Letter from a Captain’s Chair
Number One. You who are not celebrated except by those who know your worth. You whose rare gift of a shared voice is as difficult to describe as it is to reproduce. You whose ears overflow not with judgement nor adulation but trust. You whose role is more and less than a role—a foundation upon which mere roles stand and fall.
Are there proper words of devotion for those under one’s authority that are not themselves authoritarian? Authority, cousins with author: creator, advocate. originator. Authority becomes creatorhood, advocateness, originatorship—the quality of promoting or making. Things that grow must start from somewhere, even if the seed which becomes a flower was once the sex of another flower.
Here we flirt with domination, influence, control. The -arian of authoritarian suggests belief, a zeal for authority, the way sectarian points to a cultic fundamentalism.
But I prefer the author—one who builds, promotes, cultivates. In this way, you are more an authority than I am. You take responsibility for me. You multiply my voice, just as you may choose to drown me out. You know this and take your power seriously, using it with care. Faith does not need a god but fragility. It needs the risk of losing everything that makes sense.
A team must not be a family. There must be difference for trust to emerge in the oxygen between. For a voice to be shared, there must be distance, otherwise it makes no sense to speak of sharing. The risk of sharing destabilizes the fascism of the same. You know this, and I know this.
So you, Number One. You who know the multifarious meanings of authorship and authority. You who may dismantle but choose to nourish. You in whom I place my trust and to whom I owe every becoming, good or ill, on this field of play. I trust you.