WHAT DOES THE FUTURE WANT FROM US?
No. 1
Martin Shaw | Ashburton, United Kingdom
How do we talk to the future? Not as an abstraction, or with our eyes screwed up with fear, but really address it?
Let’s imagine that the future is more than just the sum of human survival and ambition. That it is a being all of itself.
And the language of the future is charm. Let me explain what I mean.
In Roman myth the future is a goddess, and her name is Antevorta. The future is not an idea, it’s a divinity. Antevorta is especially prized when something new is being birthed, her and her sister Postvorta - the past - are invoked in childbirth. Both future and past are aspects of a wider being, Carmenta. Carmenta is the goddess of technical innovation, midwives and the successful birthing of a child.
Carmenta’s name derives from the Latin 'carmen', meaning a magical spell, a song or prophecy. Carmen is also the root of the word charm.
So to speak to the future, Antevorta, in a way she respects, our words need charm to them, wit, even magic. Without that, we risk just static and statistics.
Charm is literally the wider body the future abides in.
So we could say this is a currency of talking to the future. This is a way it’s done. This is how we get her attention. That the wonderment of our social, ecological and technical advances have charm to them, protect women and children, get astonishing things born.
And it is possible for the future to actually talk back in response to these imaginings, for a dialogue to be struck, an empathic conversation.
If the future is a goddess, we wonder if she has hurt feelings. Certainly climate change is a response to a courtship gone dreadfully awry. In Celtic myth the old notion of a Queen or King is that they have to be wedded to the spirit of the land itself. Without that primacy of relationship our decisions lack empathy, wit and, to use the language of the future, charm. As Bachelard says, “the world seeks to be admired by us.” A fundamental message myth gives us is: what we exile will grow hostile towards us.
When we execute a rain forest we speak a very damaged language, set up a kind of tacit suicide pact with our own species. What is needed is to attend to the grace still present, the pin pricks of the miraculous still apparent, to not go easy, to articulate some manners, to think at the edge of our understanding. The hope is that the future is willing to talk to us, and that we speak in such a way that moves her into communication.