A psalm for a world in shambles

Many years ago, a beloved professor of mine taught me to observe how art not only reflects but predicts the times. When we are at the brink of conflicts and disasters, and face uncertainty, we as a collective turn to fictional monsters; it is much easier to deal with the controllable, couple-hours threat of Nosferatu than face the consequences of decades, centuries even, of humans making shitty decisions.

These are hard times to hope. Yet who are we if we don’t hope? We thrive by hoping for better outcomes, no matter what better means to each of us. This feeling we hold on to drives progress; it fuels wars, idealists and lovers alike. Hope, said Dickinson, is the thing with feathers.

There is comfort in knowing that, at the very least, we are all royally screwed together.

Life doesn’t pause for Icarus to fall

Picking at this hopeful thread, I tried to unravel a plan, a contingency of sorts for the foreseeable future. The first weeks of a year are a bubbling time, as if resetting the calendar resets and refuels our hope. It brings me back to the people of Winter in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, whose perspective on time makes me pause. They don’t feel like rushing or relentlessly seeking progress because every calendar year for them is Year One. There is no rush to get anywhere. The years are passing as they always do, one after another one, then another one comes.

For us, vampires are in again - perhaps because the allure of immortality will never lose its luster. Can you imagine, being able to accomplish and experience everything you ever hoped could fit into your lifespan, at the small cost of terrorizing other people? Again, it’s an allegory of hope - a shadow play and bedtime story that warns wonder comes at a cost. To be infinite and to, in a way, not rush, would cost you your soul, so why not stick to the soul and the time you have and hope you get to do enough? But no cheating!

Somewhere else on the globe, a young billionaire takes on a strict regimen to try and stop aging. Which sounds great, if only if left him any time in the day to, you know, live. Hope is a double-edged sword, cutting just as deeply into the one who hopes. If you hope to get too close to the sun, your wings melt. We are conditioned to not hope for much. Ambition is ofteen seen as such a bad word, except in professional contexts (and even then, not universally). At the same time it is bad to be hopeless, because that makes you a quitter, a traitor of the human endurance.

Contrary to all logic, while we battle to keep our heads over water, the world keeps spinning. Life keeps on going, how dare it.

At the risk of upping the count of uses of the word “hope” in this text, I understand that this double-edged blade is my greatest weapon. The future may hurt, but hope fuels my power to cut back. Hope is energy, vital will that you have freedom and choice to put into anything that matters to you.

Even if we end up screwed, we can, at the very least, dream.