Living without the Crutch of False Hope
There's no lesson here
There is no beauty in the death of hope. I don’t care what Camus says. I’ve been clawing at the hollow cave of meaning for weeks, looking for even the faintest crack. What once were fingernails are now raw stubs. When my head collapses into my hands, as has happened each day, blood smears my temples, my ears, my thinning hair, too; and my heart breaks yet again. I have rescued no solace, recovered no linings of silver. For even a sprinkle of comfort, I must resort to dharmic visions of the universe-as-cosmic-dream. Which is the crutchiest of crutches at times like these.
The narrative that we shall find light in the darkness, build a future of green cities, free healthcare and paid leave for all, birds singing round rooftops designed especially for them, harmony amongst tribes warring since Time was young, eco-communities sprouting all around as far as the eye can see, built on principles of post-capitalism—this vision too, must die.
The world is hardening into the binaries we’ve always lived by, despite how loudly we declared them dead and gone, and how desperately we’ve been pretending they were. Grief abandons itself in favor of fanciful rage; our collective consciousness merges with algorithms that profit on our destruction—this, my dearest, is no time for hope.
T.S. Eliot, one of the world’s great antisemites, said to my soul: be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Our hopes are misplaced, abstract, built on fictions manipulated by apps overtaken by ideologies, perpetrated by nation-states and the ever-renewable army of assholes worldwide. We are not ready for hope, for we know not what to hope for. We are not ready for hope because we are not ready for thought—because we do not know how to think. Worse still, we do not know how to feel. At the root of all, since the beginning, has been our collective inability to grieve the fate that awaits each and every one of us. If we did, could any of us behave as we do—for good and ill?
The angel on my shoulder entreats me to tell you there’s a white light vibrating above an abyss somewhere between life and death. She insists I claim to have seen it and remind you that others have too. She orders me to declare the universe perfect, each hair placed in its perfect coiffure. Once upon a time, a few weeks ago, she’d work my mouth like a puppet: it matters not how long it has been dark, if I can just bring a candle into this empty space, if my shaky hands can protect its flickering flame as I slip off my shoes and kneel and bow before entering Abraham’s temple, no matter how many centuries that space of prayer has been blanketed with darkness, our world will, at once, be illuminated. That’s what she once would have had me say, and I would have been delighted to sing her song.
Abandon all hope ye enter here? Quite frankly, yes. But hopelessness is not lifelessness. Maybe Camus was right, after all? Hope is a coping skill for enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous absurdism. We now must stare down the absurdity, ensure it knows our name as well as we know its. Please, please, please, permit yourself to not understand. Please, please, please do not dishonor your heart with hate. There’s no lesson here. I hope you believe that.
My strategy is to try to laugh at the world's absurdities through the words of Kurt Vonnegut "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
Giving myself permission to not understand. 🙏