A Selfless Art

Following Rebecca Solnit’s distinction, I’ve always preferred to speak of hope. Optimists and pessimists, she writes in Hope in the Dark, believe they know the future and so do not need to do anything:

Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.

Rebecca Solnit

Hope, in contrast, accepts the inescapable uncertainty of life and therefore the possibility – or the responsibility – of doing something to influence what is still unknown:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

Rebecca Solnit

I admire the clarity in this thinking and Solnit’s commitment to hope was a pillar of the last chapter of A Restless Art. But more recently I came across Angela Carter’s idea of ‘heroic optimism’ and felt there was something important in that too: there is heroism in maintaining a spirit of hopefulness in the face of the daunting obstacles that face us today.

Hope, in fairytales, is sharper than teeth. That spirit of heroic optimism – optimism blood-covered and gasping, but still optimism – is the life principle writ large.

Katherine Rundell

So I titled my talk this week to rural arts activists ‘Heroic Optimism’ and it gave me some of the courage I needed to step onto a stage for the first time in more than two years. Truth be told, my talk was a bit incoherent, combining as it did elements of my thinking about co-creation with these more recent ideas about the value of community arts work in a world that seems so threatened. Despite that, it was generously received by the audience and I felt that there might still be something useful for me to do. Everyone needs encouragement sometimes.

The future is uncertain and we always have the capacity to influence it. Hope is a virtue, not a feeling: it demands work. And doing that work, in dark times—despite, and because of, the darkness—is heroic.

References

• Rundell, K., 2019, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, Bloomsbury, London
• Solnit, R., 2016, Hope In The Dark: The Untold History of People Power Canongate, Edinburgh