by Marcus Bussey, University of the Sunshine Coast
I cannot find words for what I want to say. It has been that way for most of my life. I came to Futures because of this aphasic condition. Futures offered, it seemed to me, the place/space for the ‘unsaid’; for the emergent and ‘not-yet’. Yet in futures I must face my own finitude, my own limits. I must listen to the beyond as a distant heartbeat. I must renounce words yet use them to craft a space from which other anticipatory senses can perform their magic (Bussey, 2017). So here I stand: wordless yet full of them! My anticipatory imagination (Bussey et al, 2017) churns and I notice that memory grows more powerful the older I get; foresight becomes more urgent as I look into the abyss.
These two futures senses stand either side of me, pinning me between past and future, like a bug in amber! Turning to metaphor I stand holding the ‘grail of promise’ – my own capacity to act – a futures sense of agentic possibility… and still the words fail!
I try to write myself into Life
but every word slips between the cracks,
each a scant reminder of what eludes
And the world…?
Well, it’s just out of reach
A shadow, not in a cave, but in my open mouth.
***
Poetry helps! It is both indulgence and guide. As a cultural being there is no escape from words, just as they fail. That is a supreme irony. Don Domanski (2007), a poet I admire, speaks of angels as ‘larvae twirling in a man’s ear’ … words are like that: angels that speak beyond our current condition but define it too, holding us fast. Words are historical!
Yet, and here’s the rub, they ‘drift spore like toward anyone’s mind// their silence thumping loudly…” So, as I hold my grail of possibility, I also pour it out in an ancient act of libation (spondȇ), “Oh fates!” I murmur, “accept this wine… drink deep, quench your thirst for meaning! Bless my endeavour.”
As I pour, other visceral words arise from the visions of Indigenous American poet Joy Harjo:
“I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You who were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself.” (2002, p. 50)
***
The ‘grail’ is such a potent symbol. It exists beyond time, beyond those traditional bounds that hold it tight. There is, for instance, a ‘grail’ of extraordinary beauty in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York that bears the names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. It is lotus shaped and smells of love. Such beauty in an objet d’art! The cup, the grail sliding in and out of history carrying Christ’s blood and luring Indiana Jones into reckless adventures. Healing too the Fisher King who was sterile and so limited!
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/545756
This scent of love speaks beyond words, just as the grail, as metaphor, carries its own fragrance. Time, as Byung-chul Han (2009) asserts, has its own scent. So too do metaphors. And the future is a metaphor, a cultural artefact: both full and empty. This is my problem of course. For many, words are simply words. Just as reality… well it’s reality. Right!
This makes my problem personal. I look for aid in ‘grace’, in dance, and music, in sunsets, and poems, and birdsong (see Bussey and Mozzini-Alister, 2020). So, my problem is contextual. Historical, cultural, epistemological. Even spiritual. My solution to my perceived aphasia within the Futures space has been to approach it as an issue of epistemology and a quest for the plural or multiple. No single epistemology is up to the challenge and there will always be the ‘unsayable’ as the uninvited guest, the ajana pathik[1], as the ‘angel’, ‘joker, or ‘ghost’, or ‘trickster’ – that which transgresses the boundaries, disturbing the easy peace of consensus as ‘culture’.
***
This is why I turned to the ‘shaman’ (2009) but ultimately no container is enough to hold the ‘not just yet’, the ‘unthought’ or ‘forbidden’: the taboo! As unthought it is a limit marker. We must sidle up to it, as Bernadette Baker (2007) suggests in her brilliant paper on the apophasis of limits. In that work she offers a ‘crippled poetics’. One in which I recognise myself as bound by my own fear as Harjo declares above. I recognise I am incomplete, both damaged and made by culture. As Baker observes: “…limping characters have operated not only as apt symbols of the complexity and paradoxes of ‘the human condition’, but also as incomplete” (Baker, 2007, p. 2).
Of course, being incomplete is a gift. Yet we strive to be made whole. Again: paradox! We are what Arthur Frank (1995) calls: wounded storytellers. Certainly, as a species we are optimistic, but bound by fear. What a strange situation! So, I limp into the future carrying the wounds of culture along with its treasures. This is a mixed blessing, but blessing nonetheless. Optimism is also a futures sense, one that resides deep inside me often finding voice in community, dance and poetry. Here I am reminded of David Jardine (2020, p. 126) who quotes Gadamer as he sidles up to this question of paradox and human agency:
But right here is the weird paradox of our situation: something of the agency of our openness is “beyond our wanting and doing” (Gadamer 1989, p. xxviii) “We are possessed by something and precisely by means of it we are opened up for the new, the different, the true” (Gadamer 2007, p. 82).
***
What to do when we confront the limits of culture? This is laughable of course. Limits are there only because we create them (M. Bussey, 2013). Yet I long for limitlessness. This is part of the conditio humana to long to break out of what limits us. Myths abound with stories of those who pushed the limits, sought somehow to see beyond, transcend their limits. Just think of Pandora, or Prometheus, Icarus or, turning East, of Ravana who definitely pushed his luck.
This seeing beyond, this calling to push the limits is a key evolutionary driver. Longing, for me, is a powerful futures sense. Yet even here we are in danger! ‘Evolution’ is itself such a loaded word. Sigh! We must push beyond the trap of the word ‘evolution’, escape the gravity of its history which is so deeply entwined with myths of ‘progress’ and ‘techne’. Such myths have offered the rationale for the enslavement of the human and the other-than-human to a social project offering limitless progress but in fact giving us… what? The terrors of a degraded future? The hope of transcendence? Again, words fail, but the feelings are real enough. Fear, hope, longing.
***
I refuse to give up on words. But I look into the grammar of feeling as a key element of my futures practice. Words for me may reflect grace, but feeling ignites it! My use of words here in this series of thought bubbles, do help me as my language is a language of the heart. So too is my futures work. It involves community, introspection and meditation, care and love. Along with a dose of outrage and hand wringing! I am always on the lookout for signposts, and they are everywhere.
By way of conclusion, I turn to Brené Brown. In her recent Atlas of the Heart she observes:
“So often, when we feel lost, adrift in our lives, our first instinct is to look out into the distance to find the nearest shore. But that shore, that solid ground, is within us. The anchor we are searching for is connection, and it is internal. To form meaningful connections with others, we must first connect with ourselves, but to do either, we must first establish a common understanding of the language of emotion and human experience” (2021, p. xxx).
Engaging with my aphasia, accepting my limitations and those of culture involve a pragmatic dose of vulnerability. There is no way around it. For me a good futurist is vulnerable. We must do the inner work Brown is pointing to, in order to effectively engage with others in co-creating futures worth leaving to all planetary stakeholders.
***
Baker, B. (2007). The apophasis of limits: genius, madness, and learning disability. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 11(1), 1-33.
Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. London: Vermilion.
Bussey, M. (2009). Six Shamanic Concepts: Exploring the Between in Futures Work. foresight, 11(2), 29-42.
Bussey, M. (2013). Re-Imagining Limits. Sociological Bulletin, 62(1), 129-131.
Bussey, M. (2017). Anticipatory aesthetics: new identities and future senses. In The Aesthetics of Development (pp. 49-70): Springer.
Bussey, M., and Mozzini-Alister, Camila (Ed.) (2020). Phenomenologies of grace : the body, embodiment, and transformative futures. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bussey, M., Song, Mei Mei., and Hsieh, Shang-Hsien (2017). Anticipatory imagination as a tool for rethinking engineering education. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education Practice, 143(4), 1-5.
Domanski, D. (2007). Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (B. Bertlett Ed.). Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Frank, A. W. (1995). The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gadamer, H. G. (1989). Truth and Method. New York: Continuum Press.
Gadamer, H.G. (2007). The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings. (R. E. Palmer, Ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Han, B.-C. (2009). The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering. London: Polity.
Harjo, J. (2002). How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Jardine, D. W. (2020). Things Reveal Themselves Passing Away. In M. Bussey, and Mozzini-Alister, Camila (Ed.), Phenomenologies of Grace: The Body, Embodiment and Transformative Futures (pp. 123-135). New York: Palgrave.
- ‘Ajana Pathik’ is Bengali for the ‘unknown traveller’ who might arrive on your doorstep, perhaps for dinner. As metaphor, it represents the divine. ↑
