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Greek to Me
Silence Is Golden
© 2010 by Michael Raysses
"Success is in the silences, though Fame is in the song." - A portion of a couplet from the great poet William Bliss Carman.
"Huh?" - My Uncle Tasso, responding to a portion from a couplet from the great poet William Bliss Carman.
Metaphorically, I was born Greek. As such, I am the bastard offspring of the unholy union of Contradiction and Conflict. I was weaned on the bittersweet milk of irony, and my lungs breathed deep the oxygen of oxymoron. But when I am offered the seeming feast of incongruent expression that is “everyday heroes,” I gag and splutter.
Though the very idea of a hero is rooted in ancient Greek mythology, I am handcuffed by the prospect of anyone attaining hero status on a daily basis. I know that things change. I am also aware that shit happens. Can it be any wonder, then, that as things happen, shit changes? Let us attend.
I remember when being a hero meant dressing in colorful clothing that clung tightly to a well-muscled frame. Let’s call this era my early childhood. So great was my interest in all things heroic back then that I sought to become one, too. I recruited a friend who shared my passion for a life of gallantry. We gathered our tools—capes and shields, though in our case, we had to settle for beach towels with safety pins and dented garbage can lids—and set out for greatness. We were Captain America and his sidekick Bucky. But our plan was unceremoniously derailed when some neighborhood rivals thought we were Batman and Robin; when we corrected them, they responded that they had never heard of Captain America and that the only Bucky they knew was really some kid named Carl. Demoralized, we surrendered our costumes, along with our desire for super-herodom.
My relationship with earthbound heroes never really took form either. My admiration for them always manifested as wanting to be one, so that when I had the rare chance to meet someone who actually qualified as a hero, I choked. Once, when I was 10, I stood in line for two hours to meet Dick Butkus, a childhood icon because he could lift grown men off of their feet and hurl them to the ground. When I finally got to the table where he was seated, all I wanted was for him to tell me how I could get to be as big as him—he was 6’3” and 240 lbs—I was barely five feet tall and weighed a quarter of what Butkus did. When he told me all I had to do was to eat and exercise, I felt deceived. No amount of Manwich or push-ups was going to result in my becoming anything even remotely like him.
Crushed, my concept of heroes downshifted dramatically. They became people within my immediate sphere of life, doing things that were much more readily attainable, if somewhat reflective of my preadolescent mind. The most brilliant example was a classmate of mine, Willard Mudd. He could belch on cue, which, though admirable, was short of superhuman. What was staggering was his ability to ingest cafeteria spinach, half-swallow it, and then shoot it out of his nose. I know you’re thinking that I mistook genius for heroics, but there wasn’t a dull Wednesday floating listlessly in the middle of a nowhere week that wasn’t saved by the derring-do of a boy whose name was synonymous with wet dirt.
Then, inexplicably, the notion of becoming a hero left me entirely, only to resurface years later with a keen interest in what made a hero a hero. Traits like bravery and selflessness were obvious inclusions. But what intrigued me more was not so much what went into being a hero as much as what a potential hero didn’t do.
They didn’t lie, for one. Especially about the actions that put them in the spotlight in the first place. And they didn’t identify too closely with the designation, much less cultivate the image of being heroic. They did what they did and they let others worry about affixing titles.
In short, everyday heroes are the extraordinary men and women who on a daily basis do all the ordinary things that keep our world from spinning off its axis. They toil diligently, anonymously, and far too often for wages that are woefully inadequate. It is my sincere hope that you ignore them for as long as you possibly can or at least not pay them too much attention. Here’s why.
Have you ever heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Yeah, me neither. But I think that anyone who studies it qualifies as a hero; broadly speaking, it posits that there is no way to study something because the second you observe it, you change all the conditions you are trying to measure. As applied to modern-day heroes, the attention they receive often results in the acid rain of fame drenching them in their own good deeds. And for my money, there is no greater corrosive than that.
So if a hero’s continued success lies in the silence of our collective response, I am not going to inflict fame’s song on them. I will give them no more than a passing nod, a pat on the back, and let them continue on their valiant way. Oddly enough, that may be as close as I get to being a hero.
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator living in Los Angeles. E-mail him at MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.