The Dance of Trust
Or, against cynicism
To trust your body and its capacities is to rebel against an entire order of meaning which tells us we’re machines trapped inside unfortunate flesh constantly at risk of disease, injury, and death. To trust in the goodness of the world is to revolt against an entire order of meaning that wants us to fear others so we’ll never collaborate with them against our self-appointed masters.
My recent Sundry Notes collection, themed on the relationship between the Mythic and the Real, prompted quite a rather tense discussion in the comments between several readers. Many of them focused on the question of whether or not I’m a “cynic,” or relatedly, whether or not my focus on material conditions (against Idealism) is itself a cynical approach.
I didn’t have the patience to join the fray, as I was rather enjoying a calm and unmediated weekend at home with my husband. But the question (when it actually functioned as a question, rather than an accusation) is very much worth addressing.
Anyone who knows me well in real life certainly would have found this question amusing: I’m often seen as quite the opposite. If anything, I’ve been accused many times of overindulging in what others have called “reckless optimism.”
But I can’t have lived the life I did by being a cynic. To take just one example from almost exactly 10 years ago: I, along with my friend
, decided to completely uproot our lives in the United States and move to France. She had quite a solid plan to stay, while I’d been much too optimistic about an assurance I’d gotten from a friend regarding a place to rent.Turns out, there was no such place to rent, and I was suddenly homeless in a foreign country. I suspect most in such a situation might have taken the last bit of their money, bought a flight home, and tried to forget the whole damn thing. But I stayed and lived in someone’s storage garage for three months. I slept on a dirty mattress raised from the concrete floor with broken wooden palettes and old Jeep tires and tried not to accept the more “realistic” conclusion that I’d fucked up pretty badly.
There have been countless other moments like this for me. And what’s funny is that those many moments are exactly why I’ve never let myself become pessimistic or cynical about the world. And at the same time, they’re also how I learned to focus more on the “real” of situations and focus on actual material conditions, rather than on fantasies or Idealism.
Take that situation again. I was homeless, living in a garage, and soon wouldn’t even have the legal right to be in that country since my travel visa was about to expire. I didn’t have anywhere else to stay and didn’t have any idea how to get myself out of that situation. But I did have my body which bore all my own history and memories. And because I had the great wealth of this, I remembered that I’d been in similar situations and things turned out just fine.
It was hardly my first experience being homeless — I slept on the streets of Seattle in my early 20s, and for similar reasons. That other time, I’d moved across the country with just a backpack to a place I thought I could stay, and then that place didn’t work. This time, I’d done the same thing.
That first time, I figured things out. Sleeping on the streets wasn’t really all that bad, nor was lending my body out to strange men a few nights a week for a warmer place to sleep and somewhere to shower the next morning. And then, one of the other places where I crashed occasionally soon has a room open, and I rented it and I was no longer homeless.
This last time, I figured things out. Sleeping in a garage isn’t all that bad, just really dusty and noisy. I was much too old to lend my body out to strange men again, and not really in a place where many would be looking to rent me, but I already had a place to sleep and a shower I could use in the morning. And, then a few months later the house whose garage I slept in soon had a room open, and I rented it and I was no longer homeless.
What I learned from both experiences and countless others was a trust in the body and the general goodness of the world that’s become quite disfavored in capitalism. Capitalism requires us always to feel like we don’t have enough so that we’ll instead work and buy more. Capitalist states require our bodily insecurity and a fear of the other so that we’ll support increases of state power and restrictions on our freedoms.
To trust, then, is an act of rebellion against all this. To trust your body and its capacities is to rebel against an entire order of meaning which tells us we’re machines trapped inside unfortunate flesh constantly at risk of disease, injury, and death. To trust in the goodness of the world is to revolt against an entire order of meaning that wants us to fear others so we’ll never collaborate with them against our self-appointed masters.
To trust your body and its capacities is to indulge in luxurious wonder and awe, to be each time surprised by how much more is possible. As in the gym, finding 100 kilos to be the limit of what you can dead-lift and then the next time finding that was hardly a limit at all, trust in the body teaches you that most of what we believe are our limits are in fact only our fears.
To trust the goodness of others is just as much a delicious indulgence, and it is to each time discover as much about yourself as you do of others. Very, very few really desire their own destruction — and even fewer truly desire the destruction of others. As in the Five of Wands, conflict is mostly ever just play taken too seriously and the silly assumption that to thrive means others must not. As I put it in A People’s Guide to Tarot:
The fact that the figures in this card are often depicted as young men rather than soldiers is a signal about the kind of conflict this card is speaking about. Rather than war, it’s a form of play. Especially if you tend to fear conflict or, on the other hand, take conflict too seriously, think on how in even the most aggressive team sports, a knocked-down player is often helped back up by the very same opponent who knocked him down.
No doubt, some reading this might be appalled by such an optimism, upset how much it seems to gloss over real suffering and world-ending violence.
Here, I can only offer instead the words of my friend Caroline Ross, who in a better way describes this deeper knowledge by first admitting how fucking difficult it can be:
No matter where I turn and how far I wander, the challenge and practice of yielding are always present. This is my hearth-riddle: how not to resist life, yet keep my centreline. How to balance softness and firmness, adaptability without flimsiness, stay in touch with things, yet not become enmeshed. In short, how do I stand my ground using softness, when all around the laws of iron and silicon are followed ten thousand times more widely than the rules of any wise well-tried path or the natural process itself?
It can seem that we are in a particularly terrible time right now with domination being a popular policy instead of dialogue, in so many contexts, whether at home or abroad. The great paradox of yielding in relation to this is how do we resist ‘evil’ (such as rule by force) without getting tangled up in it, or perpetuating it ourselves? If we constantly dwell on everything awful, do we not internalise it? If we ignore it and seek a safe hermitage somewhere, metaphorically or physically, aren’t we just abandoning our fellows to its ill effects? …
And then, continuing, she explains how these questions are best explored through the body. For her, this is her martial arts practice, T’ai Chi, a body art grounded in the constant transformation of aggression:
…My experience is that consciously choosing some discomfort or difficulty for the sake of developing resilience (or better still, anti-fragility) helps us better face the bullies and forces greater than ourself in life. Importantly, in my tradition, this resilience is not about us becoming invincible martial artists, or ultimate lone victors. That would just be more of the same. It is about understanding power, transforming it and our situation via connection, attention and the ability to adapt in a heartbeat. The side-effect? Our relationships are also transformed as we can more clearly see when we are reactive, embattled or frozen, and then hopefully soften so that other options than digging-in are available to us.
In other words, the kind of trust in the body and the goodness of others of which I’m speaking are essentially the same kind of trust. One flows into and out of the other in a relentless dance, just as we flow into and out of each other. Sometimes that dance looks violent, just as intense sexual passion between two people can look like an aggressive battle between naked bodies. Other times that dance looks gentle and slow, just as, again, intense sexual passion can look artful, measured, and full of care.
To be caught up in the dance of trust is to know the dance will change, and change, and change again. And it is also to know that only our full engagement with the world allows us to join that dance.
To be cynical is to decide to sit life out, to withdraw from its beautiful struggles through our foolish certainty we’ve already learned all there is to know about ourselves and others.
To be cynical is to arrive at the place you’d intended to go, but, finding it not as you’d demanded, abandon the journey before it’s even really begun.
I heartily agree with your view of the world- but I would call it cynicism. Or perhaps the meaning is more clear if I say Cynicism. Because cynicism has always had more than one meaning- there is the philosophy of cynicism and there is the straw man of cynicism created by those threatened by the philosophy.
Cynicism as a philosophy has never said that all or most people are untrustworthy or ill-intentioned towards others. In fact, the cynics were the ones to invent the idea of being a citizen of the world and having a common humanity that transcends membership in an ethnic group, citizenship in a city state, or social class. What cynicism taught was to be wary of the intentions of those with power, and to not let social conformity come between the self and the wisdom of Nature. Elites created a straw man of this idea in order to discredit those who pointed out their self-interested use of violence. This is the origin of the use of cynic or cynicism to mean pessimism, misanthropy, and stagnation.
Cynicism teaches that the body and nature are the sources of meaning in life, and that it is demanding and degrading for humans to make up hierarchies to place one human over another. Ancient cynics lived lives somewhat comparable to the anecdotes Rhyd shares in this piece- traveling around, sleeping rough, working whatever odd jobs could be had without the indignity of faking allegiance to the social hierarchies of the time, and mocking the powerful.
Just as “communism” and “Marxism” have become strawmen to be thrown at those who question the conscription of young men to war, or increasing levels of inequality in our society, “cynic” is word which is used as a slur to shut down discussion and delegitimize an intellectual opponent. But like “communist”, it contains the ghost of an idea of a world where Nature and the body are more important than the ridiculous hierarchies humans invent, and the convoluted philosophies and justifications for that hierarchy the lapdog philosophers of the elites develop. And so long as people throw the term around, some of us will eventually look into it enough to realize that even back in the days when Plato and Aristotle were coming up with justifications for slavery, there were philosophers who mocked the systems of power rather than justifying them.
In the straw manning of cynicism the elites have kept alive the ghost of Cynicism. They show how a philosophy which says the body and Nature are enough and that kings and rulers are irrelevant to the work of being human frightens them millennia later. Their ongoing attempts to discredit a dead philosophy just show how powerful the idea of being a human animal in a human body truly is. Of course, you don’t have to call that idea cynicism. But you might consider not carrying water for the elites by perpetuating their self-serving interpretation of an ideology that might be a fellow-traveler to your ideas.
I get this a lot too. Called a pessimist, a cynic, negative, a Doomer etc. Dude it's the complete opposite! Mostly I'm pretty joyful, if you hadn't noticed! Quite weird