Open Sea, Binding Promises

“It is not hard to keep two things in your head at the same time. Even a child could do it.” Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“So how do you know him, do you work for him?” We are in the coffee queue in the short break between two presentations and the room is buzzing with productive networking, micro personal pitches, cards exchanging, LinkedIn adding. I can feel his eyes on me, working out what my connection is to the reputable man invited as main speaker who had addressed me directly and fondly during his speech. I look into the black coffee and I am seven years old on a sunny morning in my grandparents’ courtyard, and a Roma fortune teller is swishing the coffee remains around a cup and telling me she sees a dark shape, an omen, and that my grandfather is going to die. And I grab her hand and say no he won’t, that is not a dark shape, look again, it is a small spider dancing on a line. And then Anansi winks at me across a page and Neil Gaiman’s words take me off into magic and mischief and then I am back in the workshop room, looking up.

“We met at a fishing event some months ago. I taught him a new fishing technique and we became friends.” I watch his face try to make the two things fit, the formidable thinker and the fishing technique, and something opens behind his eyes, could it be, and then the bell rings and I leave him with it and go back in for the second half.

I was entertaining myself, dear reader, but I was also declining to be placed. He was holding out a clean box, employee, mentee, and I did not climb in, I complicated it. There is a price for not playing the networking game, for refusing to stand in the warm light of someone else’s credibility, but there is also a gain, I kept the interaction alive, I kept the possibilities open, I kept the relationship non-transactable.

Growing up in the end times of communism meant reality was often a slab of concrete I could not permutate into anything else, and I had three things I could do with it. Hit it and take the pain. Accept it. Or pretend it wasn’t there, turn the concrete in my mind into a never-ending sea and swim in it. As a child I used all three almost interchangeably, hit it when it really matters, accept it when there’s no other way, pretend when you want to feel free. But the machine is patient and it works through community, family, friends, and as I grew into a teenager and then a young adult I slowly forgot why it mattered to hit the wall at all. I was free only in my imagination, and even that simulacrum of freedom got harder to reach the further it drifted from anything I was actually living.

“So your tests show an unusual sharp mind, you are in the top ten percent of all candidates, but the psychologist’s evaluation is that you have a strong tendency to disobey and challenge authority. I am puzzled, as all throughout these weeks of our assessment centre you have been exemplary, almost the picture of the perfect employee despite never having worked in a corporation. What do you think of this?” I look at them, the corporate director who could be my boss and the HR manager sitting alongside him with my file open. I have just graduated from my university and I really want this job, management trainee at one of the biggest multinationals in the world. And I am remembering my first traineeship, in the government, my open idealism, the minister who listened to my ideas with a smile and then put them aside and sent me out to buy his lunch, and who slapped my behind as I went out the door. I tell myself, at least to these two you are a brain to be respected, Corina, not a piece of meat to be owned.

And I box in the part of myself that is asking why I am trading, political science for marketing, the pursuit of collective human dignity for the selling of a commodity. I box in the part that does not want to be caged and I reason with her the way you reason with a child who is being sensible at the wrong moment. Cages are everywhere, Corina. At least this way you get to choose which one, instead of someone choosing it for you. That is also a kind of freedom. And then I smile and tell them that I disagree with the psychologist, and that I can give them the contact details of my parents and my teachers, who will confirm their earlier read, that yes indeed I am a good and reliable worker.

The hard part is not that I was unfree in those early corporate years but that I was choosing. Every day I accepted, I chose, every day I pretended, I chose, and bad faith is not the absence of choice, it is choice in a costume, and the costume is usually the word reality. Or, in that room, the word freedom itself, which is the better costume, and the one I had tailored for myself before anyone asked me to. The machine never took anything explicitly but it taught me that exercising it was not worth what it cost, and then let me do the remaining work myself.

Two things at once

Long before I got good at pretending to be free inside a corporate meeting room, when I was a young child in my grandparents’ courtyard, I heard it constantly, the call away from adventure. Corina, don’t go far from the courtyard or the Roma travellers will take you. The travelling tribes, pirates on land rather than at sea, and they came past our courtyard selling jewellery and pots and pans and futures in a coffee cup.

One day I traded a book for a shiny beady necklace. The book was a Romanian crime novel with Melania Lupu in it, a small elderly woman with a clear and frightening mind who solves things the police cannot. The girl I traded with took me to her grandmother to have my future told. Fortune telling was her trade and she had a table of her own outside in the sun, next to several others, and she read coffee for whoever sat down, and she would have read mine for a coin if I had brought one. The music was loud and they laughed and sang in the summer heat, young and old, almost not paying attention to me at all. It was that air, that atmosphere of new things being possible, that made me grab her hand and say no to the omen and yes to the tiny spider dancing on its thread. And she laughed and gave me a touch of wine and let me puff on her cigar, and I coughed and said it was vile and she laughed again and called me a fox. Go home little fox, she said, and remember, they might have guns and dogs but the forest is dark and full of possibilities, and you have sturdy legs, a sharp eye and many-legged spider friends.

A hunter’s sentence, from a woman whose people are hunted. And the same mouths that told me not to go past the courtyard were the soft end of the apparatus whose hard end took her grandchildren’s names and put them in registers. The forest is dark and full of possibilities partly because she was not allowed in the town.

She kept calling me a fox but back then I saw myself more as a pirate, and that came from Anton Lupan and Toate pânzele sus, the great Romanian seafaring adventure, which I was reading that very summer. Anton is an engineer and his friend Pierre went down with a ship on a dark stretch of coast and disappeared. Anton builds his own boat and gathers a motley crew, a cook, a boy, men from four different places who have no reason to trust each other, and they work out among themselves what each one gets and what each one owes, and then they sail off to look for a man nobody else is going to look for. In my eyes Anton was an inspiring pirate, someone who made his own rules and went without permission to do what he thought was right, someone who kicked his head into the concrete slab and broke it in two. When I excitedly told my grandfather the story he asked me, why call him a pirate, Corina? He is not evil, the other one is.

The book has a proper villain in it, Spânu, the one who wrecks ships and kills everyone aboard. And Spânu makes his own rules too. He asked nobody’s permission to wreck anything. What he has that Anton does not is paperwork. He keeps his ship in the port like an honest sailor, he runs cargo to Stambul and Salonic, his papers are in order. The papers are cover, as he is not obeying the system, he is wearing it, and because he is legible to it, it never looks at him twice. Anton breaks no law worth naming and is suspect in every harbour he docks in, because a man with his own boat and a crew from four countries and no employer is a thing the harbour cannot file. So the difference between them is whether the apparatus has decided to see you which is the same fact as the registers, from the other end: legibility is what gets the harmless watched and the murderous waved through.

That leaves piracy where I want it, as a structural description and not a moral one. Both of them go without permission but one of them is also evil, and that is a separate fact about him, sitting alongside the pirate-ness rather than constituting it. Which is why the fox was an apt synonym as is not good or bad either, she is quick in terrain that is not mapped for her.

David Graeber says that the monstrousness of the golden age pirates was not a misunderstanding but a countermeasure, and you can see why it was needed. On a merchant ship a man was beaten, badly fed, cheated of his wages and worked until something fell on him. On a pirate ship he elected his captain, could vote him out, knew his share in advance and knew what the crew owed him if he lost an arm. When a pirate crew took a merchant vessel, the merchant crew frequently joined, and not at gunpoint. The monster had to be manufactured because the alternative was that ordinary men would keep looking at what pirates had built and preferring it.

That is the only thing the three of them have in common, the pirate and the fox and the women at the table in the sun. Not wickedness, whatever my grandmother said in the courtyard. They made their own rules, they went without permission, and not one of them did it alone.

A rule with teeth

“I locked them in the room and they had to sort themselves out. It was just for a few hours but it was an excellent intervention, the project ran so smoothly afterwards.” He is looking at me across the table with an impish smile in his blue eyes, two pirates drinking a beer, exchanging sea stories.

And I am back in a night from long ago, before a facilitation with several powerful men, dreaming that I am playing chess with Anansi and my pieces keep disappearing. You are not fair, you are cheating. He laughs and says ok, and then his pieces come alive and turn into small animals looking up at me from their squares. If you want to beat me, he says, you have to take them, and taking them would kill them. You really want that? So I look at my own pieces and I blow across the wood and turn them into a forest, come, I say to the little creatures, come here, there is room for all of you, and the two of us can come too, Anansi, it’s a nicer game than chess, I’ll teach you to tap dance, I have a bottle of Romanian vodka stashed under a tree and some very good stories about our forest spirits, what do you say? And then before he gets the chance to reply, the alarm rings, and the anxiety arrives on top of me before my feet are on the floor. Did I account for everything in the design? Is there enough time for all the topics? Can I do a good job?

And then we are in the conference room and it is about to start, serious men in a serious room, a tidy little chess game, and Anansi is somewhere at the back of my mind smiling, and I hear myself say, before we begin I want to draw your attention to this chair. A red plush chair at the back with a small bell on it, and it had taken me some time to find one. I want one of you to be our disrupter for the day. Your only job is to watch us, and any time you feel something is missing, that the energy has gone, that we are too boring or too structured, or you just feel we need disrupting, go and sit in that chair and ring the bell, and all of us will stop whatever we are doing and look at it and change it.

And then the bell needs to be equally available and binding to both the one with the lower and the one with the higher rank. Plenty of people author obligations in rooms, and most of them are just building a small apparatus of their own. Anton’s crew agreement is a governance structure and so is Spânu’s paperwork. What separates the one from the other is not sincerity and not good intentions, it is whether the thing you have written can be used against you by someone with less power than you, on a day you would rather it weren’t. Anton sits down before they sail and fixes what a man is owed if he loses an arm, and after that it is owed whether Anton likes it or not because an authored obligation is one you cannot take back.

Giving it away

It is never safe being a pirate in a room, and I am uncomfortable most of the time I am doing it. In the coffee queue I invented a silly little story and turned a formidable thinker into a weekend fisherman, casting myself as his teacher in front of one of his own network. It cost me my own standing and him an accurate answer. I have also proposed a red chair to a room of men who could have looked at each other and decided, reasonably, that they had hired a strange woman, and that one risked the room. It does not get easier with practice, it gets more complicated.

But freedom held back is not freedom, it is an idea you have about yourself, and it dies in the person holding it. I know this because I held one for years and it died in me. I told myself I was choosing my cage and that choosing was a kind of freedom, and the sentence was true enough to keep me quiet for a while. What I did not know then is that freedom is not a possession, it is a capacity, and a capacity you never use does not sit there waiting for you but it wastes.

James Scott has a small ridiculous practice he calls anarchist calisthenics. He is standing at a pedestrian crossing in a German town late at night, no car anywhere, and nobody crosses. So he makes himself a rule, break one trivial, pointless law every day, jaywalk, walk on the grass, and he is explicit about why. One day you will be called on to break a law that matters, and on that day you will need the muscle, and the muscle will not be there if you have spent thirty years waiting for a light to change.

Calisthenics is only the diagnosis, and if disobedience were the whole of it then Spânu the outlaw would be the hero of this essay. He obeys nothing and he also owes nothing, to anyone, ever, and that is the actual difference between the two men, not the rule-breaking. Anton – the true pirate in my view - is bound at every point, bound to Pierre, who is probably dead and whom nobody else is going to look for, bound to his crew, a cook and a boy and men from four countries who have no reason to trust him, and before they sail they sit down and work out among themselves what each one gets and what each one owes. He did not escape obligation, he wrote it.

David Graeber says our fundamental freedoms are to move away, to disobey, and to reshuffle the arrangement we are living inside, and the third one is the one that matters here, because it does not mean walking away from obligation. It means authoring it, being one of the people who decides what is owed. And he is clear that none of this was theorised first and practised after. The pirates did not publish an argument for democracy, they wrote agreements, elected a captain who could be voted out, fixed the shares and set down what the crew owed a man who lost an arm, and the merchant sailors who came aboard were not persuaded of anything. They saw an arrangement that worked and preferred it.

So piracy is not a temperament and not a taste and it is certainly not a talent for saying no. It is the practice of making rules you are willing to be bound by, in places where somebody else’s rules are the only ones on offer. A lie in a coffee queue is the version available to a woman with no room of her own, and I have been that woman for part of my life. I do not build the chair because I am brave, I build it because I am not, and because the alternative is a woman who believes she is free on the evidence of an idea she has about herself and I have been that woman too.

And it is for them, the people in the conference rooms and the companies and the institutions, because it is the same act pointed outward. I could not free those men, dear reader, I could not make them pirates, nobody has ever freed anybody. What I could do was write one new obligation into the room and put it where I could not reach it. A chair, a bell, a named role, and a rule with teeth, which is that when it rings we stop, agreed in advance and binding on all of us including me. I could have built a hundred other things into that room. I could have kept the disruption in my own hands where it was safe and deployed it when I judged the moment right, and I did not, because smuggled freedom belongs to the smuggler, and a disruption I kept in my own hands and deployed at the clever moment would have been one more thing I was doing to them. The bell was for somebody else to ring and I put it at the back of the room in a red chair and gave it away before the day started. The agenda I had worked on for a week, the timing I was anxious about at six that morning, the whole careful structure that was the only thing standing between me and a room full of serious men deciding I was a strange woman, all of it surrendered in advance to whoever felt like walking to the back of the room. Written into the agreements, it was theirs, and I was under it with them.

And the designing part of me was still necessary, because Anansi is not interesting in an empty room. He is interesting because there are rules and he is inside them, and the whole pleasure of that dream is that he does not flip the board, he turns the pieces into animals and dares me to keep playing.

Then I stopped caring whether anyone rang it, because the point was that for one day the room contained a thing a person could be, someone who stands up in front of his superiors and rings it, and that whoever saw that done would know it was survivable.

The pirates had explicit agreements. The fortune teller had a table of her own in the sun, next to several others, and a trade, and a price. I had a design with a red chair in it. There is no piracy without structure, there is only weather, and nobody was ever freed by weather.

I am looking into his blue eyes across the table, two pirates and two beers, and remembering that morning, how frightened I was, how thoroughly un-Anansi I felt even as I was pointing at the chair, and I want to go back and give that younger Corina the easy and lovely mischief I can see in him. Or better, drop him into that room, have him co-facilitate with her, show her the ropes. And then I think, well, it took you longer, but you got the fox back on your own.

Except I didn’t. The fox was handed to me at a table in the sun by a woman who was there to sell fortunes and sold me one. She is being handed to me now across this table by a man who locked a project team in a room and calls it an excellent intervention. There is no getting yourself back by yourself. There is only running into other foxes, and noticing, and something in you waking up and coming out. They might have guns and dogs. But the forest is dark and full of possibilities, and you have sturdy legs, a sharp eye, and many-legged spider friends. Go home, little fox.

Photo by Steven Cordes on Unsplash