Opening Betrayal's Door Way
If you’ve ever felt an ice shard driven into your heart by an unfaithful lover, the hollowing out of trust by a false friend or been gutted by a realisation of your own gullibility, you’ve seen betrayal’s door. Congrats, and welcome to the club of human beings the world over. What you may not have realised is that betrayal’s door reveals the rich possibilities available to us in our creative being. Betrayal might be your invitation to engage in some serious world founding.
Doors function both to allow and prevent movement between two spaces. In a long, otherwise impenetrable wall, the door says to us ‘here is the opening’. In its closed state, it signifies the existence of another space; one that is currently sealed off. Even as it covers over the sealed off space it reveals the existence of that space. Much like a wall does except that a wall indicates a division between spaces but acts to make that ‘other’ space not available to us. A door, acts to both reveal the existence of and show where we might access that other space. This dual function of a door (revealing and concealing) within a wall offers an ideal entry to some figurative play.
As social beings, we are adept at erecting walls. We build them to protect ourselves from the wild, untamed and dangerous spaces. We construct them to keep the precious things in and keep out the unwanted. We raise them to cover the unseemly, blemished or shameful. They become the signifiers of the ways we see social spaces, tell us where the boundaries are. They also settle what we are agreeing to have represent the presence of something. For example, “This fence shows where my property begins.”
Those walls are not always made of concrete, bricks or steel. Some of them come in the form of clothing, others in the performative habits of gender, culture and class. Relationships often serve as walls. Some walls take form as stories we tell ourselves. Conscious and unconscious lies are the same. There are thousands of kilometres of shielded space behind the walls that we have forgotten, never speak of and have taken for granted. All of these are walls in that they cover over, and thus create the appearance that ‘things’ ARE a certain way and not another.
I’m not trying to delude you here. Etymologically, betrayal means to ‘expose’ something. In order to be exposed, to begin with it has to have been covered over. In this context, covered over means to be presented as something other than what it is. Thus, the origin of betrayal is not that act of uncovering but in covering over, or raising the wall. Not all covering over is an intent to betray or mislead – but covering over deceives because no person, thing or event is ever simply as they appear.
Now, don’t get me wrong, walls (in this figurative sense) are both helpful and necessary. Our social fabric relies on these walls as socially constructed ways of going-on-together. Our worlds would fall apart if the walls came down. They offer certainty, clarity and the means to maintain social order. Overall, the ground for peace and calm is founded on wall building. But, they simultaneously and necessarily introduce that deeply uncomfortable feature of our being in the world: betrayal.
Let’s get into some specifics! Allow me to indulge in a personal one to start.
As I turned the corner from adolescence, I embarked on the great trajectory of walling up that is adulthood. I incorporated debt, work and the serious business of rearing children into my wall. As I did so, I increasingly felt the forced ‘leaving behind’, or ‘sealing off’, of those life-giving ways that had been part of my childhood. For me, adulthood, as I embraced it, was a betrayal of my deepest creative impulse. I stopped creating in all but the least meaningful ways. Creativity became at the service of adulthood, rather than the utterly consuming, transformative force of life itself. Sure, it was the way I earnt my living, kept myself entertained and perhaps decorated my path, but those things are simply the acceptable form of creativity that is allowed for grown-ups.
Some thirty years later, standing in a textiles’ gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, (the artist capital of the USA) the doorway showed itself. I stood, amidst the textures, tones and scent of adulthoods dedicated to the service of creating for its absorbing and transformative force, tears streaming down my face. The door cracked open and revealed the adulthood I could have had; one I had almost completely relinquished by this stage. I was awash with grief, overwhelmed with regret and angry at my relinquishing.
Those moments, the ones we have come to think of as the betrayal (the uncovering of what was covered over); the revelation of the scam, infidelity or fraud, fixate us. The cold chill of realisation prickles our skin. When the door bursts open, or is even cracked ajar, suddenly both the wall and what it has been covering over, are made entirely apparent. That is the shock. The whole damned scam, from start to finish, is utterly exposed for what it is: the appearance of a thing masquerading as if it were the thing. What fools we are; clowns in a circus of our own making.
You’ve probably had your moments where the door was thrown open for you; the unfaithful lover exposed, that dodgy, used car breaking down or the seemingly friendly colleague turns out to be backstabbing. But, these are just obvious ones. Our worlds are replete with examples and it is not because human beings are a bunch of selfish, conniving so-and-sos. The social fabric, our being together, requires the covering over of things so we have shared representations of them: ‘this coin means a dollar’, ‘this car means I am wealthy’, ‘this scarf shows I am trendy’. We have to agree on the meanings so we can negotiate our way forward together. Work, economics, love, friendships, war, peace… most anything that requires us to work together toward something also originates betrayal.
I will not offer a comprehensive list here but following are some of the walls I have noticed:
Ideologies (political/religious/corporate) suggest they have reality stitched up in one off-the-shelf package.
Uniforms, of any kind, show the social membership of a person concealing the places where that person deviates from those norms.
Language (just saying something) requires things to appear according to its words, syntax and grammars but leaves much unspoken.
Bullies make a show of strength as a way of hiding cowardice.
Our organisations wall-off the deepest nature of our humanity when they operate as if human beings are merely resources for the purposes of serving their financial ends, .
These are not grounds for some kind of corporate self-flagellation. We’ve known this for millennia. It’s captured in our mythology. Hermes steals Apollo’s golden cattle and covers over their tracks. Even as Apollo seeks justice, he enters the game knowing that he is being beguiled. A game is always afoot, and we are both the players and the played. Sure, this can be alarming, but the Godly stance adopted by Apollo might be more becoming; knowing his foolishness will always be exposed by Hermes (the great trickster) he enters the fool’s play to see what else is possible. Because, that is the nature of this play, one that exposes the folly of our walls, our certainty and the grounds of our social fabric for what it is.
Existence is built on the necessary inclusion of betrayal. We may or may not pass through its doorway, but none-the-less, that doorway is built into every house we construct; every impression we render, script we craft and appearance we put on. There is no escape from betrayal, it is existential. But, we can expect that every wall, despite its apparent intransigence, will house a door.
In the spirit of the figurative play at the heart of our being in the world, we might find the opening that is the door does not mean we have to knock down walls. We can quite simply open and close them, move between them. Or, leave them ajar to feel the draft off the fresh open fields and take stock of what is available to us on the other side of the walls we have constructed. Some simple questions that we might ask of a wall are:
What does this appear to be?
What is its appearance covering up?
Where does the opening show itself?
For certainly, while our worlds (as they have been founded) are what they appear to be, they are also what has been covered over. But possibility, its promise, its energy, its creative pulse and what might become through it, are always only available through its uncovering what was covered over; or betrayal. And its uncovering calls us to surrender to the overwhelm.