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Hope | Oct 16 2001

Andrew,

I’ve been thinking about your and William’s Gathering of Hope and have had many ideas, none of which will prove useful to you. We are far apart, you and I. Nonetheless, I will share my thinking.

Hope is an odd thing. Often it is a false sentiment, if not an out-and-out lie, and yet it’s difficult to imagine proceeding without it. (Nietzsche called hope both “the worst of all evils” and “a much greater stimulant of life than any realized joy could be,” which goes to show that you can’t count on philosophers to clarify anything.)

We once sought hope in religion, and are now left scrambling. This is what pissed off Nietzsche: the weakness of needing a reason, however stupid or infantile, to bear one burdens. Nietzsche was attacking Christianity, but the critique holds regardless.

When I considered your action, my first thought, characteristically, was of a reversal: a Gathering of Hopelessness. This sounds sarcastic, I know, so I worked to make it less sarcastic, to bring out the thing in there that wasn’t sarcastic. Today, inspired by Leili’s words, I believe I succeeded.

My idea, in short, is to change tenses. The vision here is of a kind of memorial service; a memorial service for humankind. As I see it, recent events, while horrific, are merely another turning of the wheel. What interests me is the wheel and where it is carrying us.

It is carrying us to our end. It doesn’t take a visionary to see this, nor to see that we long ago passed the point of no return.

Hope looks forward; I propose looking back, from a moment beyond our destruction.

Last week you asked what a protest of artists would look like. This is my answer.

As to how it would work, all I know is that the event would allow for each person to “remember” humankind, each in his or her own fashion. The only real danger would be insincerity; the only limitation would be of the imagination.

For what it’s worth, the event could be conducted anywhere, by any number of people. And the genius of it, if I do say so, is that it would shift perspective to the larger issue, the one that ultimately matters.

I don’t expect you and William to suddenly drop what you are doing, nor would I even want you to. A Gathering of Hope is good thing, a worthy thing, and I hope (there’s that word again) it goes well. I merely wanted to let you know my thoughts, to bridge that distance between us a bit.

Nietzsche again, to end: “Let your love towards life be love towards your highest hope: and let your highest hope be the highest idea of life!”

xo,
Michael

P.S. A recent quote from Stephen Hawking: “Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do. In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can’t regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us. I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space.”

P.S. The ending to Beckett’s trilogy: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”