Hope for Nothing in Particular

Hope takes a proposition. You hope that something, and the complement has to be a declarative sentence, and before it can be a declarative sentence the outcome has to be cut out of the vague and given edges. Hope cannot begin until the boundary is drawn. It arrives after the sharpening, dependent on it, the affect of a world already resolved. Wonder is the other kind. You wonder whether, you wonder why, you wonder at. The complement is a question, or there is no complement.

Because hope needs an outcome specified it also needs a holder. It is a claim on the future held by someone who must remain intact long enough to hold the claim. That is its structure, and the structure is credit rather than warmth. The beneficiary may be anyone, or no one yet born; the holder is the one who cannot go missing. Dissolving would forfeit it. This is why hope disqualifies you at the door: reception asks for the overflowing of the self, and the self that hopes has already refused, for the soundest of reasons, since it is holding something.

And it is consumed. When its object arrives, fulfilment ends a hope and disappointment ends a hope. Either way, it is spent. The salt is unchanged by every encounter with it. No hope survives its own object arriving.

It also needs its twin. Aquinas made hope a virtue and despair a sin, and the pairing gives the game away. They are one affect on one axis, and hope rescues you from despair the way the raised end of a see-saw rescues you from the lowered end. Hope does not save you from the pit. It digs the pit and hands you a rope.

The gate of Dante’s hell says to abandon hope, and the architecture behind the gate says something else. Farinata explains that the damned see the far future clearly and are blind to what is happening now, and that when time ends and there is no more future their knowledge will die. That is hope administered as a punishment. A self preserved intact, aimed entirely at what has not come, denied the present. Hell is not the absence of hope. It is hope with the present surgically removed.

I wrote in the margin of a book on real analysis, at twenty-six, that for in truth there is no hope, only wonder.

And still I have hope.

Not for anything. Nothing completes the sentence. There is no that, no outcome with edges, no future in which the claim matures, nobody standing by to collect. What is left when all of that is stripped out is not an attitude toward events. It is a love of something obscene. Eating. Sleeping. Shitting. A woman across the room doing exactly the same things. The joke is bad and the badness is the whole of it, because salvation contains no jokes and this does. The finer the idea, the more naked and indecent we are.

I do not need life to continue. I do not need death either. Both cravings put down, becoming and un-becoming, and the natural inference from here is that what remains is cold, an emptiness with the lights off, indifference dressed as attainment. That inference is wrong. What remains is warm, and what it is warm toward is the eating and the shitting. This is the true ordinary. It is not reached by rising. It is what is there when the ledger is closed.

The word carries a frame with it, and the frame is why the word is nearly unusable. Christianity’s move was to make hope a duty and give it an object, and once hope was obligatory despair became a sin, and once despair was a sin the axis was installed in everyone and could be operated from outside. Hope defers. Endure now, be paid later. Anything that defers can be administered, and the administration of deferral is most of what power has ever done. Hope is spent by arrival, which is why an object that never arrives keeps it alive indefinitely, and why deferral is not a failure of the promise but its maintenance. The Christ I can still hear speaks urgently in the present tense. Consider the lilies. Sufficient unto the day. Today you will be with me. That voice does not ask anyone to wait. The waiting is institutional. An apparatus took someone who ate with the wrong people and converted him into a promissory note, which is precisely hope’s operation performed at scale: turning what is here into what is owed. Christ was good. Christianity is his opposite. The whole mess is deadly.

So the hope I am keeping is not the one at the gate. Dante’s damned kept the future and lost the present. I have made the opposite trade, and it is not a sacrifice, and there is nothing noble in it. I gave up what was never mine to hold and was given back the ordinary, which was always here, and which is obscene, and which is funny, and which does not need me to persist in order to go on being what it is.