Offering: May 24, 2025

Detangling hope from the future

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It was another harrowing week in the world that still managed to hold space for beauty. The yellowed reeds are filling in with cool greens, the trees and lilacs are flowering and on our walks through the marsh, we saw a flock of new yellow goslings.

One day, I got to watch a majestic Blue Heron hunting in the tight water way. Overnight, the channel’s walls gave way to a surge of saltwater from a late spring Nor’easter. The red-winged blackbirds—whose call you’ll hear in the audio version of this newsletter—greet us everyday from their perch in the cat tails. They’ve become one of the most prominent voices in our daily lives.

I listened to a bit of an interview with artist Katie Paterson, who recorded the sound of a melting glacier in Iceland, and set up a phone line where people could call in to hear it. I also read this profile with Maine sound artist Diane Ballon, who said that it was bell buoys that started her life making recordings:

“…that absolutely gorgeous, uneven ding-ding-ding of the bell buoys, it tugs at my sleeve…that’s what happens to me with sound. It tugs me to the point where I finally say, ‘I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to open up other folks’ ears to the beauty of this particular sound.’”

I’ve been interested in listening closely for a long time, in conversation with humans but also with stories, images, and interspecies relations. It’s been a way to make presence thick, to be in a moment more intensely¹, to orient toward unusual knowledges, to catch the anomalous moments that inevitably protrude from smooth stories, to harness and attend to the swerves².

I’m thinking about and referencing Merlin the magician more than ever these days, who is an excellent listener and who, true to theologian Catherine Keller’s description of a dream reading prophet³, listens closely for “the patterns of what has already become” in order to attend to “what might yet be.”

Merlin is considered a tragic figure, because he had the power to see the downfall of Camelot but did not have the power to change it. And yet, as psychologist Donald Hoffman has written, Merlin “devotes himself to the completion of a project in the full knowledge of its eventual defeat.⁴”

Well aware that what he makes will eventually crumble, that “what he most loves will most painfully destroy him,” Merlin manages to find a way to stay engaged. He is such an important character for me because his total engagement despite impending doom is emblematic of something I return to and write about often, which is philosopher Brain Massumi’s thinking, on how to make “hope” a useful concept:

“From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope can be made useful is when it is not connected to an expected success—when it starts to be something different from optimism—because when you start trying to think ahead into the future from the present point, rationally there really isn’t much room for hope.”

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