And I love my boy
and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
any such thing as grieving
-
Sineád O’Connor
From Black Boys on Mopeds

Hope and its Other

This is to be a philosophy of hope. It is to sit down and write something that wants to be read. It is the commitment of that action. The striking forward into the world and the leaving of a mark. To punch, propel, slam forward. To commit.

Yes, but to be relaxed. For hope without relaxation is but violence. Hope without relaxation forgets its orientation, its heterofascination, its relaxed dedication in an outward spreading embrace of the Other. All of which is to say that it moves forward gracefully, with a music that reverses the Pied Piper, and smiles all the while.

This is the movement of desire and its power is seduction, but with a suction that is so smooth and soft as to make the Other feel itself fully in renewal. In its embrace, the Other does not become appropriated, but rather exonerated, justified in its existence. The Other of hope, however, is hopelessness. The relaxed nature of hope exonerates and justifies the hopeless nature of its Other, but offers it no pity — pity does not ever enter into hope, for all hope can offer its Other is itself.

The orientation of hope is toward the impossible. It moves toward the impossible without ever believing that it can get there. Hope does not accompany the movement of faith for this reason. Faith moves toward the impossible with conviction; hope moves toward the impossible with benediction. Its approval comes from its engagement with those who have no hope.

The giving of hope to its Other is not based on an economy that would find itself dealing with a finite resource. When one gives hope, one does not lose hope. Rather than the economy of finite resources, it is the economy of the ever-growing infinite. The ever-growing is not at the expense of its Other, however. It does not grow like an uncontrollable cancer, destroying everything in its path. Rather, it grows like a party when the hosts are enjoying themselves and their neighbors keep showing up; but unlike a house party grown out of control in spite its neighbors — the undeterminable limit contributing to the justified presence of its Other. The respect that hope has for the hopeless is detected in hope’s acknowledgement of the impossibility of this determination. It is this positive acknowledgement in the face of the hopeless that at last introduces it to us as hope.

The Action of Hope

Action is conceived violently (while it is born in violence, it is possible for it to mature into consciously nonviolent action). Action is movement into the space possessed by an other, which is not to be confused with the other’s movement into one’s space given over by an other (the persuasive performance of seduction is an example of a nonviolent action). The first is a horizontal movement, while the latter is a transascendental one: it moves over and up.

You gave these words their space and they move across the page and up to you — but not into you: they do not penetrate beyond the space that you give them. At the same time, they do not go anywhere. The words on the page are always here for you to welcome into your space again. They offer themselves up only knowing that to do so is to take nothing from you.

The pleasure of the words on the page is the pleasure of being on bottom.

The economy of the words on the page is the same as the economy of hope. They overflow without ever becoming diminished. You can take all the meaning you want from them and they will still offer more.

Though the words on the page do not create themselves, their origin is not the source of their meaning; though they are created, they are forever separate from their creator and cannot depend upon the creator for justification. The words on the page can only depend upon their other to draw them ever out: the overflow is a suction. In hope, the present is pulled into the always separate future, rather than endowed by an always obligatory past.

The words on the page of a philosophy of hope are the evidence of hope’s movement. The process of reading provides both the detection and the conviction of hope’s only crime, survival in the face of all the laws of man and his God. Hope’s accomplishment of its immortality is not motivated, however, by the desire of egoist pretension, for hope desires not its own survival, but the survival of its other. As these words receive their meaning only when faced by a reader, hope receives its meaning only when faced by the hopeless.

The words of a philosophy of hope do no violence. They do not persuade like a snake. They do not formalize into a penetrating rational point. They present themselves to the hopeless reader on their face, offering themselves up to the reader’s judgment, knowing all the while how easy it is to close the book on them. Lying on the page, they hope for the reader’s judgment, but the judgment for which they hope is not simple verification. Such is the judgment desired by the egoist pretension, which only wants to allay the pain of its own doubts. The words of the egoist pretension go on merely to replicate the internal sound of its own voice, finding a false sense of infinity in the reflection. Hopeful words, genuine words, want to be judged on their own merit, not because of where they come from, the judgment at the end being determined by a judgment at the beginning, but because of what they say. The end should not reflect the beginning, but create it anew. The desire for immortality that lives in hope’s writer is not for the writer but for hope itself. Lying prostrate down on the page, the written words of a philosophy of hope desire only that the reader choose whether he or she too will hope.

The Time of Writing
as the World of the Child

Writing is the death of the now. The words on the page are the tombstones of the now; in this, they are but a monument to the memory of an event. The event is the interaction between the writer and the world. This is a completely internal encounter. The force of it explodes into the world, but its source, its origin, is from within the writer. Nothing taps the keys but the typer. Nothing moves the pencil but the scribbler. Nothing writes the words but the writer. The primordial interaction of the world and the writer takes place within the writer. It is writing’s big bang. There is no time before the big bang; there is no writing before the big bang.

The words on the page represent a record of the time of writing, but they do so falsely, as tombstones falsely represent the absent life-force of the bodies below them. The words on the page have been manipulated. Perhaps not all of them, but definitely some of them. Many of the words that went into a writing will never fully reveal themselves to a reader. These may be the words that were once chosen and then erased, their sacrifice going to the greater effect of the whole, for once the writer engaged these sacrificial words, the writer chose a word that was better. These words — these poor, poor pitiful words — have already survived one life of judgment before even approaching the eyes of a reader. They go into the world of the reader already mature, prepared for their judgment.

Rather than seeking the judgment of the father, the words selected to survive the time of writing are sent seeking the judgment of the child. A philosophy of hope is not concerned with its own time. It sacrifices its time to its other. The simplest expression of this sacrifice can be found in the difference between the time it takes to write and the time it takes to read, but such an expression devalues the sacrifice by ascribing any value at all. A philosophy of hope takes no sacrifice, but is offered up and handed over in its abundance, offered up and handed over to the reader, whose time comes after the time of writing.

Abundance

Living is not mere existence. Living only happens in the abundance of the existent. It is necessarily transascendent to the existent, but it must be remembered that the movement of transascendence is always over and up in relation to the plane of existence. In one sense only, it moves in time with the existent, but it is necessarily above it, and in every other sense, it creates its own time, its own existence above and beyond the mere existent. It is this sensed difference in time between the writing of these (non)words that you (don’t) see on the page and the sound of these words that you hear in your mind, the first of which occurred in a completely different time from the latter, not just in the difference between one second and another, however far apart those seconds may be, but the difference in the abundance of seconds that went into the creation of your second in the future.

This is not similar to the process of subtraction, from which the many become one, but rather, the process of addition, from which the one joins the many. The movement of abundance is the movement that creates a family, but it is also the movement that creates the cities and the towns. It is the movement that creates all of society. In abundance, living begets the living.

Hope is the recognition of abundance.

The writer of a philosophy of hope must recognize abundance for what it is: an infinite resource that is always given away and an infinite resource only because it will always be asked for. It is the positive giving itself over to the negative, knowing that the negative will never become satisfied, and that what is hoped for will never become real. But the abundance of hope makes this okay, as the production of another life does not kill the living, as the words on the page never kill the writer.

A philosophy of hope introduces itself to the hopeless reader, and not to the hopeful writer, who is already intimately familiar with it, the way a mother is intimately familiar with her baby’s bum. This self-introduction of hope to the hopeless is not the movement of the death of hope, but rather, its first formal engagement with its other. The writer might help it as much as possible by preparing it for the event, the way a teenage girl’s parents may spring for a coming-out dress (though nowadays they call it a prom dress), but a philosophy of hope must, in its first mature moment, stand naked and alone, and, in the abundance that comes from the movement of its reading, offer the words up and hand the words over to its other.

Hope and Progress

The real time of writing and the real time of reading are entirely different. This is not the mundane observation it makes itself out to be, for when the time of writing is posited as the hoping present and the time of reading as the hoped for future, it becomes clear that the two activities are not sharing the same experience of time. Writing shapes the time of the reader. This, in itself, is important because it characterizes the difference between what is abundantly real in the time of the hopeful — abundant enough that it can be used without concern, the economics of an infinite resource — and what is scarce in the time of the hopeless. The writing takes its own time and uses it to add to the time of its other. It is the joining of time.

Hope always operates on the same plane as progress. The diagonal linearity that defines progress formalizes the over and upward movement of hope’s transascendence — progress without its other simplifies the movement in its perfect linearity. To see the line of progress is to experience time from hope’s vantage point. Hope’s respectful recognition of its own other, however, must mean that, in that recognition, it must turn its back, if only for a moment, on progress.

This manifests in the linearity of the words on the page. The face of hope in its engagement with its other obscures the linear progression of real time from the hopeless, but knowing this, hope tries to express itself as if the linear progression of real time had previously been acknowledged. Though blocking the reader’s view of the real time of writing — the real time that passed in the typing, deleting, revising, and proofreading of the (even sometimes, non)words on the page —, the writer acts as if the reader existed in real time. The words on the page must demonstrate progress in its absence; they must perform progress and express it as if it were truly present.

Hope will never deny the absence of progress, but it will never acknowledge progress’ absence either; it acts as if progress is present, despite the fact that progress is undeniably absent. Only in the very act of denying the presence of progress can hope continue its engagement with the hopeless. Hope’s denial of progress is a leap of faith into the world of the hopeless.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
and who shall wear, the robe and crown,
good Lord, show me the way
–
Gillian Welch, Allison Kraus,
& Emmylou Harris

World of the hopeless

To be without hope is to deny the existence of progress. It is to be incapable of seeing it for oneself. It is to be shut out on all sides from its potentiality. It is not necessarily the inability to believe in progress, but it is the inability to recognize it.

From the vantage point of the hopeless, time just drags on and on, like a leper dragging itself from village to village, leaving nothing but death and the dying in its wake. From every corner of the hopeless room, mortality drips from fleshy cobwebs. The sun brings harsh light, disturbing the banality until another dark night returns again. For the hopeless, nothing’s going to change their world.

The hopeless swallows hope and poops it out. It becomes nothing but the nutrient by which the hopeless continues its existence. There is no effect but persistence, no cause but instinct.

The action of the hopeless is to allow domination. Whether the domination propels out or thunders in, whether the hopeless dominates its other or allows its other to dominate it, the action of the hopeless is to allow domination to come to presence. The potential for complete domination is infinite in the world of the hopeless.

The reader allows the words to dominate the mind. It allows the words to enter without judgment, and without a fee. The reader has a passive and open mind. Before the reader is the reader, however, the reader of a philosophy of hope is the hopeless. As the action of the hopeless is to allow domination, the action of picking up the words of a philosophy of hope is the crying out for hope to come. The hopeless is propelled out of itself, dominated by its own hopelessness, and entering into the world, it only comes up short when it is acknowledged by its other. When it comes face to face with the hopeful.

Sing and dance,
la la la, hey, la la la
I’ll play for you tonight,
the thrill of it all,
dark clouds may hang on me sometimes,
but I’ll work it out.
Turn, turn,
we almost become dizzy.
–
Dave Matthews

Becoming Hopeful

The hopeless reader of a philosophy of hope arrives with nothing. It offers hope nothing in return for its own engagement. There is nothing the hopeless can do for the hopeful, nothing but to be. The hopeful comes in such abundance that the hopeless needs to bring nothing. If the hopeless can take enough action to come face to face with the hopeful, the hopeful is ready to provide all the hope that the hopeless may desire.

The orientation of a philosophy of hope is toward the impossible. Coming face to face with the hopeless, a philosophy of hopes doesn’t believe that there will ever be enough hope to satisfy what the hopeless may desire. Looking into the face of the hopeless, hope finds an infinite depth, but having already had acquaintance with progress, hope looks into the infinite depth with an eye toward possibility.

The writer of a philosophy of hope stares at the blank page and imagines the possibility of shaping a world of hope. A philosophy of hope begins with nothing and expects nothing more to be needed, nothing that a philosophy of hope cannot provide on its own. Taking from its abundant self, it offers its labor over to the hopeless. If the hopeless allows itself to be dominated, if only for a moment, a philosophy of hope will propel, punch, slam forward with all its forces offered up in abundance, and join itself to those who find themselves without hope.

Yes, but in a relaxed style. For hope without relaxation is but violence. Hope without relaxation forgets its orientation, its heterofascination, its relaxed dedication in an outward spreading embrace of the Other. All of which is to say that it moves forward gracefully, with a music that reverses the Pied Piper, and smiles all the while.