in New York, indulge in improbable words of love, admirations, and give account of ones own

life-style to the German bureaucracy. If a lingua franca wasnt there to help us, how could we live, eat, make

love, read and think in this global world? How could I otherwise explain the differences between being

anarchist and being an idiot to my fellow American who pretend he doesnt know what communism is

about? How would I launch myself into a fearless speech against all that disappoints me? How would I

explain that orange, anaranjado, arancione is awful like those baroque ceramics decorated with oranges and

lemons one can find in southern Italians villas; awful like the melted cheese on the beef burgers, which are

now crowding the table with the smell of dead-meat? I hesitantly grab a burger sandwich with the newly

painted nails, fill my mouth with it, and engage in a conversation.

So, how are you doing?

I am good. Your nails look good.

Oh. Thank you. Yours too!

I smile. You too. The miracles of lingua franca, the power of communication. We come from the opposite

edges of the world and still: we meet, exchange some stupid opinions, go to bed together, paint our nails, eat

burgers and spell our concerns and anxieties out aloud. Oh. By the way, we havent been introduced yet. I am

a writer, a generic one. When people ask me what kind of writing I become awkward, start mumbling

only to admit that I dont know what to answer. So, I smile and utter the word: writer! With a disarming

Italian accent. As generic writer I prefer not to fulfil the expectations of others, from time to time I disappear

between the lines of my own writings leaving no traces of my passage. I can write a novel, a political

commentary, a piece about the way people used to live in Venice in the XIV Century or I can write them all

in one text, mixing thing up and make a big mess like the table around which voices get louder and words

dance a fast dance this evening.

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Lingua franca doesnt have another term to express nuances, to describe vagueness in details. Its a technical

language and as such it is used amongst professionals. And since I am not, I can only become the

embodiment of a generic action, the act of writing. I am one of those who are meant to UNPACK the

tangled thread of intuitions, concepts and ARTICULATE them appropriately. I stretch my hands to touch

the world with my corrugated palms, a stretch my arms to embrace the world with the rough texture of my

words. Sometimes, I want to say something and I finish with saying something else, I aim to express a

straightforward thought and I enter a tortuous path instead; I try to sketch a face and I end up with a monster

with seven heads. Why dont we have another drink and go outside? Despite the new season doesnt seem to

want to arrive, it is warm tonight.

Please to meet you. A dry, deep guttural voice reaches my ears, and clasps my left shoulder. It grips me and

prevents me from breathing. The voice is steady, and its zeal holds me hostage. It seizes me by the neck like

robust fingers grabbing a cat by her furry soft neck. The guttural voice resonates across the room, fills my

body that now feels hollow like the interior of a drum. This voice has silenced the festive voicing and now it

seats heavy among us.

A scary laugh and then:

Who are you to speak?...Dont you see, you hide yourself behind the orange of your little fingers! I despise

you and your friends, all generic, all too content with their own inconsistency!

I cannot see his face as his voice is so intense and grave that my head bends and I only notice his nails,

which are painted in bright, shiny yellow regularly interrupted by electric blue. He doesnt introduce himself,

neither do I. But there seems to be no reason for futile introductions, he is confident. His voice unbroken. His

words are like arrows. His hands move fast, they speak the language of war. He launches a merciless attack

against... Conventions, power, position, dogmatism, false values, participation, revolutions, conviviality,

corruption, hypocrisy, bad faith, false conscience, intellectualism, abstraction. Is he talking to me? Its hard

to make sense of everything he is saying. His speech is fearless, and directed against me, against us, the

generics who dont take a position, dont explain who they are and what they do, always make mistakes and

do the opposite of what is asked to them. The malady of our time. The ones who, according to his words,

have no place but keep moving around, pleasing the potents, like parasites sucking blood, borrowing from

the stories of others, criticising the power while fucking it all the time. He is not drunk, he is not mad. He

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puts up a fight. Actually, he is fighting a war, and before you realise, you have been drawn into it. You have

to fight back, with your ammunition, all your energies. It doesnt matter if you want it or not, if its your or

not: the war has been declared without asking for your opinions. So, what? He is straight to the point, his

opinions sharp, his tone unforgiving. Those present are confused; they stare at him, trying to understand what

is happening. Everybody is speechless.

Generic! Of course! Your observations are generic, your life is generic. You have no virtues. You know

nothing and pretend to speak with the voice of the multitude. With your speech you pretend to address

THE people, to give general advices on how to be independent, autonomous, a free agent. Free? You are

not free, you are at the service of the power that be.

Orange? General? Autonomy?

You understand anonymity as the receipt to deceive power. Dont you see it? You are the power you are

trying to deceive. Look at the orange of your nails: What is your position? Where do you stand? Your

anonymity like the orange of your nails is a gift to the powerful. You! Miserable supporter of the existing

system of values! You, you talk of changes, but you buy into this immutable system. The voice of anger.

Didnt I recognise it? His speech infuriates me to such an extend that my hands, my feet, my entire body

starts shaking like a building during an earthquake. The shaking cannot last long enough though, for the

anger relieves my physical pain catapulting me into another level of the game. From deep and clear, his voice

become less and less articulated to my ear, the speed at which he is delivering his speech make his words

melt into each other to the point that I am only able to hear a Papapar Parapararar, like the insistent

sound of a untuned trumpet. I immediately respond with the deep, loud sound of a drum, while people are

turning their heads left and right like in a tennis match.

Had I not been deafened by anger, fallen into hopeless antagonism, defeated by my own passions, I would

have had the time to recognise the harsh, grave voice, which speaks with the truth of examples, disdains

general theories of the world, and professes the freedom and happiness of simple life against any form of

possession. The voice which rejects all conventional desires for wealth, power, sex and fame. The fearless

voice which speaks in the full glare of the publics gaze, indifferent to social codes, to normalising

behaviours, to beliefs, to gossips, to insults, to opinions, shameless for, it has nothing to loose, nothing to

gain.

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The voice that speaks with clarity, with the mouth of the true virtue, for, it is the voice of essential truths

which would then serve as a guideline, or as an example for others to follow. The voice that unveils the

absurd, contradictory nature of conventional values. The voice that dislikes elitist exclusion, and prefers to

speak in places where people gather for feast, contests, events like this party tonight. Virtue and moral

freedom in liberation from desire. The voice that barks like a dog. The voice that displaces the accepted rule

to show how arbitrary the rule is. The voice of freedom and self-determination. The unhesitant voice of the

exemplary man, whose singularity among others stands for each of them and serves for all. The exemplary

man whose deeds and speeches resemble that of a Saint. The exemplary is Saint. The Saint is the truth-teller.

Had I not been overwhelmed by the voice of the parrhesiast, who like a Saint communicates in the empty

space of the examples, who says everything he has in mind, I would have declined the offer to join in,

refused to mimic his voice.I am the one who says this ....and that. He does not hide anything, but opens his

mind to other people through his discourse. The voice of the truth or the true voice, which gives opinions

with honesty and courage. The voice of provocation. Of scandalous behaviour. The critical voice which

speak freely when it discloses a truth which threatens the majority. The voice that has a specific relation to

truth through frankness, a certain relationship to its own life through danger, a certain type of relation to

itself or other voices through criticism and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. The

parrhesiast, who risk he life because he recognises truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people.

Had I not failed to understand, blinded by my own sense of being unjustly attacked, I would have recognised

the familiarity of that voice, for, I had spoken with a similar voice whenever I felt unjustly excluded by the

people I wanted to belong to, when I was convinced that my statements, my actions and speech were more

coherent than the ones of my peer whose shallowness I despised and fought. I use the same tone of voice to

build a wall, then a fortress and exclude myself from the world. I had used the fearless speech to attack what

I had considered to be my adversaries, my enemies and the enemy of my enemies, Kapitalismus. I had joined

not only the cynics, but the hopeless ones who see destruction everywhere, and preach the necessity of

radical violence, fearless rebellion. I used the same tone of voice when I felt under the pressure of someone

asking to take a position, when I had to impress other people, to find an ethical model free from

contradictions. I had sang with a similar voice the gospel of rebellion against norms and conventions, against

rebellion itself. I had escaped fatalism and flee its land for, I felt I had the fearless speech like wind in my

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young, dainty sails. I felt the strength and harshness of the sea and I could only navigate it by mean of

fearless speech. I had professed truth-telling, vindicate justice. I had antagonised, look at my fellows with

the distance of those who know to be special, to be different and only become unbearable to the others and to

themselves. I knew that one day I would have abandoned it, leaving nothing behind me, but the present

memory of my fearlessness speech. Yes. I have opinions, lots of them. It might sound arrogant and

unpleasant to the ears of the reader, but it is with joy I had left fatalism behind. The fatalism of those who,

full of hope and expectations, look at the future without changing nothing of their present. Of those who live

trough sleepless night, lazy days indulging in images of triumph. I had other interests, I spoke with fearless

speech, I told the truth and try to be honest. They didnt.

I can speak the language of the angry voice addressing me today. Once, I raised my voice but I was too loud

to even hear what the other was saying. Now I feel overwhelmed. From friend to enemy the distance is very

short. The fearless speech that gives you agency, has taken it away from me.

His speech hurts, but I recognise its touch, its smell. I know its name. I would like to be freed from it, to

forget it, but it keeps being next to me, like a shadow, it follows me everywhere I go. The urge of fearless

speech. I understand provocation. I dont need time to retreat, calculate the distances and eventually respond.

I stretch my body out. I lean my heated shoulders on the wooden seat back, I open my arms, I make an

inviting movement, my tits reach out, I show him the amplitude of my territory, I show him my teeth, I piss

on his feet and I welcome him in the hell of antagonism, of fearless speech. He plays his untuned trumpet, I

play drums with my orange painted nails. He barks and I bark too to make clear that I am not going to look

while he is delivering his speech and putting up his show. I generally dont like to be told what to do, but this

time I have no choice, but to make his game mine.

He turns the table and I have to respond. His speech is an exercise of anger and violence. I would prefer not

to participate, not to respond to his raging provocations. But, I am skill in rhetorics, he is not. I speak the

lingua franca, he imitates it. He has presence, he is louder and has occupied the whole stage. I cant stay and

wait. I am also tempted by the stage. I raise my voice and make things clear. I wont hold any single word.

But a question remains, What all this for?

I won a battle, and lost the war.

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Fearless Speech- Bueti

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