Courage

Short Essay on Dreams and Suffering

Wonder and beauty are not pure, nor are they untainted. They are coextensive with terror and horror. We experience both in and through the terror and horror visited on us by power and by the contingency of existence. Suffering performs the work of dreams. We urgently need the courage to face the dreams that emerge from within our suffering. And the courage to pursue them. Courage is the only way we can exist against the terror of power—the only way we can experience the wonder that engages the daily existence of struggle against it, and the only way we can learn to exist in love with those of us who find solace in each other. We continue living to experience the possibility of wonder, beauty, and love—courage is the means through which we reach for those things we desire even while we struggle to maintain ourselves amid the conditions that make possible the knowing, pervasive way in which terror is waged against forms of life like ourselves.

My politics is attuned to the interconnections between dreams and suffering—how suffering pushes us to believe in more powerful and necessary dreams. I believe in a world unlike this one. I live by the possibility of this unnamed world, rather than according to the rules of the existing world. It deepens my suffering, makes existence more dangerous and unlivable. But the preservation of this unnamed world of desire and need gives me courage that I would otherwise give up and refuse. If I gave up this unnamed world that floats in dreams and washes down my face in tears, I might appease the existing world. I have realized that appeasing is never enough for this world. It is a world that does not want us, that desires beauty without our beauty, needs life without our life, believes in values that do not value us. The existing world is one built on our repudiation, whose blueprint is the architecture of our nonexistence. This much has always been true. The question is do we beg for admission into this building whose steps break our legs and whose door frame bashes our head and whose ceiling keeps us down on our knees even if we are admitted. Or do we tear down the house and build a house of our design for people like us, where we can bring into being the warm dreams we had known only in sleet and rain. We must always believe we can ascend to our full height, radiate the full brightness of our glory, and expand through full knowledge of that which is completely untenable and that which is absolutely necessary.

We are forced in so many ways. We are oriented toward the ways of others. We are led and misled into alien ways. When will we choose to discard the ways imposed on us and choose to live in the ways that we require? Often, the ways of being that we presuppose are acceptable, desirable, and necessary are instead impositions. When will the concepts of acceptance, desire, and need be formulated in service of our purposes rather than in service to a world whose interests are not the same as ours, whose language is not the same as ours, whose continuation is not the same as that of ours?