Middle Hope

I

Middle Hope, a small coastal inlet of Somerset, south-western England, carved into a promontory that juts out to the Severn Estuary. Or, thought differently for a second, ‘in the middle of hope’; a mischievously Latourian turn of phrase, the location, perhaps, of geographers and geographies long mired in the prospect and puzzle of hope. ¹ From the calculated – and calculating – imposition of indexical happiness upon populations by certain nation states ² to the intellectual conjecture of grief and reconciliation invested in narratives concerning the Anthropocene, ³ hope continues (against hope) to exercise contemporary cultural geographies. ⁴ Hope’s appropriation by state, scholar and activist ⁵ as the affect-of-choice is peculiar given its conceptual indeterminacy. The ‘Anthropocene’, for example, when finally and formally categorised as a geological epoch, will be identified, in part, by its stratigraphic signature. ⁶ Concomitantly, its forthcoming pronouncement is likely to be accompanied by the feeling that something untoward, something unseemly, something human has happened and that worse is afoot. Yet hope, with little rationale has emerged as a prominent affective motif with which to engage epochal environmental concerns. Likewise, while conceptual taxonomies of hope presently counter liberal encodings of an associated but unrelated ‘optimism’, what it means to hope or rather the question of ‘how does one hope?’ remains vexing. ⁷

I pose this existential question in the context of what one might, in hope of a sympathetic reader and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, label ‘fieldwork’. Or more specifically, the question arises in the moments, encounters and witnessing in a day spent in and around Middle Hope. Elsewhere in cultural and political geography, fragments of south-west England have animated empirical spaces in which geographers have questioned the extent to which the sensibilities and specificities of place can be made to speak to phenomenal, embodied and geopolitical encounters in landscape. ⁸ In attempting to continue this recent experimental regional geography of south-west England, I offer a modest critique of hope from a stretch of the coastline where the water shifts from an Atlantic blue to a turbid, Bristolian brown.

II

Middle Hope, its etymology itself mired in the middled, muddle of old Middle English. ‘Hope’, in this story, denotes a sunken inlet, or in parts of northern England, a valley. Just west of the inlet lies the official line where estuary and channel merge, where the River Severn gives ways to the Bristol Channel. A cloud’s shadow darkens the already murky water. The tide, when it peaks and then dissipates near to the Autumnal equinox, floods and scours the muddy estuarine bed. ‘Treacherous mud’, warns a nearby sign (Figure 1). This is no place for a swim. Rocky outcrops are left exposed by the receding tide; limpets (Patella vulgata) cling relentlessly to jagged rocks. The limpet strives – its conatus – towards an anticipation of the tide’s return.

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Figure 1.

Treacherous mud.

Middle Hope is a geological extension of England’s Mendip Hills that course east-west across Somerset. Carboniferous, black rock limestone dominates the local geology, yet Middle Hope is the site of seemingly incongruous volcanic basalt deposits. Middle Hope also marks one of the rare sites of Pleistocene deposits in this part of Britain, residues that stratigraphically lie at odds with the otherwise Holocene legacy of the inlet. ⁹ Fossils are etched into the grey rocks; anemones and flattened jellyfish abound. Jellyfish, ‘we cannot touch them without inviting distress’, writes Elizabeth Johnson. ¹⁰ Looking, for me, is anxiety enough. The fossilised jellyfish of Middle Hope are a stinging reminder of their pre-eminence as durable beings, simultaneously primordial entities and virtual signatures of the coming Anthropocene. As Johnson goes on to suggest, jellyfish give rise to paradoxical concerns: one, that they signal apocalyptic ecological degradation and, two, that they offer significant hope in the advancement of biomedicine. Such a paradox neatly points to an affective ambivalence in contemporary politics, perhaps not unique to the Anthropocene, but one which oscillates between hope and anxiety. Encountering fossilised jellyfish also raises, albeit perversely, the question of non-human affects. Do, against human intuitions, jellyfish hope? Did jellyfish ever hope of the epochal durability they have both survived and help generate?

Such questions undoubtedly incite incredulity, not least because they are predicated upon assumptions of an autonomous, non-human sentience. Yet, at this site of Middle Hope, might not one question, what is more ludicrous – that jellyfish ponder hope, or that retrofitted geological epochs, as in the case of the Anthropocene, should give space for hope, however monumental or tentative in register? Regarding the former, we cannot know. Regarding the latter, a key issue lies in a political overcoding of geology undertaken in the name of the Anthropocene, provoked, in part, by the ‘geosciences attempt to move above ground’. ¹¹ It is in this fervent intellectual-political complex that matters of hope and grief become entangled. Yet returning to the windswept shore of Somerset, how does one hope from Middle Hope? There is nothing automatic about hope here; no epochal fissures that tell of hope, no landscaped manifesto for hopefulness. Perhaps the problem is not so much with ‘hope’ itself as it is an incipient worry about assumed, taken-for-granted tendencies towards hope and hopefulness.

III

Middle Hope is both a Site of Special Scientific Interest and also titled as National Trust land. ¹² It is trust – writes Ben Anderson – an enrolment into relations of trust and a cultivation of an ethos of care that is central to the act and encounter of hoping. ¹³ To be sure, this is a productive basis for hope, yet at Middle Hope at least, it appears that trust – institutional or otherwise – is as precarious and as ambivalent as hope itself. Walking through the sandy grasses on the approach to Middle Hope’s beach I note, and occasionally photograph the following: thistles, bramble, an abandoned instant barbecue, cow-pats, blackthorn (species: Prunus spinosa). Spinoza (species: Baruch/Benedict de) is often turned to when considering hope, or as a precursor to broader philosophies of affirmation. Strange moves, perhaps, given that he has remarkably little to say on hope, an affect he holds in intractable relation to fear. As Terry Eagleton concludes, ‘hope for Spinoza is always mixed with fear precisely because its object is obscure’. ¹⁴ Ironically, then, more credence should be paid to Spinoza’s lack of detail, or reticence on hope, precisely because he was otherwise assiduously clear on other passions and affects.

In the middle of Middle Hope, it is still and quiet, unperturbed by the unpredictability of English weather. The past-their-best sandwiches languishing in my backpack fulfilling the parody of a day spent by the British seaside. To paraphrase Robert Burton, it plays into a geography of melancholy. ¹⁵ Standing on the cliff’s edge, looking left to right, swayed a little by blustery winds. Bracing, but no haze – commanding views, so to speak. Peering out to the south-west some 20 miles, I can see the two imposing oblongs of Hinkley Point A Nuclear Power station sat across the bay. Memories flash of a school visit to the reactor hall followed by a quick paddle in the disconcertingly warm waters surrounding the complex, its cooling system reliant on estuarine water which would be returned to the sea 3 °C higher. For a Brit, that’s approaching sub-tropical conditions. Turning to the right, looking north, the town of Clevedon lies 10 miles adrift from Middle Hope. Closer still, mere yards away, a visible but off-the-map weapons development and testing site. ¹⁶ Middle Hope, then, as hope sits globally, rests precariously between fractious geopolitical-energy interests upended in the tumult of ‘Brexit’, ¹⁷ and the sub-contracted, concealed machinery of state-violence. This is not hope; this is, at a stretch, the melancholy of the security-military complex. Middle Hope is the middling foil of a landscape held in national trust, yet kettled, geopolitically, between atomic fission and arms manufacture.

I look out to the water, to the Severn estuary; it’s altogether more soothing for the mind, momentarily so (Figure 2). While it is something of a tall-tale, the term ‘Severn’ is the Anglicised form of the Welsh word ‘Hafren’. In turn, this word is derived from the name of a legendary princess who drowned in these self-same waters, at the hands of her own mother, no less. Every enunciation of the river – every rolling-in of the tide, if read away from hope, is a recantation of maternal filicide; one that echoes for the countless times people have ended their lives in this stretch of excoriating river. Seaweed, rusty scraps of sheet metal, the durability of washed-up Coke bottles, random bits of litter that don’t bear attempts at identification. All gifts from obliging oceanic gyres; material remains that call to mind, or are themselves waste, decomposition and death (Figure 3). Hardly nascent grounds for hope. In the middle of Middle Hope, might it not be more appropriate to accommodate feelings of ambivalence, irony and melancholy?

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Figure 2.

Middle Hope, Somerset, UK.

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Figure 3.

High Tide Line.

Across the estuary, and squinting considerably, I just make out the coal hill valleys of south Wales. They are industrially sized reminders of a different stratigraphic seam shut down in the 1970s and 1980s with vindictive, Thatcherite intent. Former miners living across the water used to have geologic lives too, the substrate of coal-soot often found coursing in their blood. Minor-miner-bodies surfacing for a few hours at a time, drills’ decibels still ringing in the ear, laboured by the cruel optimism of excavation. Occasionally, a black silt laps at the high tide-line of Middle Hope. Truth be told, I don’t know what it is, I’ve not bothered to find out, though in walks past, my grandparents would tell me it was coal deposits that had washed up from Wales. Indeed, anything remotely suspect arriving on English shores from that direction, no matter bad weather, oil slicks or otherwise, was often – half-jokingly – attributed to the Welsh. It’s an imaginative and clichéd geography of blame, that much like ‘hope’, helps offset responsibility for all manner of geographical quandaries.

One idea, one word, that has not washed up on the shores of Middle Hope from across the Severn is ‘hiraeth’, a Welsh term with no cognate in English. Pejoratively, hiraeth has been figured as homesickness. Read less acerbically, it pertains to an idea of longing, however, abstract such longing might be. Crucially, hiraeth entails longing for longing’s sake. There is no space for hope in this mode of longing. It could appear at first blush that hiraeth is a Welsh take on melancholy, itself derided by Spinoza for diminishing the capacity of a body to act. ¹⁸ However, hiraeth augments such capacities by attuning bodies and minds to a future or futurity that may never arrive. It relies not on coded relations of trust and persists in the face of what Spinoza would call ‘sad passions’. Hiraeth, not hope, thrives as much on negation as it does affirmation. It is a proficient and productive melancholy. More importantly, it does not rely upon a national trust of relations in an ill-defined societal hope to nowhere. ¹⁹

IV

The love that has no hope of being loved. ²⁰

Admittedly, all such thoughts go a long way to spoil what might otherwise be a perfectly pleasant walk. Nonetheless, to walk in and around Middle Hope helped to examine a little of what it is to live in the middle of hope; the political presage of an uncertain geological-geopolitical epoch. Such quick recourse to ‘hope’ in contemporary, liberal political narratives, including in their mildly agonistic forms, can be stifling, not least because they insist upon a duty to be hopeful, even in the face of the social-mental-ecological disasters and Donald Trump induced nightmares that psychoanalyst Felix Guattari once wrote of. ²¹ Middle Hope is not just the extent of a geologically peculiar promontory nor hope the conceptual extent of liberalism – it is also the accretion of silt, atoms, weapons and indeed a sense of longing, however painful. The imagining of how one might hope in such a landscape is hampered by the inadequacy of the idea of hope, to borrow terminology from Spinoza once more. Hope’s inadequacy lies in both the muddle of affects it produces and in its ambivalence, needing always to be tethered to fear. We could, indeed, ignore Spinoza’s ambivalence surrounding hope, or we could, as Guattari demands, face up to such ambivalence. That is to say, Guattari identified a collective logic of ‘desiring ambivalence’ in humanity; a logic in which recourse to simple affects needs to be eliminated through acts, however simple or mundane, of untethering from the disciplinary shackles of hope. Jorge Luis Borges writes, above, in relation to Spinoza’s philosophy, of an unrequited love for his work; similarly, in the spaces of Middle Hope, one finds a lament for hope itself – the hope that has no hope of being hoped.

For Catherine Mary Gerlach