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November 18, 2010
Writer Rebecca Solnit gives a lecture about darkness, or less metaphorically the unknown, using Virginia Woolf as a touchstone for the discussion. In it she proposes a reexamination of hope. Most people I presume regard hope as having something to look forward to. But Ms. Solnit suggests that the opposite is true, that authentic hope comes when we embrace the unknown future and accept that it is unknowable and that it will in the end reveal itself regardless. This may seem absurd or insignificant, but the more I sit with it I see far reaching implications. There is nothing new about “inhabiting the void”, mystics have been talking this way forever, but to call it hope? Watching a favorite team the Skins play football, I see they are down 45 to 6 in the first half. I don’t know about you, but my hope goes out the window. I pop another beer and watch another episode of24. Now, slow it down a bit. Say the Red Sox are down three games to none in the best out of seven series against the Yankees. Do I watch the next game? Of course, even if it goes to the bottom of the 9th inning and Rivera is on the mound. Hope sticks to the end, even though in this case the odds are not any better for the Sox than for the Skins. Slow it down another notch and we come to “there’s always next year”. Now let’s look at a different kind of hope, one that is so illogical it should make us laugh at ourselves. Reading a novel, any novel, we turn the pages full of hope the hero somehow transcends his enemy’s shenanigans. We watch Jack Bauer as if he could die, as if the nuclear bomb could go off in L.A. We hope our child is born healthy, she grows up to be happy in life. We hope we get a pay raise. We hope the professor gets sick so the exam is delayed. Some people patriotically hope a president makes huge mistakes so he can be knocked off his pedestal, which is truly paradoxical, given that such a sentiment is synonymous with hoping the country flounders or even suffers. What does a person on death-row hope for, or Prince William’s bride to be? Sometimes it is hard to tell if we are hoping or praying. How is it that oftentimes, if not all the time, when we get what we hope for there is a sort of letdown in the heart, almost an embarrassment? I remember a writer describing how strong was his hope to get published, and that as soon as this happened he felt a sort of emptiness and immediately began hoping for a book deal. This continued from book deal to getting reviewed by the New York Times, from that to winning an award, from that to winning a Pulitzer Prize. He said jokingly, though honestly in a sly sort of way that he was presently hoping to win the Nobel. When we claim that hope is a good thing, that it is a key to happiness, what exactly do we mean? What did we think when we voted for Obama and his slogans of hope, that the country would undergo some sort of fairy tale Renaissance? What did he mean by it? Nobody asked. Not exactly. As we get older hope changes. We approach the ninth inning and begin to evaluate the game. For many people their hope transfers to the hereafter, they are still able to look forward. For others there is only regret or at best a quiet reconciliation with life. What this perusing suggests to me is that hope, in the end, reveals itself to be a kind of delusion. This is not news. The entire existentialist movement was onto it. The problem was it was so occupied with debunking hope it neglected to come up with an alternative other than its opposite, hopelessness. That is where Rebecca’s (and Virginia's) musings on darkness pick up the pieces and head us toward a cosmology that frankly makes more sense than either hope or hopelessness. I found something akin to it the year I delved so far inside Edgar Allan Poe’s mind a kind of alchemic regeneration out of dark, dark matter opened a new insight into this subject. From nightmares to the big bang theory Poe unflinchingly worked to create meaning out of a world where hope is illusory. He never lost his thirst for life, or his passion and excitement about the unknown. In other words it was the unknown that contained meaning for him, and it was inside this meaning that he found reason to live and in a strange sort of way, (I’m going to get clobbered by Poe scholars for saying this) happiness. Which brings me to Afghanistan. I think it is safe to say the people here have a particularly devastating relationship with hope. Arguably, it is cruel to come here and once again offer it to them. Bombing the hell out of the country in 2001 did not silence their newfound hope (after it had been deafened by terror and violence for twenty years). America was coming. Now it is difficult to talk to any Afghan citizen in the street about hope. You will get a quizzical look, a shrug of the shoulders. “We will see what happens,” she or he will say not from a place of distrust or even doubt, but as a matter of fact; eventually we will seewhat happens. In other words, hope as a force has little to no bearing on life here. It is beside the point. To be sure this is not the same as despair. Remember, the absence of hope by definition means the absence of hopelessness. Nor is it a form of denial; only the crudest most pompous turd would accuse an Afghan of that. With this reality in mind how exactly do we go about winning the hearts and minds of the people? Actions. Not merely the textbook action, such as printing a million schoolbooks or building twenty schools, but how these things are done, and what happens after they are done. There are volunteers around the world discussing whether or not it is damaging to volunteer, damaging to the host and damaging to the individual trying to give service. This is a valid debate to have. In early September of 2009, to see Frishta shuddering and weeping in my arms, to feel the level of pain in my heart for leaving her and for all practical purposes, forever, I’d agree. Damaging. Why bring such love and hope and then take it away? When I go back and read my journal from that time I can pinpoint the moment I came to realize the last shred of the concept of hope and hopelessness being eradicated from my spirit. On the roof, sipping whiskey with Kaka Ryan, watching the moon come up on my last night in Kabul. There was absolutely no way for me to devise any semblance of a game plan to even hope for. In one respect my hands were tied to forces out of my control, and in another sense I had total freedom. I did not know what I would or even could do, not that month, not that fall, and certainly not into the future beyond that. The children asked, Jamshid asked, why are you leaving? "I... don't... know," was my answer. And yet… everything seemed perfectly aligned and, that word again, happiness crept into me, a happiness I didn’t even recognize as happiness because of its divorce from hope and despair. Best not even to call it happiness. The people of Afghanistan have something to teach us westerners. It is the age-old story wherein the hero is enlightened (ie: saved) by the very one he is trying to rescue. He isn’t aware of it, may never be. That will determine if this ends in tragedy or not. I believe the lesson we are being taught has to do with hope, and I believe this lesson, like a planted idea in our dream as illustrated in the movieInception, has far reaching implications. Thirteen girls in my leadership workshop dared to hope they would be chosen to go to America with me this winter. Three were chosen, and ten had to varying degrees depending on expectations negotiate their loss of hope. We had to manage this process carefully. These students at times can seem fragile, emotionally wounded from deeply impoverished memories. There were two or three who were not chosen who had a viable argument for their candidacy, in particular Hala who got 96% on her final exam, a hundred questions that the next best in the class got an 80% on. We assuaged disappointments with promises of more opportunities coming next year, but we still feared the worst. Then, only one day after the announcement went out we held a graduation celebration at the resource center. Not a single somber face, not a hint of self-pity or resentment. All were happy for Manizha, Pashtana and Sahar. The level of acceptance without despair was astounding to me. Try imagining you are a sixteen year old girl in Afghanistan, that you have been raised in an orphanage. Try imagining suddenly getting the opportunity to go to America for three months with your teacher and two of your sisters. Imagine that deep down you expect this is/was the only time in your entire life such a chance will come, and that the chance has been lost. You might expect some level of despair. Yet in these girls is something akin to that strange form of happiness I am talking about, the one absent of hope. The same could be said about the winners, as they too exhibited a poise I have rarely witnessed. When Jamshid asked Pashtana in English if she would give her position on the America trip to Hala or Lida or another one of her friends given one of them so dearly deserves and wants to go, Pashtana unflinchingly answered, “Yes, she goes.” Meaning, of course, her friend. Don’t think for a millisecond Pashtana cares not if she goes to America. She and her co-awardees are so excited they cannot wipe the smiles from their faces, and when they look at me there is a kind of openness, a seeing through to a far horizon, through me. I am not even there. It is so infectious we just start laughing. And yet Pashtana, and I venture to say Manizha and Sahar would give it all away. It has nothing to do with hope, everything to do with what happens, an embracement of the unknown or even the darkness we fear. This week we celebrated Eid al-Adha. It is a good time to be a shepherd. This is the day when Moslem people remember the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of devotion to God, and God’s ensuing intervention wherein He told Abraham that a ram would suffice. Thousands of goats and sheep are slaughtered on this day, following morning prayer. We purchased two billy goats for the occasion, and dispatched them in the courtyard of Mehan orphanage. Manizha was an active participant, and Farida, and Hala. They helped in the slitting, the pumping up of the cavity, the skinning and butchering. I’d experienced the slaughtering of a large animal before, pigs, deer. But this affair still affected my domesticated sense of propriety. Within two hours two living goats were transformed into kababs on the grill, and I evolved from being a curious onlooker to salivating over a choicely cooked section of heart. These are things that happen in Afghanistan. You cannot see them coming. You cannot hope against or for them, or they will or will not come. Each day, something does happen. Of this much I am certain. I still do not know if I will be around for a while, if I will be living here or there, if I will fall in love or not, if I will ever write another song. If I were told I must leave Afghanistan today, I would leave, and something else would happen, but unless that happens I celebrate the “hope” I have conceived from embracing the darkness. Becoming teacher to these orphans is about as blessed a life as I can imagine. In such a state it is not so difficult for me to understand how happy Pashtana is, and how equally she would sacrifice her future so her friend Hala might have one.
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