In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and The War on Crime, by Michael W. Flamm

Philosophy

/4 April 11, 2017 Book Review: In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and The War on Crime by Michael W. Flamm blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/04/11/book-review-in-the-heat-of-the-summer-the-new-york-riots-of-1964and-the-war-on-crime-by-michael-w-flamm/ In In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and The War on Crime, Michael W. Flamm draws on personal narratives and archival evidence to outline the development of the New York Riots of 1964 - instigated by the shooting of the fifteenyear-old black teenager, James Powell, by a white police officer - and their wider repercussions on the social and political landscapes of 1960s America. Resonating with current discussions on racism and police brutality, this book will prove an inspiring read for those questioning the relationship between discourses of law and order and the reproduction of collective fear, writes Eraldo S. Santos. In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and The War on Crime. Michael W. Flamm. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2017. Find this book: In Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York, no plaque indicates the grave in which James Powell was buried more than half a century ago. The fifteen-year-old black teenager, entombed near African American luminaries such as James Baldwin and Malcolm X, lies forgotten, and many today have probably never heard his name. But his homicide-Powell was shot dead on 16 July 1964 by Thomas Gilligan, an off-duty white police officer-and the political events that succeeded it were responsible for significant upheaval in the Civil Rights Movement and, more broadly, in post-1960s US politics. In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and The War on Crime tells us how Powell's death triggered major civil unrest in New York, shifting the already widespread call for 'law and order' within US public discourse to the centre of the debate on state policies designed to fight crime. Michael W. Flamm is already known for his research on the US political culture of the 1960s as well as for his studies on debates between liberals and conservatives. In the Heat of the Summer continues more than two decades of reflection on this complex moment in US history. In the book, questions previously raised in Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s are discussed using a different and fruitful strategy. Here, Flamm elects a very precise cluster of historical 2/4 events to put under scrutiny-the first 'long, hot summer' of the 1960s unleashed by Powell's death-and analyses its main consequences: the beginning of 'an age of law and order' in US domestic politics, which would galvanise the so-called 'War on Crime' and the long-lasting crisis of US liberalism (286). The result is impressive. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book may be of interest not only to academic scholars working on related topics, but also to general readers interested in US and African American history. Archival materials, biographies, memoirs, newspaper articles, official reports, interviews and correspondence with reporters, activists, officers and participating eyewitnesses: all are mobilised in order to write a day-by-day history of the New York riots of July 1964. Exploring the interstice in which history and story meet, Flamm weaves all these elements into a detailed, sometimes anecdotal, narrative. From the participants' height, body shape and facial features, to their life stories and career aspirations, everything deserves the historian's attention, who describes carefully the unfolding of events, taking into consideration 'a broad range of personal perspectives-black and white, young and old, Christian and Jewish, angry and fearful as well as radical, liberal, and conservative' (7). Image Credit: Demonstrators carrying photographs of Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan march on 125th Street near Seventh Avenue during the Harlem Riots of 1964 (Dick DeMarsico, New York World Telegraph & Sun, Wikipedia Public Domain) The book goes far beyond a simple reconstruction of the events that took place in New York between 16 and 23 July 1964, however. In Chapters One to Nine, Flamm references both the contributing factors and the political consequences of the uprisings. Flashbacks to the urbanisation in Central Harlem (Chapter Two) and Bedford-Stuyvesant (Chapter Seven) contextualise the social-economic situation in the places where civil unrest began. Chapter Two looks furthermore into previous moments of civil disorder in Harlem, such as the riots of 1935 during the Great Depression and of 1943 during World War II. 3/4 From Chapters Ten to Twelve, the narrative's cadence accelerates. Here, the focus moves to how 'law and order' became a central issue during the two subsequent presidential elections: the first one won by the then-Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, some months after the fateful events in New York, and the second, won by Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon in November 1968. Flamm analyses the way in which, following the events of 1964, personal security and law enforcement progressively became the major concern of US citizens and how these issues were explored by both conservatives and liberals during local and presidential campaigns. The conservative role in this important shift in focus from other domestic issues towards public safety should not be ignored, Flamm contends. By accusing the Civil Rights Movement of weakening public respect for law and authority, conservative discourse nullified the differences between nonviolent civil disobedience, civil unrest and crime, insisting that increasing crime rates were the sign of liberal governments' failure in ensuring law compliance. The episodes of civil disorder were said to be the indication of how 'racial integration' and 'permissive liberalism' could be harmful to public safety. Liberal counter-discourse, in turn, consisted of the defence that both urban crime and civil unrest could not be understood without taking into consideration what Cleveland Robinson, a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, called in 1964 'the whole social structure' (133): precarious housing, low-funded schools and segregated education, a lack of jobs due to automation and police brutality as well as consequent hopelessness and despair. Only an attack on these 'root causes' of noncompliance and unrest could enable an efficient fight against crime. The 'War on Poverty' declared by Johnson was said to be, in this context, the fairest and most effective way of doing so. As Flamm shows, Johnson's discourse still sounded convincing in 1964, when he won the election over Senator Barry Goldwater-the man who triggered in his acceptance speech to the Republican Convention the call for law and order. However, as street criminality rose over the following years despite the War on Poverty's policies, the liberal stance lost its soundness. By mobilising anxiety provoked by increasing crime rates, conservative attacks won a new dimension: Johnson's 'Great Society' programme started to be held responsible for the deviation of federal funds from issues such as public safety. The figure of the 'undeserving poor'-associated predominantly with the urban black criminal- started to permeate the public imagination and discourse more and more, leading some sectors of the population to the conclusion that, by rewarding noncompliance, the War on Poverty led to (and did not help to defend against) more criminality. It was thanks to this scenario that Nixon's motto could gain popularity: 'Freedom from fear is a basic right of every American citizen' (285). For more than fifty years, 'law and order' would remain the US political lingua franca, spoken by citizens of different races, classes and ideologies: a language whose syntax would offer for decades, as Flamm briefly shows in the book's epilogue, cohesion and coherence for both parties' discourse in their fight for power. The focus on the liberal and conservative stances overshadows in some moments the role and importance of more radical interlocutors in debates on racial and economic injustice. More attention could be given, moreover, to the specificities of Johnson's 4/4 antipoverty programme as well as its racial implications. Such reservations do not, nonetheless, obscure the book's merits. By exploring the tensions between aspirations for 'social order' and 'social justice' (285), it helps put the history of the freedom struggle in the US in a new light. It also offers myriad materials that can be enlightening in the context of current discussions on the new dynamics of racism, the persistence of police brutality as well as the effectiveness and fairness of state policies designed to reduce criminality. Perhaps more remarkably, it is a reminder of how putting into circulation discourses on order and personal safety are one of the most effective strategies in producing and reproducing collective fear. From Harlem to Ferguson and beyond, law and order's heritage still haunts us. In the Heat of the Summer would prove an inspiring read for those who fight against it. Eraldo S. Santos is a PhD candidate at University of Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne. His doctoral research focuses on the history of the concept of 'civil disobedience'. He analyses how it was reformulated in the context of the revival of political obligation theories in the US during the 1960s and 1970s. The project is funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES, Brazil). Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.


Philosophy

OPINION ARTICLE published: 22 November 2013 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00870 Can enlightenment be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior? No, and (a qualified) Yes Jake H. Davis1† and David R. Vago2*† 1 Department of Philosophy, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA 2 Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA *Correspondence: email@example.com †These authors have contributed equally to this work. Edited by: Zoran Josipovic, New York University, USA Keywords: mindfulness, meditation, awareness, enlightenment, consciousness, neurophenomenology A NEUROSCIENCE OF ENLIGHTENMENT? The field of contemplative science is rapidly growing and integrating into the basic neurosciences, psychology, clinical sciences, and society-at-large. Yet the majority of current research in the contemplative sciences has been divorced from the soteriological context from which these meditative practices originate and has focused instead on clinical applications with goals of stress reduction and psychotherapeutic health. In the existing research on health outcomes of mindfulness-based clinical interventions, for example, there have been almost no attempts to scientifically investigate the goal of enlightenment. This is a serious oversight, given that such profound transformation across ethical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive domains are taken to be the natural outcome and principle aim of mindfulness practice in the traditional Buddhist contexts from which these practices are derived. If short-term interventions as short as a few sessions are now beginning to produce neuroplastic changes (Tang et al., 2010; Zeidan et al., 2010; Xue et al., 2011), it may be that even in secular contexts, practitioners are already developing states and traits that are associated with progress toward enlightenment. In order to carefully assess the potential effects of meditative interventions it is of singular importance to ask whether enlightenment can be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior. NO: ENLIGHTENMENT NEEDS SPECIFICATION Unfortunately, the first answer to this question is "No." The term ''enlightenment" is an extraordinarily imprecise construct. Using the term enlightenment or even the term more native to Buddhist traditions, "awakening" (bodhi), as if it referred to a single outcome either privileges one conception over others or else assumes that there is some commonality among the traditional goals of diverse contemplative traditions. There are deep disagreements over the nature of the goal between and even within various Buddhist schools. Scientific investigations cannot assume that there is any commonality among the transformative changes referred to as "kensho," "stream entry," "realizing the nature of mind," and so on, that various Buddhist traditions take as various stages of awakening. Empirical investigations of these constructs can only proceed with reference to the specific psychological and behavioral outcomes described in the native discourse of a specific tradition (see Lutz et al., 2007). Because we do not have space here to offer detailed examinations of the theoretical context and neurobiological characterization of enlightenment as it is specified in multiple Buddhist traditions, we focus here on one specific example, that of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of the Burmese meditation master Mahasi Sayadaw. Nonetheless, by applying more generally the approach we adopt here for this tradition, claims for commonality or differences between psychological states and traits associated with various traditional goals can be operationalized as testable hypotheses. While some Buddhist traditions understand the goal of nibbāna just as a cessation of unwholesome mental states, Mahasi Sayadaw maintains that nibbāna "can be seen inwardly as the cessation of all phenomena" (Sayadaw, 1992). This Theravāda Buddhist tradition distinguishes between a "path" moment and the immediately subsequent "fruition" state, which can later be repeated and cultivated. As Khema (1994) describes it, "the path moment doesn't have any thinking or feeling in it. . . While the meditative absorptions bring with them a feeling of oneness, of unity, the path moment does not even contain that. The moment of fruition, subsequent to the path moment, is the understood experience and results in a turned-around vision of existence. . . The new understanding recognizes every thought, every feeling as stress (dukkha)" (Khema, 1994). Of particular note here is how the "fruition" attainment (phala-samāpatti) of experiencing or "seeing" cessation that results from insight practice is sharply distinguished by these Theravâda teachers from various results of concentration, including the cessation of consciousness characteristic of the concentrative absorption nirodha samāpatti (Griffiths, 1986), as well as from secular goals of stress reduction, and also from other Buddhist conceptions. For instance, according to some schools of Tibetan Buddhism, an enlightened awareness "sees" all phenomena as truly beyond suffering, as an inseparable emptiness-luminosity-bliss state, not different in nature from awareness itself. Given the differences between various competing conceptions of awakening, one scientific approach to tracing enlightenment would be to use the tools of social psychology to investigate which states and traits are valued in a particular community. For instance, recent work in moral psychology suggests how value judgments of people and practices as either enlightened or unenlightened could be traced to affective reactions of admiration and disgust (Rozin et al., 1999; Schnall et al., www.frontiersin.org November 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 870 | 1 Vago and Davis Neural Correlates of Enlightenment? 2008; Brandt and Reyna, 2011; Schnall and Roper, 2011). Some of the most virulent disagreements over what counts as genuine awakening occur between closely related practice traditions, such as the debates between various Theravāda Buddhist traditions in Burma over which states are to count as realizations of nibbāna and which are instead to be counted (merely) as states of deep concentration. Surveying these debates, Sharf (1995) concludes "there is no public consensus as to the application of terms that supposedly refer to discreet experiential states within the vipassanā movement" (Sharf, 1995, p. 265). It is important in this regard to separate two sorts of disagreement, the one centering on which states are taken to be worthy of the title of awakening, the other on the accuracy of self-reports of experiential states that may reflect markers of progress. Even within communities where there is consensus on which states/traits deserve to be called enlightened, there can be disagreement over whether or not particular individuals have attained these. In practice, as Sharf (1995) details, Buddhist teachers do not accept self-reports of meditative experience at face value, but instead assess whether a particular reported state should be counted as a case of realization depending on practice history, the manner and emotional state with which the report is given, and retrospective observations of behavior. This kind of skepticism is emphasized in Buddhist theory (Olendzki, 2010) and also recent cognitive science (Clark, 1997; Knauper and Turner, 2003; Mehling et al., 2009) suggesting unreliability of self-report, due to affective biases of attention and memory, as well as poor validity and generalizability. Fortunately, objective measures of such affective biases of perception and cognition have been developed (Elliott et al., 2010), and recent work suggests that certain forms of meditation practice may function precisely by attenuating such biases (Vago and Nakamura, 2011; Garland et al., 2012; Van Vugt et al., 2012; Kang et al., 2013). This leads us to a qualified optimism for studies drawing on a nuanced understanding of the specific traditional context of a specific conception of enlightenment and leveraging objective measures of experiential acuity. A QUALIFIED YES: RECENT PROGRESS AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES By integrating evidence from neuroimaging with evidence of behavioral transformations specified in particular traditional descriptions of meditation practices, some important obstacles may be mitigated. For instance, in an adaptation of the Mahasi method developed by Shinzen Young, practitioners use the label "Gone" to refer to the "fruition" experience of cessation described above. According to Young, this kind of experience is not uncommon for advanced practitioners (Young, 2013). Indeed, in a recent study conducted with adept practitioners of this system, two subjects reported having a temporary experience of cessation while in the scanner environment. The methodology was unique in this experiment given that button presses were used to indicate temporal markers associated with peak level of clarity or contact with a sustained period of "rest" that follows ordinary experience of a particular sensory object passing or vanishing from conscious awareness. Using traditional methods of fMRI analyses, we were able to investigate the functional correlates of the deeper experiences of cessation in comparison to the more common experience of the passing away of a sensory object. The preliminary results suggest a number of very unique functional changes in particular brain regions that were similar in activation for "rest" in the other meditators, but the magnitude of the hemodynamic change from baseline was much larger. For example, the frontal polar cortex (Brodmann area-10), a specialized area for higher cognitive functions (Koechlin et al., 1999; Ramnani and Owen, 2004), showed dramatic increases in functional activity (>50% BOLD signal change) that were not as large for the other meditators. As interesting as this preliminary finding is, we can not simply say we found the neural correlate of cessation, but rather a potential neural marker for the experience of "Gone" in Young's system of training that is relative to the baseline state of mind wandering in this individual. Because of the limitations associated with traditional analyses, we are currently attempting to explore this state using more novel methods that do not require the state of interest to be contrasted with a state of no interest, such as state space analyses [see Janoos et al. (2011)]. One major problem in using neuroimaging methodology is that it is typically dependent upon the general linear model (GLM), a convenient method that flexibly allows for both linear regression and ANOVA; however, the model relies on assumptions that may not hold in all situations. For example, fMRI has a poor temporal resolution limited by a hemodynamic response function for each brain response or "state" that is approximately 12 s in duration; any attempts at exploring discrete states within this timeframe is likely to be influenced by "bleeding over" of hemodynamic activity from the previous state. Furthermore, another limitation of the GLM is its dependence on creating a contrast between states of interest and some other state of no interest. The assumptions and limitations are likely to fail in attempts to capture the subtle changes associated with normative, but transitory, states of enlightenment. Nonetheless, important progress has been made. Some studies investigating long-term meditators with mixed traditions have attempted to map correlational neurophysiology with first-person experiences of clarity, somatic awareness, nonduality, and mind-wandering in adept meditators (Lutz et al., 2004; Josipovic et al., 2012; Garrison et al., 2013; Hagerty et al., 2013; Kerr et al., 2013; Vago et al., 2013). Indeed, neural correlates of particular meditative states show a developmental trajectory, such that there is a similar pattern of development regardless of cultural background or technique early on in meditative naïve practitioners, but that such markers change throughout expertise and experience (e.g., Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007). More recently, attempts have been made to operationalize meditation in very specific contexts of automaticity (Travis, 2011) and non-duality (Josipovic, 2010). Some studies have focused on expert practitioners with the assumption that unique neurophysiology amongst these meditators (in comparison to meditation naïve control subjects) may point to particular biomarkers of advancement toward end-goals of practice. For example, Lutz et al. (2004) found gamma band electroencephalography (EEG) power over lateral frontal and parietal electrode sites Frontiers in Psychology | Consciousness Research November 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 870 | 2 Vago and Davis Neural Correlates of Enlightenment? to correlate (r = 0.69) with self-reported clarity in expert Tibetan practitioners of "non-referential compassion" (Tibetan: dmigs med snying rje), suggesting a particular mechanism for increased phenomenal intensity. More recently, a number of studies have also found gamma band activity across different electrode sites to correlate with particular meditative states across different contemplative traditions (Lehmann et al., 2001; Vialatte et al., 2009; Cahn et al., 2010, 2013; Rubik, 2011; BerkovichOhana et al., 2012; Ferrarelli et al., 2013; Kozhevnikov et al., 2013), some suggesting increased gamma power correlates with level of experience and may be a marker of plasticity that remains during restful or even states of deep sleep (Ferrarelli et al., 2013). CONCLUSIONS Scientific investigation of mindfulness and meditation have already arguably advanced the field of neuroscience and specifically our knowledge of the brain (e.g., "resting states") in the context of functional neuroimaging [see Holzel et al. (2011); Vago and Silbersweig (2012) for review]. Once biomarkers are established for progress along the paths outlined in particular traditions, these can be used as feedback (e.g., Garrison et al., 2013), or for therapeutic targets in the context of neuropsychiatry. It is therefore, necessary to responsibly unpack traditional constructs into common psychological and neurocognitive terms that can correlate with first-person experience with some consistency, but without unwittingly dismissing the deepest and most fundamental features of the practices from which they originate. We are, in the end, cautiously optimistic that progress can be made on well-defined projects in this area that integrate behavior and phenomenology with neuroimaging evidence, but not without a careful consideration of the methodological obstacles. Responsible scientific investigations of enlightenment can proceed only on the basis of rigorous understanding of particular experiential states or behavioral traits within a particular tradition as part of a whole value system, embedded in many other aspects of the models employed in that specific tradition of how the mind works and how awakening progresses. REFERENCES Berkovich-Ohana, A., Glicksohn, J., and Goldstein, A. (2012). Mindfulness-induced changes in gamma band activity-implications for the default mode network, self-reference and attention. Clin. Neurophysiol. 123, 700–710. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2011.07.048 Brandt, M. J., and Reyna, C. (2011). The chain of being a hierarchy of morality. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 6, 428–446. doi: 10.1177/1745691611414587 Brefczynski-Lewis, J. A., Lutz, A., Schaefer, H. S., Levinson, D. B., and Davidson, R. J. (2007). Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 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Cogn. 19, 597–605. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014 Received: 15 October 2013; accepted: 31 October 2013; published online: 22 November 2013. Citation: Davis JH and Vago DR (2013) Can enlightenment be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior? No, and (a qualified) Yes. Front. Psychol. 4:870. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00870 This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Copyright © 2013 Davis and Vago. This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Frontiers in Psychology | Consciousness Research November 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 870 |


Why is there Nothing Rather than Something An essay in the comparative metaphysic of non-being

Philosophy

This essay in the comparative metaphysic of nothingness begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the converse question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral 'zero' (ÅÅ«nya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g., 'In the beginning was neither non-being nor being: what was there, bottomless deep?' RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, etc., receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools. The present analysis follows the function of negation/the negative copula, nÃ£n, and dialetheia in grammar and logic, then moves onto ontologies of non-existence and extinction and further suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After a discussion of interests in being (existence), non-being and nothingness in contemporary metaphysics, the article examines Heideggerâs extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1929 inaugural Freiburg lecture, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', published later as 'What is Metaphysics?' The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Metaphysical Nihilism.

/27/13 10:09 PMWhy Is There Nothing, Rather Than Something Page 1 of 2http://r.hodges.home.comcast.net/~r.hodges/WhyIsThereNothing.htm ©2008, R. Hodges Why Is There Nothing, Rather Than Something A wheel of thirty spokes turns on the hole at its center A pot is useful for the emptiness within What Is is good because of what Is not Tao Te Ching Why does everyone ask "How are you"- Why does no one ever ask "How are you not"? Rumi The most important word in any language is "No". Every Yes shines forth only against the darkness of the No it is the shadow of. What part of "No" do you (e.g. I) not understand? Faith. Love. Hope. Faith, as is said, is blind. To trust in what one does not see, does not know. Blind faith is common; conscious faith is to not even wish to see. To accept not to know. To not see is far better than the blindness of seeing only what one wishes to see. To pray with faith is to turn one's back to the known world, to face the unknown, the unseen-better not to name it, perhaps it is nothing that exists, only a direction in which to face. But sometimes names seem necessary, even though names themselves are always only empty. This toward which I pray-name it God if you wish-this God remains unseen, He in turn has His back turned toward the one who prays. To whom is God praying? What is it that God has faith in, that He trusts but does not see? This question cannot be answered; but the asking of it establishes the likeness between myself and God, whose image I am (or vice versa). Credo, ergo sum. Credo ergo est. The prayer of faith is an act in the first person singular. Love, it is also said, is blind. The blindness of love is different-it is to need something, which obscures the actuality of what is loved. Needy love is common; conscious love is to not even wish to possess. When there is possession, it kills love. To pray in love is to face the Other, the Otherness which is beautiful in its promise and in its unpossessedness, to face the Other across the infinite emptiness that exists between all singular beings. The prayer of love is an act in the second person singular, it is to turn one's back on all other others. One says only "You"-not "Thou" which presumes a claim upon a pre-existing intimacy. In conscious love, there is no reaching across the emptiness, no attempt to lay hold of the Other which would in any case be impossible. One only contemplates the face of the Other, and looking without touching beholds there a reflection of one's own 1/27/13 10:09 PMWhy Is There Nothing, Rather Than Something Page 2 of 2http://r.hodges.home.comcast.net/~r.hodges/WhyIsThereNothing.htm face, which otherwise one cannot see. The question is asked: Whom do You pray love to? What do You need? Hope, let us coin a phrase, is passive. Passive hope is common; to hope consciously is to work, which means to engender a profound passivity that renounces all false effort. To pray with hope is to turn one's back to the past, which is dead even though it lives on in all that one is; to face only what is to come; grammatically speaking not the future perfect but the present progressive-not what will come at some unknown time, or may never come, but what is coming in at the moment NOW, through which everything is always coming in. To wait, without expectation, without demand. The present future, in which whatever is happening NOW is sacred-call it the Will of God if you need a name; we do not know God's will except by whatever happens. What is prayed for is that the impossible shall come in, inshal'lah. Who prays the prayer of hope? Call it We, first person plural, because unlike faith and love, We hope together, face together in the same direction.