From Nick Cave’s most recent Red Hand Files:
So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.
It immediately made me think of Bright Horses in which he offers two ways of looking at the same scene in successive verses:
The bright horses have broken free from the fields
They are horses of love, their manes full of fire
They are parting the cities, those bright burning horses
And everyone is hiding and no one makes a sound
And I'm by your side and I'm holding your hand
Bright horses of wonder springing from your burning hand
And everyone has a heart and it's calling for something
And we're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are
The horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire
The fields are just fields and there ain't no Lord
And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel
There's no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools
And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall
Is just a wish that time can't dissolve at all
Over the weekend I saw this David Hockney installation which promised an invitation “to experience the world through [his] eyes”. It didn’t entirely work for me for fairly pedantic reasons (was it a retrospective? an autobiography? an artistic statement? it tried to do all 3 and didn’t quite do any of them as a result) until a moment towards the end where the ageing Hockney talked about why he paints. I think this might be the interview which was sampled in the installation:
The world is very very beautiful if you LOOK at it. But most people don’t look very much do they?
It immediately reminded me of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to his friend, the historian William Miller, who was struggling with a new job he had started:
You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been plowed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we must now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.
The trouble with you and what used to be the trouble with me is that you don’t use your goddamned senses; too much society crap and too much mentality and not enough tactile and color and sound stuff going on. So now if you’re like I was a year ago, you’ve got to coax the sight and sound back, carefully tease it to life again and it will fill you up.
This leaves me with a conundrum. When I watch the robin outside my window feeding, notice the pigeon footprints in the snow or the complex fractals of the trees I feel hopeful. A reductive explanation for this would be that these activities lead my Parasympathetic Nervous System to kick in which lowers the level of stress. But I think it’s obviously deeper than that. To notice being is to encounter its worth which lends itself to hopefulness because that which has worth should be preserved:
“I have been defending a completely general thesis about being: that being as being is good (Augustine), or as the medievals put it, that the terms ‘being’ and ‘good’ are convertible … of course the Augustinian position that I am defending includes the idea that human beings have intrinsic worth, and indeed more intrinsic worth than other natural entities. I am proposing the worth of being as the ‘intransitive dimension’ of the whole of ethics, which every moral code approximates to more or less well, and under the constraints of its time-and-place-bound ideological determinants.” (Collier 1999: 90)
But if I look beyond the immediate, if I look to the horizon, I despair. The real possibility that the first year of the Trump presidency might see a bird flu pandemic and terror attacks seems almost calculated to generate the most possible chaos and destruction out of this event which would have seemed absurd ten years ago. The idea that Donald Trump would be starting his second Presidential term, having won a sweeping victory? How can the hope found in the worth of the everyday be a foundation for hopefulness, in the sense of ‘optimism with a broken heart’ as Cave once called it, in the face of global unravelling? The risk is that without this link, unless we find some way to connect the satisfactions of the drives to a desirable vision of a future, the immediacy of present experience licenses a turn away from the broader horizon of things? A retreat from despair into immediate comfort, even if those who have it now (such as myself) can not realistically assume that it will last, whatever strategic conduct seemingly present itself as a means to preserve it.
Mark Carrigan 