Between a Rock and a Hard Place

To Claudia Rankine’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”

Hopelessness. The eternal shrug.

I know that feeling all too well, you know?

An indifference born out of being too used to suffering, manufacturing a stone-hard shell, a face that cannot be surprised, just disappointed (and even that is unsurprising); hopelessly tired, eternally exhausted. So if hopelessness is an eternal shrug, what is hope?

You ask if life is a form of hope.

Someone else, or perhaps another part of you, answers if one is hopeful it can be.

Julio Cortázar says that from all the feelings human beings have, the one that isn’t truly ours is hope. He argues that hope belongs to life, it is life defending itself. I agree with both of you, and I construct my own definition throughout that agreement: hope is the inherent desire to feel alive. Living, not just surviving while pumping blood and breathing air and adhering to your body’s needs, is an act of hopefulness. Making that decision, taking that turn from automatic existence to acting consciously, is hope personifying itself in you.

But what about the Inability to Maintain Hope, as you put it? If hope is life, if hope is life defending itself, being hopeless is being dead by law of transitivity. Which means, those of us that are “too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience,” we are dead in life, we are simply surviving, we are paradoxes walking from one place to another, with an eternal shrug deep beneath our sternum.

Sylvia Plath says she has always been extremely fond of the definition of death which says it is inaccessibility to experience. When I read this in her journals, I circled it and highlighted it and underlined it. Because she killed herself. I think she thought she had experienced enough and such tiredness thrusted her into hopelessness. After this, I think she became dead before putting her head in the oven, by her own definition. She didn’t want to experience anymore, and she wanted it to be final. I wish I could’ve helped her, told her Cortázar’s take on hope and read her your book of death and show her my love. But that just would’ve been blind leading the blind.

I know that feeling all too well.

You also explain to me what policemen do after you’ve called the suicide hotline.

You put me in someone’s shoes, maybe yours, maybe Sylvia’s, who can tell. I didn’t know cops could restrain you if you refused to go to the hospital, and that “resistance will only make matters more difficult; any resistance will only make things worse.” My therapist told me resistance is happiness’ worst enemy. I think the real threat against peace– which is what I strive for, not happiness, but peace–, is not chaos, but your own resistance. When you resist acceptance, you put yourself between a rock and a hard place, between inaccessibility to experience and hopelessness. I will draw a diagram for you, in case I seem like I'm mumbling.

hopelessness | you ● inaccessibility to experience 

the eternal shrug | you ● death in life

But acceptance is too difficult sometimes, isn’t it? I think that is what you’ve tried to do with this book, with the loneliness that plagues you from understanding hopelessness and death so profoundly. It is why I write too, you know? To understand my own mortality, trying to accept, avoiding resistance.

Does writing about it work? Do you feel better now?

I can feel the eternal shrug sighing in my sternum. I would like to know. 

All my hope,

Camila.