“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed,” (Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace).

I love this quote by Havel. I like how it describes hope as a moral choice that is independent of the external situation. It reminds me a little of faith, but not quite the same. Havel’s description seems like more of a choice than faith does. One thing that this quote does, for me, is it preserves the right of the individual to choose what is right and what deserves to be worked for, regardless of the dimension of how likely it is to succeed.

I just finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s book, Hope in the Dark, in which she cites the above quote by Havel. The quote doesn’t appear until page 148, but it seems to inform a thread of Solnit’s argument from the very beginning. “To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk…Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope,” (Solnit, 4-5).

Another thread in Solnit’s book is of darkness, which is not necessarily the typical way that darkness is thought of. She writes that the “future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave,” (6). This darkness is more of the creative void than the destructive void. It is this embrace of generative uncertainty that also runs through the book. This reminds me of the dark matter of the universe, that unseen substance that physicists can measure that seems to make up all the empty space between things in the universe. I can’t remember for sure, but maybe it is something like 85% of matter in the universe is unseen matter, maybe it is even more than that. But, what is all this dark, unseen matter doing? I like to think that it is somehow invisibly guiding and shaping the tip of the iceberg of matter that we can see. We can bemoan the visible catastrophes, but all is not lost. Just like the iceberg metaphor, Solnit argues for a cognitive restructuring, do we focus on only what is going wrong in the world, or do we focus also on what is going right. Or, even do we focus on how things could have been an even bigger catastrophe than they are?

Solnit introduces the Angel of Alternate History. As compared to the Angel of History, who mostly counts bodies, the Angel of Alternate History focuses on that dark space that surrounds the actual and sees the possible. “The Angel of History says, ‘Terrible,’ but this angel says, ‘Could be worse.’ They are both right, but the latter angel gives us grounds to act,” (76).

Another way of looking at this cognitive re-structuring is that we have to count victories as well as catastrophes in our analysis of the world. Solnit provides criticism of the tendency toward pessimism and catastrophizing of many activists and the Left in the US. She describes such paradoxical victories as the role of Viagra in saving species that were previously used in for increasing sexual potency in Chinese Medicine and how some military bases have inadvertently become safe havens for endangered species.

Another critique Solnit discusses is that of the end of the need for activism, or the desire to “go home,” after the protest. In a way, this mindset looks at attention, awareness, and activism as only being necessary to re-set things or make it happily ever after, and then to turn off awareness and to let go of engagement. Rather, she sees activism as a mode of being, a moral responsibility, that is ongoing, and that one engages in regardless of the “state of the world,” or the “chance to succeed,” to refer back to Havel, again.  The need for engagement never ends.   “Still, I use the term activist to mean a particular kind of engagement – and a specific politic: one that seeks to democratize the world, to share power, to protect difference and complexity, human and otherwise,” (18). “For a long time, I’ve thought that the purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and writing this book I now see how this is connected to the politics of hope and to those revolutionary days that are the days of creation of the world,” (115).

Solnit also quotes the Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos throughout the book, who apparently publishes manifestos over the internet. For some reason, I found these to be a kind of eloquent comic relief, not because the content wasn’t serious, maybe even because of the seriousness of the content, but with their ease and fluidity of language and the sense of spontaneity, creativity, and even joy that seems to flow through these declarations. “A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity…In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise an International of Hope. Unity, beyond borders, languages, colors, cultures, sexes, strategies and thoughts, of all those who prefer a living humanity. The International of Hope. Not the bureaucracy of hope, not an image inverse to, and thus similar to, what is annihilating us. Not power with a new sign or new clothes. A flower, yes, that flower of hope,” (cited, 39-40).

Overall, it seems that Solnit’s argument for hope lies in looking at things differently, refusing to despair, seeking engagement in art, activism, and life, and accepting uncertainty (the darkness that obscures) rather than demanding a certain outcome. This again reminds me of this central Havel quote, which connects a human being to themselves and refuses to let external events dictate whether or not one can hope to make things better or even hope to have one’s own vision of life.

One last thing I’ll touch on here is a small way thing that I find hopeful. As someone who is concerned about the health of the environment, Solnit engages and relates to the natural world and refuses to disconnect from that. After reading Hope in the Dark, I started reading Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” which I don’t think I ever read before. A few thoughts have been coalescing for me. As I sat reading Emerson, drinking a cup of coffee at a cafe, gazing out the open window at the ocean which is right across the street from where we live, I thought, I should really get out into nature more – and it struck me that living on the ocean is perpetually being on the edge of nature, even though this is a pretty happening place, bustling, full of continuous human activity, it is in constant relationship to that great and restless body of water, constantly moving in and out. “The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation…The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity,” (Emerson, p. 41, in The American Transcendentalists). Emerson argues that “words are signs of natural facts, particular facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and nature is the symbol of spirit,” (42). At first, I was taken aback by this, it seems he is arguing that the natural world and the internal, cognitive and spiritual world are reflections of each other. Oh, ok, that old “as above, so below” congruence between things. Maybe even more. I have read in a couple of different sources now about the finding that there is a 10 hertz electromagnetic current that pulses throughout the Earth and that 10 hertz is also the “dominant (alpha) frequency of the EEG in animals,” (Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric, p. 249, in the chapter, “Breathing with the Earth,” which discusses this concept in depth). What this seems to mean is that living beings contain within them an echo or correspondence with a common electromagnetic current of the Earth. It seems like an instance of “as above, so below,” or maybe, rather, as without, so within.

James Oschman, in Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, also writes about this, the Schumann resonance, which “is a unique electromagnetic phenomenon created by the sum of the lightning activity around the world,” (99). The Schumann resonance is 7-10 Hertz in frequency, just like the alpha waves of animal brains. Also, Oschman cites a study of various healers who had their brain activity recorded on EEG and when they went into a “healing state” had activity in the 7.8-8.0 Hertz range (107). Additionally, Oschman cites studies that show that have measured healers whose hands generate electromagnetic fields ranging from 0.3 – 30 Hz, which could be seen to vary around the 10 Hz frequency of alpha brain rhythms and this particular background pulse of the Earth (Oschman, 87). Oschman suggests that a mechanism of various healing modalities is a supportive “therapeutic entrainment,” in which the healer amplifies this electromagnetic rhythm of the Earth and that this is healing by resetting the natural baseline rhythm in the person being worked on. It is easy to imagine that through the daily stresses of life (or even longer term maladaptive patterns of living) that one could lose touch with the natural rhythm of one’s own body, which also corresponds to the natural rhythm of the Earth. Getting back in touch with nature, in this light, could really, truly have a healing effect on one’s biorhythms.

Maybe all this might seem far-fetched to you, but it is what sprang to my mind as I was reading Emerson and his argument that nature is a symbol of the spirit. The transcendentalists refused to buy into the split between mind and body and the individual and the natural or social environment. Another way of stating this could be that nature and spirit both share a common origin, both are in relation and communication with each other, and both enhance each other. Nature and spirit are reflections of one another. Rather than a separation between mind and body, or individual and environment, there is a resonance between all the different things that we divide from each other and with our intellects imagine as separate. Lately, when I feel particularly out of synch in my life, I have been imaging this great, pulsing rhythm of the Earth and looking for the echo of it in my self. I find this comforting, even hope-inducing.