My dear friend Arlene Goldbard and I have been recording a monthly podcast for over three years now, though I have had to take two longish breaks, most recently over this winter. Fortunately, my role is secondary: Arlene manages things perfectly, writing up each episodes from New Mexico, while Owen Kelly turns recordings into distributable artefacts in Helsinki. It’s an efficient cottage industry, done without significant cost or support, its products freely available to any who might want them. I don’t know if it’s exactly post-capitalist but it works.
Arlene has held things together while I’ve not been working and I’m very grateful for her commitment. A couple of weeks ago, we recorded our first conversation together, and it’s published by http://www.miaaw.net today. I’ve not listened to it yet—I tend not to, but I feel I should hear this one, because I’m a bit apprehensive about my contribution. The subject is not the cheeriest either: we’ve both been preoccupied by the darkening clouds in and beyond the small part of the art world we inhabit. Independent community cultural action is becoming ever harder to do, while lies and hatred poison the wells of trust and social life. Violence grows daily and those in charge seem to have no idea what to do.
Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about hope. In the myth of Pandora—a characteristically misogynistic tale of the origins of human misery—hope is all that is left in the jar once the world’s evils have been released by her curiosity. The Christian interpretation (which I was taught in my monastic school) was that hope was humanity’s saving grace. Since then, I have learned that other traditions see hope as the greatest evil in the jar. There’s a good discussion about Hope in the excellent BBC Radio series, In Our Time.
Still unsure, I hold on to the idea that hope is a virtue, which works in both pre-Christian and Christian ethics. To be hopeful is to accept, as Rebecca Solnit says, that we do not know what will happen and that how we act has the capacity to influence the future. It’s akin to the idea of prefiguration, mentioned by Arlene in our conversation, when she writes ‘we find small or large ways to inhabit the world we desire even as it is being born.’ Aristotle too thought that hope could be be a source of courage:
Thus, even though not every hopeful person is courageous, every courageous person is hopeful. Hopefulness creates confidence, which, if derived from the right sources, can lead to the virtue of courage.
Claudia Bloeser and Titus Stahl, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
We don’t try to solve these problems in our conversation, but I hope you find something of interest or comfort there. You can hear the podcast on www.miaaw.net or the usual outlets, and you can read Arlene’s characteristically thoughtful account of it on her blog.
The engraving above is by John Flaxman (1755–1826) and is one of the less offensive representations of Pandora that male artists have given us over the centuries. Which is not saying much.
François Matarasso 