a beautiful monster

HOPE. The expectation of a desire coming to bear on reality. Everyone hopes for something, the OBJECT of our hope. It’s that desire, burning deep inside us, a desire for something (like true love), a desire so burning and scalding and deep that it becomes part of us, and removing that hope puts us through the gauntlet and empties out to a wooden bastion where we’re hung and quartered. There’s that which we hope FOR, and there’s that which we hope IN, the person or thing that we expect to bring this hope to fruition (be it fate, destiny, God, ourselves, other people, etc.). There are little hopes—“I hope the weather’s decent so I can get up without wanting to smash my head into a mirror”—and there are Big Hopes, such as, “I want to fall in love and get married and have a family.” Little hope disappoint and we shrug our shoulders and move forward with no skin off our back; Big Hopes disappoint, and we can be scarred for life.

Hope’s a beautiful monster. It promises us our desires and fuels our endurance amidst life’s checkered hellholes, but its monstrosity becomes apparent when the hope returns empty, and we’re left to pick up the pieces all by our lonesome selves. “Be careful where you place your hope.” The cost of an ill-placed hope can be pricier than we ever thoughts. Over the years I’ve wrestled with the concept of hope, especially in a world so cruel and unfeeling, in a world that doesn’t give two shits about what we want. I’ve likened hope to barbed wire: the tighter you hold on, the more it hurts (as a nautical variation on this, I’ve equated Hope to the lionfish: every time you get a hold of it, it just stings you). Hope, I’ve said, is a drug, an opiate, an escapist technique. “Life’s something awful, so we’ll get through it just telling ourselves everything will work out.” Perceiving the world to be one way, we fabricate in our minds the opposite of it, and we hope for it (never-minding, of course, that it’s just an illusion; such details become peripheral if they’re considered at all). And so, again and again, I condemn hope as a lie, a rogue, a marauder, and I decry its authority and advocate its beheading.

And behold the hypocrisy, the inconsistency: I’m a creature of Hope.

Hope saturates my life, keeps me going, keeps me from giving up.

With my mouth I confess hope to be dead.

But in my heart it’s flourishing and vibrant.

To quote the Harvard Sailing Team, “I love myself and I hate myself.”

I’m seeing, again for the first time, that the Simple Answer isn’t so simple.

“Kill hope, bury it, leave it there.” That’s fine and dandy, except:

(A) A life without hope is no life at all. Yes, the world’s awful, but it has its bright spots, too. Realism isn’t focusing wholly on the bad, but focusing on the whole: the Good and the Bad. Calling life a hellhole with no moments of glory is emphasizing only one end of the spectrum; we may as well be honest and acknowledge that life is constant suffering interspersed with brief and fleeting moments of happiness. While that outlook’s depressive in its own state, the fact that there are moments of happiness shows that a total genocide of hope is a foolish endeavor. At the least, hope itself should be reworked, reframed, rearticulated, but not wholly abandoned.

(B) A life without hope will turn us into monsters. If hope has a function, perhaps this is it: it keeps our hearts above the murk and moiré of our world, and we’re able to “hold ourselves together” as the world’s shit-storm rages all around us. Those who abandon hope become cold and calloused creatures void of any vibrance and vitality, mere shells of their former selves. Looking at the world in all its darkness and cruelty can make our own inner light go dark, and focusing solely on the bad that doesn’t just happen but thrives can easily lead us into a cistern of despair from which there’s no escape (except, of course, for a well-placed round in the temple or a blade drawn up the wrist). If you’re going to abandon hope, you’d better be willing to become a monster.

(C) We declare hope to be escapism, but what’s left when Hope’s removed? Just a greater escapism. Held down by the weight of the world, we flail and thrash against the meaninglessness in all sorts of ways, not least our postmodern triumvirate of sex, drugs, and alcohol (shadowed by a host of other less noticeable addictions). The right path through this minefield will lead to the other side, not just leave us wandering like blind fools waiting to get our legs blown off.

The answer isn’t to just toss out hope altogether. The answer lies in being honest with the world and reshaping our hope around that. Specifically, in light of my quest for True Love, how ought hope be shaped? Reality is mean, but it has its kinder moments. How does hope acknowledge this without lose its soul altogether while simultaneously being restrained? At this point there are no solid answers; I feel like I’m in a black room filled with smoke, groping for a door or window; but this is a house of mirrors, and how long I’ll be stuck here, I just don’t know.

We can’t leave Hope as is, and we can’t abandon Hope altogether. It’s that tension between Cognitive Dissonance and Resignation: we can be like the ostrich, thrusting our heads in the sand so that we don’t have to face reality with all its trimmings, or we can be like the turtle, curling up in our shells and becoming lost in ourselves, shutting out the world and waiting for it all to end. But there’s a different route, the route of Rebuilding. When hope disappoints—as it often does—there’s a period of disillusionment, and we can move through that disillusionment into cognitive dissonance, resignation, or rebuilding. This is where we’re at: we can either naively cling to our foolish hopes, we can just give up and sit in the ash while cutting our boils with broken pottery, or we can Man Up, Nut Up, and hammer out a way forward. My perspective on hope—especially hoping for true love—must be in accordance with reality while refusing the miserable, albeit easier, routes of cognitive dissonance and resignation.