And suddenly you ask yourself: Are people looking at the fly circling around my head?
Photo: dpa
Recently I was invited to give a public speech. I asked myself: Why me? I then asked my client that and she rightly replied: “Why not you?” Then she continued: “There are so many monsters and dilettantes speaking publicly at the moment. At least you’re not a monster.”
So, somewhat calmed down, I prepared for my public speaking act and asked myself: What does I say when I speak? What do I think when I give a speech? What do I wear when I present something?
Fun and responsibility
Bahar Kaygusuz
Olga Hohmann doesn’t understand what work is and tries to find out every day. Sitting in her placeless office, she explores her biography and is amused by her own neuroses. All texts on dasnd.de/hohmann.
I never speak alone. I am The Pleaser, the opportunist who wants to entertain when she speaks in front of an audience. Who wants people to laugh or at least smile. The Killjoy, the killjoy who desires to subvert expectation. Like when I was a kid and would regularly fall asleep on the Monopoly board while everyone else was destroying each other in the real estate market or putting themselves in jail. Or is it The Magician, the magician who knows about the mundane side of her magic tricks and who is aware that “something more” of the illusion is always needed for “it” to happen. “It” – but what?
Every performance in front of an audience requires magic, requires the invocation of other powers. Every speech is a gathering, it is an invocation, an incantation, a slight trauma, alone in front of many, it is the knowledge that you always have voices united within you – inside and outside, this distinction is difficult to make. What did I hear, what did I think, what did I read, what did I develop myself? What is the voice traffic of the street, what is an advertising slogan, what conversation takes place at the next table, what at your own table, what is a conversation with yourself?
I give a speech and I pack: The Pleaser, The Killjoy, The Magician.
I have my mother tongue with me, highly charged, my father language – can it become a sister language? I have with me all the voices that have been arguing with me recently, some are thousands of years old, others I only heard yesterday, picked up, consciously or unconsciously. I speak in tongues, some things speak through me without me knowing it.
What are words worth? Every public speech contains at least one speech act, something eventful that introduces a before and an after. Before the speech and after the speech, before the speech is after the speech, after the speech is before the speech. Sometimes what happens is “nothing at all.” Then the third thing is missing, they call it “magic”.
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So what responsibility do I have if I dare to speak out? The voice is always the actual voice, which does not only arise in the body, but shimmers above it, which takes up and defines space. A shrill voice can ruin your evening. It is no coincidence that one “has a voice” and “raises one’s voice” even in political contexts. It is this very specific, immaterial organ, almost occult, it speaks out of you just as much as you speak to it yourself, that has such special power.
You say something. But what do you wear while lecturing? What do you carry in your hands with manicured fingernails that are almost not designed to carry anything other than perhaps a book, a pen, other than typing on the keyboard so loudly that a German man reprimands me on the ICE: “We are in the quiet area here.”
What, what facade, am I maintaining when I speak? What can I endure, the curse of the speech act? The fact that there is always a before and an after? When I have to speak in public, I’m often in a bad mood all day long. “Saving endorphins” is what D. calls it. What do I think when I give a speech? What do I endure, what tension do I have to maintain, what expectations do I receive (in return) – is the fly circling over my head actually the event? I sustain, I endure, I persevere, I desperately try to keep the tension, like a tightrope walker without a rope. Wireless, toothless tightrope act. What do I look for when I give a speech? What do I look for while giving a speech?
Speaking in front of people, alone in front of many – a traumatic experience in itself, the archaic instinct says: Run away! And my friend J. answers: “Culture begins where the injured and sick are no longer left behind, but rather cared for.”
And Bertolt Brecht writes: “What are these times when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it involves silence about so many misdeeds.” And then he says: “First comes the eating and then comes the morality. «