stop making sense

Surfing at Midnight. Tonight I speak in lost tongues. A momentary reflection on shame, which is distinct from guilt. Shame carries with it a public connotation: one may be shamed. To be shamed, to experience shame, is always to be disgraced or condoned in the public sphere. All this requires is the opinion of another. Guilt, in contradistinction, breathes in the private, in the person, internally. Yet the two bleed into each other. The best shame, if one may judge it positively, is that which induces its private corollary. Ought one submit to this suicide? At times, I have been shamed. I continue to be shamed. And what is shame, shame itself, but a civilian opinion? A fable told with the air of wisdom, the wisdom of a supressant morality? What God would enforce shame in the wake of a radical freedom? In the presence of its only true radicalness, its own disavowal? What kind of tradition brands this violence shameful as oppose to triumphant? What tradition continues to confuse the two, or label them, one way or another? The argument justifying postlapsarianism speak for itself. To violate the law was always to redefine it and be the law: to pull the mask off its own contradictions. How do you prove shame? And guilt, must we bear the weight of that eternal world too?

So don't ask me. Not that you've ever. I'm not going to be your stock character of shame. Nor will I adhere to a guilt I cannot identify with.