Instability and Hope

Sunday, March 13th, 2011. I’m sitting down to begin writing my portfolio. The intention is to write a call to consciousness, a manifesto of sorts. I want to, in lyrical prose, shake us awake. And as I try to direct my mind into abstraction, into the tunnels and passageways of language, I keep returning to the flickering images of the tsunami sweeping across Japan, of a white sheet waving from the upper floor window of a home engulfed in water, waving in the wind as the helicopter capturing the image zooms in close, then moves on and away; my mind is flooded with the image of flames mushrooming from a natural gas processing plant, with images of cars swirling through rushing water, images of vast expanses of splintered wood, rushing cascading waters on fire. This devastation is so new that we don’t know how to place it yet. We don’t know what it will mean, what it will become, and as nuclear reactors teeter on the edge of meltdown, we collectively hold our breath, waiting to see the magnitude of this disaster. Will this be one for the record books, or will this change life as we know it?

It is in these places that my artistic self begins to flail. How do I understand the making of things to have relevance, significance, in the face of events of this magnitude? How can I begin to understand scale? Shouldn’t I just have become a doctor, a philanthropist with a fleet of helicopters, a nuclear physicist? Where is the contribution I can make that will have impact? This, then, must be the place to begin.

I think of the safety net—a project I completed just under a year ago—and of places of repair. I am not a nuclear physicist. I cannot prevent meltdown. What I can do, is offer some small scraps of solace, of hope. After all, if we are to effect any kind of change, we must believe that there is hope. A couple of weeks ago, I saw Vandana Shiva speak at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall in Portland. The title of her lecture was Soil Not Oil, and one of the first things she spoke of was how she didn’t talk about global warming, because the terminology wasn’t accurate; it painted a pretty picture of nicer weather, a more pleasant climate—you know, more bikini days at the beach. No, climate change isn’t primarily about global warming, it’s about climate instability.

And that instability is seminal.

In times of such great cultural, environmental, political, and fundamental instability, we must build structures of hope. Small as they may be, I can only keep interweaving these threads of hope, only slowly keep working away in my attempts at repair.