chronic hope
written aug. 2020
What, if not for hope, pulls us into the streets to protest? Rage and desperation, certainly, but if those were the bookends in the fight for racial and gender equity and all that is worth fighting for, then eventually, we’d run out of steam. Or, scorch the earth.
I fantasize about burning it all down. In one fantasy, I play the part of a shipmate on Noah’s ark. I set fire to the tarred timber, wool, and boat soup on Noah’s schooner the day before the rain comes. Everyone drowns in Mother Earth’s baptism, but She is saved from mankind’s eventual and inevitable disregard of Her. Ferns grow to the size of gas stations; dinosaurs flourish and consciousness hibernates in the stars for a later rebirth.
In another fantasy, I am Jonah. But rather than being swallowed whole by and spit out from the soured belly of a porpoise, I stick to my guns. In the original version, Jonah is commanded by God to travel to the city of Nineveh and warn its indulgent residents that they must repent or face the wrath of God. Jonah decides he’d rather not be the bearer of bad news. He boards a ship to the city of Tarshish, instead.
As with most Biblical parables, I empathize with the human and question God. In Jonah and the Whale, I question God’s audacious authority and the pattern this parable sets in motion, a pattern in which men with no other cause than to do God’s bidding blindly are merited for lording their manufactured righteousness over bendable, less empowered humans; and the men who refute God are defrocked. Midway across the seas, a storm rages. Jonah believes his decision to exercise choice has upset God in only the way that a vainglorious man who believes God has such a trained eye on him can believe this. Sensing a tragic kismet, Jonah tells the shipmen to toss him overboard to secure their safety, allowing God’s anger to follow Jonah to a watery grave. Then men do so, but rather than dying the venerable death of a drowned martyr, Jonah gets swallowed by a giant fish.
Over the years, I’ve watched from the wings as loved ones learned to separate, with surgical precision, the underbelly of religion — crooked human beings, red tape, and addictions to mediocrity. Their faith is one with complications, occasionally in need of a stent to widen areas of their hearts that constricted at one time or another in order to protect. I am no surgeon. My hands are less than steady, my nerves shot, and I have little to offer by way of finesse. I have hacked away at my religion and its adjacent white patriarchy to be free of it like a useless limb — flesh, sinews, bone, and all — with every intent to lose its laws and my faltered faith. In my retold Biblical fantasy, had I been Jonah, I would have thrown my weight into the bow of the ship, climbed the sail, and into the torrents and black sky thrown an empty moonshine bottle and shouted, “Tarshish or bust, you motherfucker!”
My rage, like my chronic hope, is a hard-earned habit. The two — hope and rage — are a strange codependency and go hand-in-hand like birds of a feather that stray together. I was raised on hope and taught to bury my rage. Later I learned the truth: One cannot live without the other. Hope too piddles and dithers if it is not stoked by some hot need for the future to still be there for me when I’m older.
Had I been Jonah, I would have thrown my weight into the bow of the ship, climbed the sail, and into the torrents and black sky thrown an empty moonshine bottle and shouted, “Tarshish or bust, you motherfucker!”
God — my so-named archetype of exorcised shame — is at the cross-section of my hope and rage, a phantom for me to push against, something for me to hate without hurting anyone, something to use as leverage for love. Religion taught me to besmirch myself. Losing my religion taught me to love myself. I’m beginning to wonder if love-made-manifest is only possible once we lose a part of ourselves. Not because we are flawed and must scrape down our bodied imperfections, but because death and loss are at the core of all existence, an unremitting prelude to life, a folding of one spent, far-gone universe into itself only to birth another. Bang, here we go again.
