preface: in trust we trust

This series is the product of years of reflecting on distrust and the corrosion it exacts on one’s experience of others and the broader environment. When trust appears elusive, one cannot move through the world with ease. Sinister phantoms lurk in every corner turned and unturned. Echoes of betrayal lived and unlived pepper the contours of memory and relationships lost and won. When one spends her waking days pondering the intentions of others and finding no real consolation in their actions and failure to greet her with the warmth and naïve sincerity of a child, she is prone to suspicion. Great elephants loom large in rooms big and small and mimic landmines which one can ne’er overcome. Nevertheless, it eventually becomes necessary to subject one’s suspicions to the magnifying glass so that they may stand the test of scrutiny. Subjecting one’s proclivities to self-scrutiny is not an easy undertaking. It is a confrontation and provocation that invites one to undress in the mirror and private rooms and in public streets and alleyways. As Socrates once said, the unexamined life is not worth living. The failure to examine, assess, and make sense of oneself and the desires, hopes, aspirations, fears, and interests that structure one’s life lends itself to blindly moving through life like an automaton. The subject of trust has long preoccupied me. Distrust has plagued my interactions with others and the world. My seeming inability to trust has served as justification for retreating into myself. However, the time has arrived to explore this treacherous subject and determine once and for all if distrust is truly insurmountable. This exercise will open new avenues for understanding trust and how people from all walks of life can re-orient themselves to this phenomenon. Day breaks and new paths are charted here.

Here, readers can expect to engage with the meaning of trust and how we can understand it. Trust will be discussed in relation to conflict, solidarity, social justice, artistic representations of the human condition, and what is beautiful and ugly. These threads will ultimately reveal the ways in which trust permeates our lives and every encounter therein. This preface will establish the tone and tenor of this series, introducing notions of trust that will be tested in subsequent installations. What emerges will be a hopeful elucidation of trust that is unlike my initial suppositions prior to embarking on the journey of writing this series. The critique of conventional, historical, and contemporary understandings of trust stands as a critique of my prior understanding of trust and the ways in which it orders our lives and shapes the world. Therefore, this series is not only a critique of the world at large, but a critique of myself, including any moral-ethical commitments or their absence thereof. Through this critique, my actual commitments are revealed, and an invitation is extended to the reader to embrace the call to action that animates this series. The dual self and externally directed criticism that underlies this series therefore aims to situate both writer and reader in relation to one another, inviting me specifically to enter into a dialogue with the reader. The aim of this series is both to invite discomfort on the part of readers and to inspire hope and utopianism in an entirely achievable manner. As such, this series invites readers to trust in the intentions that animate this series and the explication of trust that emerges. It is an invitation to trust in the fruits of self-criticism and the horizons it births, highlighting that ‘utopia’ need not be a derogatory term.

***

Let us begin our ruminations on trust with its seeming lack as daytime echoes through the autumn breeze. There is something sinister about living in a world wherein trust is perceived to be limited, finite. The establishment of new relationships is always already dependent on one’s capacity and willingness to trust. It is fraught, or so we are told. There are echoes of vibrant pastures where people congregate and frolic, dreams in the unmentioned abyss of tomorrow, an abyss that is not promised but always lingers on the tongue like an unspoken secret, beckoning one into the future while seated in the present day perched on a chair in an enclosed office that feels distant even though one inhabits it. Trust does not come easily when one’s fight or flight response is always already attuned to the messiness of betrayal and loss, always remembering the rough textures of the cat’s tongue when it purrs and whispers gently into one’s heart. Such creatures could readily injure, perhaps even maim unsuspecting bodies clothed in naivete. In life, one must ingratiate themself to the reigning politics of the day, dancing around the relational preferences of one’s colleagues, friends, and family, learning the pain points and land mines that litter the places one ought to call home.

In the workplace, we suckle and draw attention to ourselves for the great and brilliant work we each are tasked with. Still, no one pauses long enough to question the nature of this work, for it is not the immediate tasks that lie before us splattered on screens that shine bright like ineffable diamonds breaking underfoot on their way to a wedding. This time, the marriage will last, or so we are told. Between the black text that peppers one’s screens, superimposed on white, everywhere white, one is reminded of how desperately powerless she is. The moment she stops working is the moment she turns into another fool for Christ, raving and barking mad, materially and spiritually impoverished and without a home to call her own, though she should be able to find God hiding in abbesses as great as the sun, our distant and blinding star, sustaining us in ways our day-to-day work seeks to rival. Without toiling day-in and day-out, she will be without shelter, clothes, food, transportation, phone service, internet, and so much more. These are the rhythms of life, plodding along to the smile, shrug, and politics of the workplace of living. Life is work, toiling in fields that will never be cultivated.

We are merely products, curating ourselves to the system requirements of labour demands and fickleness of one’s fellow prisoners. This is an arrangement that does not bode well for trust. Whatever goodwill one cultivates is always already marginal because no one lingers at the end of their workday just to spend time with you. Each of us has her life outside of work, which is presumably one’s ‘true’ life and cannot be divorced from one’s working life. At work as in life, we are perennial strangers. There are no intimate—close—relationships. For most people, these relationships are transactional and provide something or other. Trust does not abound under these circumstances, only need. It sits in the corner and weeps like a small babe beckoning its mother’s bosom, eager to satisfy its thirst but finding neither milk nor water. Trust is a game of risk where one is perpetually navigating the perceived effects of uncertainty on operational objectives, that is, on the business of living and belonging.

Recriminations abound and fingers are raised, pointing at the other who is hiding in alcoves as deep as the earth’s core. Life is work and one can scarcely retire from her employment. Retirement is a renunciation of life and a pronunciation of defeat. One cannot trust that gentleness will greet her when she turns the corner to oncoming traffic, pedestrians and strangers holding hands like they were promised tomorrow. There are no assurances, big or small, gestures that intimate the coming of a new age of belonging, to one’s spouse, friend, teacher, sister, brother, mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, doctor, pharmacist, colleague, or acquaintance. Belonging requires trust and the bells to toll, a beacon that heralds the presence of bonds so tight they cannot be undone. Trust is an elusive and illusive phenomenon. One can neither touch, lick, smell, hear, or taste its sensations and promises. The way it invites one into its home with goodwill and in good faith, ushering one into the outwardly affirming arms of houses of stone erected upon a cliff’s edge. One can hear the chiming and loud whispers caressing the skin like a soothsayer dismembering snakes hiding underneath the tarmac. The work has only just begun, skirting the contours of the never-ending dusk. There is no forward dawning, merely rabbit holes etched in skies so low one can touch their blue hues and disappearing clouds. This is life and it scrapes and disappoints with its pregnant pauses.

***

This is the end of the beginning, a Ferris wheel dancing into flickering horizons unabashedly echoing the wonderment of yesteryear. Trust is a game, undelighted by bronze statues and the anamnesis of the present moment which lingers on the tongue like a marriage fallowing the land as sparrows and ravens, galahs and budgies, magpies and rainbow lorikeets disperse and diverge into the morning dew. Many look into the eyes of strangers they have come to regard affectionately. They have lost all wonder about when they ceased to view what is unfamiliar as such. They till the lands of the unknown and unusual until it is the recognisable image of decipherable dreams. At work, they are compelled to trust that their livelihoods will not be threatened by the fickleness of colleagues they would venture to call friends so as to console themselves about the fundamental insecurity they face. They dream, dance, and grasp at employment in order to keep their heads covered. Life and its pregnant pauses shimmers seductively and invites the fertilisation of a life in utero. Factions emerge as one is invited to negotiate the treacherous waters of alliances which we all navigate like sailors on the high seas. A glance and a glimpse into the intentions of high flying egos, each considering itself to be the most capable and seeking after high esteem. These are not only the markers of finely-oiled workplace machinery, but the rhythm of a life unencumbered by questions, about the absence of windows through which one can glean the possibility of relations built on care for all of mankind and not merely the apparent status employment bestows upon another in a transactional economy that is governed by dreams neither of us can remember. Off into the ether we go, dancing around the truth like inconceivable children.

Life is work and so too is leisure and the requisite trust that one can escape, even if momentarily, the demands of living. Leisure is an escapist daydream and awareness of one’s condition and the fleeting rest and playfulness thereof is but a nightmare that one must live through and forcibly embrace while nursing further daydreams about the coming of respite. It is a sad society that has convinced itself that life must be stolen from life, that there are spheres, portions, fragments, and domains of life that are inaccessible to one’s desires. That many spend their lives toiling under the resignation that they participate in wage labour contrary to their true desires is a sobering reality that can neither nurse a babe to life nor satiate an adult’s hunger. It is nary a hunger that can be quenched by waters from the fountain of youth, for the latter is always already beleaguered by the troubles of growing into a man or woman who will be responsible for providing for her own mouth and, perhaps, those of children who will be faced with the same fate. Much of our lives are marked by this seeming inaccessibility of swathes of life’s moments and our own desires and yearnings as we pine after lives that could be lived, those that were lost through choices made, and those foreclosed by the singular perspectives and aversion to change that we all inevitably harbour as the years go by. For those who embrace change under the misleading guise of labouring to fulfill desires they can neither name nor realise, change provides the illusion of escaping the compartmentalisation of life into separate spheres. Indeed, they trust that change, whether through migration and relocation or changing employers, will be the harbinger of the realisation of their daydreams. Soon, however, they recognise that they are imprisoned within the same logics, fearful of not having a means to make ends meet, rooves over their heads, food and water in their bellies, transportation, clothing, access to the internet, and myriad other goods that have become luxuries but should be regarded as necessities. Trust in the realisability of one’s daydreams and the promise of leisure is corrosive where societies continuously reproduce well-trodden paths and are fearful of change, grasping, always tightly grasping at the established scripts. Trust rises into the bosom of fear where it is housed and nurtured, and nothing new is cultivated nor is it possible.

***

You see that we started with the supposition that trust is finite, and this is true (to some extent). Now, we also see that it abounds everywhere like oxygen caressing the interior of our bodies and waltzing with our lungs. The trust that we experience in relation to the social structures that exist both independently of us and by virtue of the collective actions of individuals who uphold particular norms is in a sense intangible and insincere. It is borne out of necessity, for we must be able to peaceably live together, including by creating moments that approximate pleasure as one would hope of the procreative act or even the casual encounter between two bodies seeking momentary connection. Trust is mandated by a world wherein it is not possible to live one’s life independent of the intrusions of other human beings and creatures large and small. When encountering other people, one must summon the belief that they will not cause one harm, brandishing knives or a fist to the face, breaching one’s confidence or spreading rumours to mar one’s reputation. The corollary of socially and biologically mandated trust is the promise of a life free of paranoia and empty of conceit and deceit. These are the steps we each must learn, swaying to the untoward rhythms of promised intimacy that never arrives. Kisses blown and firmly planted on cheeks and lips, the nape of one’s neck, the centre of one’s thighs, the soles of one’s feet. These offer some comfort that one is secure, loved, desired, and needed. Still, they are somewhat illusory, for were it not for the reality that we are designed to live in relation to others, then the brush of one’s shoulder with that of a stranger would nary provide any semblance of comfort and reassurance that one is not alone. As it is, we are raw materials to one another, resources ripe for excavation as we uncover the earth so that it may nudely greet us, offering a safe haven as we retreat into its core. This is the beginning of the end, realising, always realising that tomorrow is another day.