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Fuckedness | Oct 20 2001

I’m still thinking about hope. Obsessively. My latest definition: Hope is desire accompanied by perceived possibility. This is different than faith, which is desire accompanied by ordained possibility. Does that sound right? To me that sounds right.

I’ve long considered hope the one necessity. We must believe our desires possible, however tenuous that belief, however miniscle that possibility, in order to drag our asses out of bed.

A friend wrote, partly in respond to Thursday’s request for accounts of notes left for desirable persons, that there should be a sign at the entrance to the nerve.com personals (where he has loitered of late, sending notes to desirable persons) counseling all to abandon hope, not because there is no hope but because hope is of no use there.

But he’s mistaken, I think. Hope is what allows him to imagine, as he must, that online desirability is a reflection of offline desirability, and that the various objects of his desire will grant him an audience. Otherwise, why write?

Another friend, Chris, disagreed in advance with everything I’ve said so far, writing: “Faith is superior to hope as a psychic state. It doesn’t have the stink of desperation. I think if people could actually give up hope, they might find a place in their hearts to cultivate faith. Nietzsche would agree. And Dante, obviously. But I also understand the suspicion that underneath hope is nothing but, in Mickle’s words, ‘grief, and a vacuum.’”

On cue, Mickle writes: “It seems to me that an unironic gathering of Hope is already something of a gathering of Hopelessness. To me, what’s the worry? Why do we need to affirm our Hope unless things have really gotten razor close to Hopelessness, which would be more a cause for despair. Me, I think things are just as they always were: violent within a context of infinity and the calm of the void. Hope needs no gathering. It’s permeated the cosmo-structure, to ‘gather’ it is to gather air.”

Frankly, my head hurts. I understand what Mickle is saying, I understand that view, but lately I’ve been taking another view, the “species” view, if you will, and by that view we’re fucked. Actually, Mickle would agree, I imagine, he would agree that we’re fucked; he’d just say that being fucked is not quite what it appears to be. Or whatever he’d say. And this is when my head starts to hurt. Because while I feel convinced that we’re fucked, and fucked in a way that none of us can actually grasp (which is part and parcel of why we’re fucked), I’ve come to feel in recent days that what matters is not our fuckedness (about which nothing can be done) but the possibility, the scrawny possibility, of, well, love and caring and kindness. (It’s been an intense time, in my head.) Which shifts the view to what I think of as little things. Not little in the sense of unimportant, but little in the sense of being about people’s everyday lives at one particular time. This time.

Said another way, I’ve been feeling that the ultimate hopelessness of action (by which I mean political action) is a poor excuse not to act. Maybe you already realized this. Probably you did. Or probably you don’t think it’s hopeless because you don’t know, or care about, how fucked we are. Bully for you, if that’s true; I won’t try to convince you otherwise.

Or maybe I will. Maybe that’s what my political action will consist of: A memorial to Oblivion.

Chris again: “Your Humanity Memorial nestles nicely in my recent conviction that the present American condition is a sort of ‘Groundhogs Day’ phenomenon, where we proceed, privately but collectively, through the first part of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, and get stuck at the critical moment, On Another’s Sorrow, rushing back to the beginning to have our innocence re-gained and re-lost all over again. Maybe Hope is just a symptom of this, and a Memorial is the better way to Call the Lapsed Soul & Turn Away No More.”