I have left the mould, which has gone moldy, for this hope soap on a rope at my old house. It is one of the last things to pick up. It holds the potential of new hope soap in its negative space. It is relevant today as I have been talking about putting together a new Festival of the Mind proposal the last one I did was with Kate and this was when when I first made the cast. On Friday we have explored radical hope in my trees-scapes project. I have also had two weeks of work that have felt more like the good old pre-covid days. Jumping on the train and going places and meeting real people in offices and cafes, sat on chairs inside and outside. I have enjoyed it but its also tired me out in a place deep inside, not under the skin tired not something easy to shake off. I am a little worried about my stamina levels so I'm booked in for a suit of blood tests tomorrow morning. I haven't really done any PhD writing for a couple of weeks but I recon that's fine there really hasn't been time and I have had to manage a few things at home that needed managing.
I have just finished reading Radical Hope, a book that uses the story of Plenty Coups the chief of the Crow tribe to talk about hope in the face of cultural annihilation. I kept thinking about artists and how I sometimes feel I am part of a tribe that follow a different set of cultural codes. My idea of what courage is and a successful life is somehow slipping out of view. Perhaps not within society as a whole but to an extent I, or my subjective self is falling away from it. A coup is a small victory for the Crow, like steeling a horse or hitting a rival Sioux warrior on his breastplate with your Coup stick. The Coup stick was a way of marking Crow territory, the warrior would plant it in the ground and the enemy could not pass it or remove it. Plenty Coups was good at getting Coups but then the white man came with his forked tongue and killed the buffalo and the Crow were moved to a reservation and counting coups became irrelevant. I don't think the story or the history was supposed to be a metaphor or an allegory but I kept thinking about trying to win coups as an artist.
On my PhD I kept and keep planting my Coup stick and bashing my supervisors on their chests with none fatal blows yet as I've moved from the world of artists, counting coups has lost its relevance. My world and all its principles have not being destroyed by external forces yet an internal malaise, a loss of faith has taken hold. The cloud was always there but a clever idea would hold it just enough at bay. How then can I look at where I am and find some sort of radical hope? I occasionally find a piece of practice that feels like a coup, building Derek Jarmen's prospect cottage in my garden perhaps. Only last week I had a slight buzz when I thought of constructing a machine of capture that would take the ideas and images of children and produce a giant identity collage. I felt like this could be a coup but the nature of an artists coup is that it needs nurturing - you can find the seed of an idea but that is not a real coup unless it grows into something.
Radical hope then takes me four years into the future when I have moved past the planted coup stick of my Phd and I'm living in a world that at this moment I cannot quite imagine. It is not a new place that is built from the present it it a raveling of the significant threads that's I hope to find again. Perhaps I was stupid not to drop a long line of breadcrumbs for the birds to eat so I could follow their migrations on the the warm winds of hiemat.
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