In the initial oil sketch of George Frederic Watts’ famous painting, Hope is painted in deep shades of blue, tinged at the edge with golden yellows and oranges, and sits, blindfolded, playing a harp and listening intently, while the earth below her appears to burn. Blue tinged with yellow is an appropriate choice. In Utopia as Method, Ruth Levitas dedicates an entire chapter to the utopian impulses of the colour blue, taking as her starting point the words of Dennis Potter’s character in Pennies from Heaven:
There’s things that is too big and too important and too bleeding simple to put into all that lah-di-dah, toffee-nosed poetry and stuff, books and that — but everybody feels them. It’s looking for the blue, innit, and the gold. The patch of blue sky, The gold of the bleeding dawn, or — the light in someone’s eyes — Pennies from Heaven, that’s what it is.
As Levitas observes, blue is frequently associated with both longing and possibility, both ‘feeling blue’ and the depths of possibility contained within it, “the longing that precedes transcendence.” As in Watts’ painting, Blue is often accompanied by tinges of yellow and gold, representing variously flashes of inspiration, joy, intellect or madness.
Levitas identifies the role of blue in the longing of the romantics, among whom Watts surely belongs, but also homes in on the later role of blue in the affinities between Theosophy and abstract art. Those who sought to go beyond words and figuration in their art were deeply influenced by those who believed in the possibility and desirability of knowing the divine, sharing with them “a concern with access to, revelation of and progress towards infinity and the absolute, and thus the intuition and expression of utopian desire.” For Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter, the attempts at extracting colour from structured figuration was at the same time an attempt to convey “a preconceptual spiritual essence which would transform human experience and usher in a new world.” This sense of abstraction, Levitas argues, is very different from rational cognitive abstraction (in contemporary theory we might say idealisation), since it remains wholly dependent on “the embedded materiality of the human body.”
But Watts’ painting is not an abstract one, and its figuration matters. While the painting is framed in golds and yellows, that is not where Hope’s attention lies. She is blindfolded, she could not see this horizon if she wanted to. But in any case she does not try. Instead she sits head bowed, ear turned towards her instrument, and to the earth below. Watts’ Hope thus shares more with those Russell Jacoby labels Iconoclastic Utopians, thinkers deeply touched by the Jewish refusal to name or represent the divine (as Gershom Scholem put it, that “One can approach, but not pronounce the name of God” [“Der Name Gottes ist ansprechbar, aber nicht aussprechbar”]). Among such thinkers, who “fashioned a utopianism committed to the future but reserved about it,” he includes Bloch, Adorno, and Benjamin, but also Gustav Landauer, Commisioner for Enlightenment in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet, and a victim of its repression. Jacoby singles out in particular the sense of hearing: “Jews keep their ears, not their eyes, on the future. To depict the future is sacrilegious, but it can be heard and longed for.” Hope may not be able to see, but she keeps her ear to the ground.
In an esoteric and often overlooked study, R.N. Berki suggests that Marx’s thought is defined by an oscillation between insight and vision. While insight examines the ground below us, the ground we stand on, the experiences we can touch and feel in all their mundane reality, vision looks forward to the outline and horizons of possibility, vague, inspiring, and underdefined. For Berki, the problem of communism was that Marx wanted to treat it as both vision and insight, and could never settle on which. But this is hardly Marx’s problem alone. It feels instead like the problem of all of us who believe another world is possible. It is the question of whether to turn our head towards the broad horizon, or to intently listen to the world beneath us, a world which in Watts’ painting, like ours, burns. The wager that Watts’ hope seems to be taking, is that if we first hear the world properly, the horizon will take care of itself.
To talk of blind hope in contemporary politics is always to denigrate. It is to suggest something naive, clumsy, to be avoided. The implication, rather, is that hope should be able to see its target, to see clearly and recognise its goal; or more often to confront its futility. Visual metaphors abound, and we all want to be the ones who see most clearly. But if hope could see it would be certainty, and vision remains in short supply. In any case, as Jacoby suggests, “the unseen is neither unreal nor inessential. On the contrary. If the name of God is unpronounceable and the portrait of God unpaintable, a future of peace and happpiness — a world without anxiety — may not be describable. We hear of it in parables and hints. It speaks to us, perhaps more urgently than ever.” Hope’s blindness, then, rather than rendering it futile, is what opens it to transcendence.
