Imagining the Future
Ekphrastic poetry, visual art, legacy, and science fiction
This month my wife and I will have the pleasure of participating in a unique art opening at the Metropolitan Arts Council’s gallery here in Greenville. The Visual & Verse: Poetry & Art Exhibition is a collaboration between our city’s poet laureate Glenis Redmond and 30 local writers and visual artists.
Glenis did a similar project last year with MAC — ekphrastic poetry where writers were responding to pieces created by artists. But this year, we did it in reverse; poets were given the prompt “imagining the future” and then our work was handed over to artists to interpret. The first time we’ll see the art is opening night, which is admittedly fascinating, terrifying, and fun.
This was my contribution:
I hope this message finds you
thick with colossal abundance
overflowing onto neighborhood streets.
I hope it is quieter there
where you’ll be after me
and you carry in your bones
marrow-deep joy and wonder;
how the genesis of things
is they are never ending.
I hope you know love in the stillness and storm
and your bed and belly and
when you dig your hands in the dirt,
you feel the generosity of the earth,
wiseblood flowing through your fingers.
I hope you are favored by the dawn
whose heat travels unobstructed until
it is stopped at the last moment by your face,
warmth pooling in the cracks around your eyes,
your shadow proof you are there in the not-yet,
stealing the last seconds of the speed of light.The future is eating all the snacks in our house
“What happens next?” is by no means only a thing parents think about, but it’s an inescapable daily topic when you’re raising children. Ours are currently 10 and 7½, and we homeschool, so we are deeply-embedded in how their worlds are being shaped nearly every hour of every day.
With our oldest, we are navigating the coming 4th to 5th grade transition, where her intellectual and task independence and rapidly-expanding inner world are a daily metamorphosis. It’s impossible not to think about her future, with all her objective brilliance and potential, how unique medical needs will affect her life in this country, and the simple fact that there are only a handful of years left where she’ll be under our roof and care and deep influence.
With our youngest, we are navigating the burgeoning skills of reading and growing into responsibility, how to take the supernova of energy in his body and direct it for good, and to hold and process his emotions in healthy ways (still working on that one myself). It’s impossible not to think about his future, and what kind of young man he’ll be in a time where young men are walking rotten paths following predatory grifters, and throwing shrapnel into their communities wherever they go.
We’re trying to raise (and be!) wise, generous, joyful people in a cultural context that values and incentivizes foolishness, selfishness, and cheap, easy escapism. Some days I feel like the future is all I think about.
No, not like that
I watched and read a lot of science fiction as a kid, and still do. The genre shaped me more than any other (except maybe the wisdom literature of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). But now, in middle age, I’m faced with the logical outworking of all that speculative fiction, and it’s not pretty.
Instead of flying cars, holodecks, and techno-utopian interstellar peace, we got Robocop’s profits-at-all-costs privatized public services and “I’d buy that for a dollar!” catchphrase slop. We got Alien/Predator’s Weyland-Yutani company-over-everything ethos, and a techno-dystopian blend of WALL-E screen time, the virtual worlds of Neuromancer and Strange Days, and Starship Trooper’s patriotic propaganda fascism. A film like Idiocracy shouldn’t have been a prophetic voice, and yet…
I hope this message finds you
“thick with colossal abundance overflowing onto neighborhood streets.” I can’t help but be hopeful — for myself, and the humans in my house who carry my name. For my neighbors facing the economic and social pressures of gentrification. For my backwards state that’s never reckoned with our racial history1, so we’re doomed to repeat it on loop.
I hope “you carry in your bones marrow-deep joy and wonder” because what else is there? What else can fix what’s broken except hope that drives action that drives change? Hope’s the thing, not in a trite way, but in a cataclysmic way that upends worlds that need to change for everyone to flourish.
When we imagine the future for ourselves, our neighborhoods and cities and circles expanding out into the world, I hope you see how the future is a shapeable thing. And you get to work building the world you want to inhabit. Because plenty of other folks are at work building theirs.
Eyes on the prize, feet on the ground, hand on the plow. This is how we build the future. Slowly at first. And then all at once.
From James Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew: “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reason, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. ¶ But these men are your brothers — your lost, young brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”