September 19: Excerpts from “What do you do when there’s no nope?”
A talk with Toni Spencer and Bayo Akomolafe
Recent events have made it really difficult to meet the everyday with the spirit of positivity. With the easygoing, devil may care, things are going to be alright, kind of spirit that we are usually encouraged to nurture and cultivate. And so I speak today with a sense of scatteredness. I hope you will accept me that way. I hope you will welcome me into your midst that way. I speak with a sense of brokenness. I don’t need to give all the details except to say that hope seems to be spread very thin at this moment.
Thankfully, that is the subject of our conversation--when hope is spread thin--as it feels right now. And it seems holding on to hope is just a failing expedition, just a breaking enterprise. Like we are holding on tenuously and the system continuously encourages us to keep the hold alive, keep the faith alive. Is it Winston Churchill who said “never, never, never give up”? I think it was. To never ever give up. We will prevail, we will come out on the other side. And I wonder if that isn’t part of the problem, never giving up. I wonder if endless hope isn’t part of what the system wants us to do, and if that isn’t maybe something that needs to die.
Let me put it this way: the world is alive in stunningly beautiful ways. Creative, magical ways that our systems of learning, our educational paradigms do not know how to approach. When a star burns, it burns with hope, part of its field is hope. When it sputters and dies and spits its guts into space, that’s hopelessness. And yet that hopelessness is generative, it is the generativity that makes our bodies, that spits the matter that makes us alive, that makes us human. [...]
When you ask the question: What is hope? I don’t know that it is something stable. The kind of hope that a plant exercises as it bursts through the loamy soil is probably of a different texture than the one we are told to exercise when we leave home for work. And wake up from our bed like this [stiff], and drive like this, and be on the computer like this, and go to bed the same way. Hope seems to me this sterilization of posture. It's like a bodily orientation in the world. It’s also a gift, right? It's also how our parents, our institutions, the food we are eating, the gut bacteria that is processing the food, its like this web of life is gifting our bodies this learning, this intuition, this way of being in the world, that if you want to survive and thrive, let your body be straight, let your body be linear. Avoid the invitations on the banks or to your sides and focus on the straight and narrow and keep going forward, keep pressing forward towards progress.
And hope is beautiful, especially when it does the work we want it to do. The trick is noticing that that comes with costs. Hope is costly. And what are the costs of hope? The things that are left by the wayside. The generativity of failure, the other orientations. Toni, you work with body, you are embodied in your philosophies and you know the body is already entangled with what we say and think and yearn and want. And you know this even without having the word for it. Sometimes you just know what to do when you’re in a room with people. That invitation to move to the side, to dance, feels to me like a shifting of our centrality. And that’s the call, what I hear as the call of hopelessness. Maybe the way to go isn’t forward, maybe it’s awkward. Maybe there are ways of moving to the side that invite a shifting of our positions.