Guv’nor

It’s not so easy to think about governing — ourselves, or others. We developed politics and ideology as a kind of shortcut; scaffolding for the cognitive and practical processes to serve as tools for worlding. But we rarely ask “who were the people who made the tools, let alone own them, and what biases and postures might they (wittingly or unwittingly) impress upon us.

So, I continue to think-with many folks, and this quote from a book I love came across my feed. I, unsurprisingly, took it further down, descending further into my disabled embodiment. The quote, from Ursula K Le Guin is below:

“It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

My disabled body isn’t really a settled thing at all. My nervous system likes to give me spasms, shakes, jerks. My limbs, and my thoughts like to do their own thing — shudder and shake. Sometimes the complexity of the world and those hierarchies that were built to attempt to smooth out the unsettled, the spasmodic, the nomadic, and the seemingly useless?

That adds to the mental climate so the weather gets heavier, and depression whispers “you’re not supposed to be.” Over time, I have learnt the roots of being “under the weather”; a sailor who is ill going below to a space where they can ride out the storm.

And so, going below is what I often do. Seek out the inner, the underworld; the spaces where the rhizomatic and mycelial meet and intertwine in dark, black, profusional and processural humus. Because the underworld is not a settled place: the rootworlds are alive-and-dead with the processes of decay, the emergences and submergences of bacteria, viruses, primal phantasms and images all.

Is it any wonder such a misty, shadowy, and above-all-confusing-space is presided over, in Greek myth, by Hades, with his helmet of invisibility, By the great Lady who we casually now call Persephone, but for devotees would often remain cloaked in bynames, her theophanies indirect but all-embracing?

The underworld(s) have no bottom, no base, because they are all-fundamental — katabasis is not just one thing. The descending never stops, never settles, and is ALWAYS changing. But what has this to do with being governed?

Cybernetics and systems thinking reveal that EACH ONE OF US is a governor, but that a governor is a steersman, a pilot — not in control, but part of, influenced by, and influencing many agential flows.

It’s right there in the etymology: kybernan -> gubernare.

This is fundamentally unsettling: no one is in control. My disabled body does what does, responding to, and with, and through the world. All ‘I’ may do is sail the waters of those great oceans and rivers of life. To exist as best I can in that which is also a starry cavernous vault: have you seen the Milky Way unveiled truly, by the way? An Ocean of Milk indeed!

To be unsettled, to be unsettling? Is to be like an uncanny fen-dweller to some, murky, unclear, obscure and occulted in shape, dwelling in unstable lands. I’ve been doing some work with the concept of aglaeca, but that is, as they say, another story for another time, unruly as it is. Despite what may be wished by those “in power”, who regard themselves as the only rightful governors?

Governing is what is done by us, every moment of every day — the daimons/daemons of our bodies and minds do what they do in their worldings, and regulation is simply learning to work-with what-is. Not some special thing only those at the “top” do.

So, take it from a Brit:

You’re the guv’nor.

And the guv’nor in me nods wordlessly to the guv’nor in you.

So it goes.