Live Like an Artist – Hope
As artists, it is perhaps time to brush up on the terminology around hope. Despair, too, sure, but hope. And, let me say that when I say “artists” I mean, anyone who is in a state of becoming, persistent dreamers of possibility, and believers in the lovelinesses which have not yet come into being. I steal from Cixous, who has called Poet, “any writer philosopher, author of plays, dreamer, producer of dreams, who uses life as a time of “approaching.””
Perhaps it’s time to shake off our old wings and forge new ones in the smithy of our soul, to get all Joycean. Come you artificers!
Well, you don’t need me for the news, Madge, we are soaking in it.
But there is news, too, in books, written in the recent and farther away past. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a good place to revisit these days. In the foreword to the third edition she says, “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” Solnit reminds us of what hope is not: “it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” Hope, she says, “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
A couple of posts ago I wrote about emergence, murmurations, and how if we do what we can where we are, that that can be some of the way forward, (with reference to adrienne marie brown and Robert Macfarlane). Returning to Solnit, she says: “Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
I keep trying to run these words together: emergencemurmurations, emer-murations, e-murmurations, emergency-ations, emurmencyations. And then one’s thoughts must turn to possibilities, re-inventions. Emergency inventions. Inventioncy. Well, we could go on in this vein, fashioning new words.
Can we locate hope in the adjacent possible, too? Anne Bogart talks about the work of Steven Johnson who is interested in the “preconditions for invention.” He says “The adjacent possible, is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
In his book, To Breathe with Birds, Václav Cílek talks about gathering strength from the landscape of home. He quotes a painter, Václav Rabas, who would say, “it is important to find one’s own square kilometre of landscape and try to understand it.” It’s not necessary to travel to see beautiful or thought provoking things. We could let go of the notion that “beauty and truth must be somewhere else.”
We have our three meters of influence; we have adjacent possibility, murmurations, emergences, and we have our dreams. These things are not nothing.
