Soap: Art of Failure
Sitting on her desk is a black notebook filled with photographs of decaying buildings in Havana, Cuba, extinct parrots housed behind glass in museum specimen collections, and architectural designs for amphibious houses (houses that can float when floods occur). Beneath that book — but in direct reference to it — is a sheaf of papers that is a novel.
It is a novel about two people falling in love in front of a pile of broken pianos. About what it might mean to have the sky swept clean of birds and the ocean cleared of fish and have to create them again holographically from archived footage and specimen collections. It is a book meant to make people feel the loss of the natural world — and the weight of our current species extinction crisis — partly by understanding it through the loss and longing of a human relationship. It is a book that begins with two epigraphs:
“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.” –– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
“Ua iloa i vaʻa lelea. / One family.” — Samoan proverb
It is a book she spent eight years writing in the scraps of time she had between teaching and changing diapers and reading ten thousand iterations of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. After finishing and sending it to close friends and a celebrated New York author and editor, she receives the very painful feedback that the book is, in fact, a failure.
~
The etymology of the word failure tells us this: from the Old French falir, “come to an end; err, make a mistake; let down, disappoint.” But here’s what’s interesting: if you look back further, you see the word shares a root with Middle Persian škarwidan, “to stumble, stagger,” and the Greek sphallein, “to bring or throw down.” How different those meanings are. Failure: to end. And failure: to stumble.
~
Failure: to stumble is why she wants you to consider for a moment the work of poet Francis Ponge.
Ponge is perhaps best known for his poems of things — poems such as “The Candle” or “The Oyster” — in which, under his exquisite gaze, familiar objects are disheveled in the light of imagination and seen in entirely new ways. She loves the strange and alluring anthropomorphism in these poems (trees are frantic to speak, an orange is bitterly aware of its juicing). And often recalls Ponge when encountering these objects — when turning, for example, an old crystal doorknob (see Ponge’s “The Pleasures of the Door”).
But of his books, it’s Ponge’s Soap she turns to when she feels most demoralized, most lost. Because Ponge’s Soap is not just a document of soap. It is also a map of failures.
~
Ponge’s Soap “dossier,” as he called it, took more than twenty-three years to complete. It’s a slim volume with a guileless title. It’s not a book you’d toss in your bag to read while splayed out on the pebbled beaches of the Côte d’Azur, French 75 in hand. Nevertheless, it’s a book she would think to look for if she woke up to find her house on fire.
Why, of all subjects, soap, one might ask? Ponge began writing Soap while working for the French Resistance and continued to work on it off and on during the war. He says, “It was because we were, then, cruelly, unthinkably, absurdly deprived of soap (as we were, at the same time, of several essential things: bread, coal, potatoes), that I loved it, appreciated it, savoured it as though posthumously in my memory, and hoped to recreate it in poetry.” Soap was that object that floated in his psyche. Soap was a symbol.
Earlier, she mentioned Soap is a map of failures. In fact, it maps its failures as artifact: in Soap, Ponge compiles drafts of the same passages that he has tried over and over to write, often mentioning where he is in space and time while he attempts — yet again — to set down the work he envisions Soap to be. Yet Soap continues to elude him; it “slips between [his] fingers.”
Ponge includes in the text of Soap false starts, personal admonitions (“Develop this a little”), directives to “crumple and throw away every note or rough draft.” At one point, Ponge decides to send the manuscript to his good friend Albert Camus, whose response to the work is pointedly unfavorable. What does Ponge do with this less-than-lukewarm response? He includes the letter in the text of Soap, of course.
What is incredible is the voracity of a mind intent on capturing a vision — if each attempt is a failure, then he fails differently, inventively each time. He fails in a way that makes one reconsider the very definition of failure.
Ponge’s Soap is not just a document of soap. It is also an argument for failure. Failure not as end point, but as process, as dogged, audacious, unrelenting, surprising invention.
And what happens if we think of failure not as end point, not as detour, but as a different kind of unfolding? Failure as experiment? As practice? What if instead of saying we have failed we say that we are failuring? What if a practice of imagination is often also a practice of failure?
~
Her daughter has completed a week at “The Lost City of Atlantis” camp. In which she has constructed a small aquaponics system that includes a design of her own Atlantis and its inhabitants. A fishbowl aquarium with living plants to wrap roots around the city and a small electric pump to aerate the water — the whole thing is designed to create a self-sustaining habitat for plants and guppies.
All week long, the campers worked on their Atlantises, and every night she and the other parents got the report. Mosaics were being constructed around the fishbowl with glass gemstones and pottery shards. Figures and animals were being molded from clay, along with small-scale architectural marvels: hidden chambers, trap doors. When she goes to pick her daughter up from camp each afternoon, the sculptures unfurl from the tables — organic, monumental. The excitement in the workshop is palpable.
She didn’t know what to expect when she picked up her daughter on the last day of camp. But when she arrived, she had to laugh. Each Atlantis was utterly different. Each was utterly original. Most were more than three feet tall. One girl had forgone the idea of a living system and simply filled her fishbowl with water and cups of glitter. Her father tottered out to the car while the glitter bunched and swirled like a living creature pummeling the bowl. “How are we supposed to get this home, honey?” he said, but his voice was not without a note of dazed astonishment.
Her daughter’s Atlantis is not an Atlantis with cups of glitter — her daughter had wanted the fish too badly. The water is clear; two guppies are swimming in it. The mosaics glint from clay in lozenges of turquoise and cobalt. When they get home, they balance the whole wild monstrosity on her dresser and plug it in. The pump turns on, the water trickles like a fountain, and the guppies happily mouth their little Os. Late at night, she can hear the sound of water dripping in her daughter’s room, and she thinks of what it means for her daughter to have manifested something that had only a few days before existed entirely in her imagination.
But when her daughter wakes early the next morning, she finds one of her fish — Flutter — belly up at the top of the water. Her daughter is inconsolable. They call a friend who has a freshwater aquarium. And they gratefully take the remaining living fish over to the friend’s house and release it. Then, they perform a funeral outside by the Seville orange tree. Last week, they’d been painting rocks using their Lotería game cards as models. Her daughter chooses two rocks for the grave: LA LUNA (the moon) and EL CORAZÓN (the heart).
After examining the aquarium — the pump, the filter, the temperature of the water — her daughter declares the aquarium does not work the way she dreamed it would, the way it is supposed to. The Lost City is a failure.
~
Her daughter is too young for Soap. But what she can understand — at least somewhat — are the films of Jean Painlevé.
Jean Painlevé’s films generally defy genre: created in the 1930s, they are neither science documentaries nor dramas, but hybrid creations meant for both academic and general audiences. With titles like Shrimp Stories, The Love Life of the Octopus, and How Some Jellyfish Are Born, Painlevé’s films reveal the hidden worlds of such disparate subjects as vampire bats, shipworms, hermaphrodite mollusks, sea urchins, and clumps of “underwater vegetables” that are, in fact, crabs strolling about in seaweed camouflage.
Her daughter shares her love for marine life, aquaria, and invertebrates of all varieties — especially striped pyjama squid and sea stars. When they make a nest of blankets on the couch and she shows her daughter Painlevé’s Sea Urchins, she also shows her photos of Painlevé’s studio. The tanks and lighting, all of the strange contraptions that he had to envision and invent in order to create his films.
In The Seahorse — one of the first films to use footage shot underwater, Painlevé enclosed his camera in an exquisitely designed waterproof box. The enormous glass aquariums he used to film “shattered on two occasions — once exploding with such force that it flattened a crew member against the wall.” Spare parts were corroded by artificial seawater, and when, after waiting thirty-six hours without sleeping, the film crew missed the delivery of the first seahorse, Painlevé created an electrical device to shock himself so he wouldn’t miss another. All of that was just for one film. Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon — his partner both in life and in the films —made more than two hundred.
Her admiration of Painlevé hearkens back to the reason that she wanted to study biology in the first place. His desire to capture processes beyond our capacity to see or recognize them (who in the course of their daily life would have been able to view the birth of a jellyfish? The eerily beautiful courtship ballet of sea slugs? The almost hallucinogenic growth of a crystal?) Surreal, incognito, dizzyingly defiant of simple explanation, delighting in both the wonderous and repugnant — Painlevé made us see that science is indeed fiction, the unimaginable real.
But more — his investigations didn’t just pull back the curtain on what was more or less invisible to humans. As James Leo Cahill tells us in his book Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé, the films of Jean Painlevé developed “a mode of looking and a surreal practice of cinematic encounter that, in turning its attention to animal life and nonhuman world, also critically altered conceptions of human life.” In a talk, Cahill goes on to say, “[Painlevé] developed a practice of anthropomorphism without anthropocentrism such that it asks viewers to consider what animals might teach us about being human differently rather than simply how they might reflect our all too human values and foibles.”
Painlevé has been described as “[slipping] through the cracks of film history.” With the exception of L’Hippocampe (The Seahorse), his films were never commercial successes. They didn’t reach wide distribution — they were considered too volatile and strange. He was scorned by his scientific colleagues; some were outraged at the very idea that cinema could be a valuable tool for science. But it’s always Painlevé she thinks of when she and her daughter find themselves practically glued against the glass of The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Warden Aquarium. How patient you must be to see what’s actually in front of you. How many times you have to practice seeing. Teach me to be human differently may not be the first thing one thinks about when staring through the glass at garden eels, or a seahorse looping its tail around a slim piece of seagrass. But maybe it should be.
~
In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam argues that “the social worlds we inhabit, after all, as so many thinkers have reminded us, are not inevitable; they were not always bound to turn out this way, and what’s more, in the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been discarded and, to cite Foucault again, ‘disqualified.’”
Where and how do ideas move? Where and how do they slip from one mind into another, one image speaking to another’s deepest longings or lonelinesses? How are ideas lost or found?
She can’t stop thinking about these small vignettes: a manuscript of soap, a film about sea urchins. As if they are worlds in miniature. As if she is walking again through that room of Atlantises. As if the imagination and its processes are on display.
She can’t stop thinking that a culture allergic to failure is also a culture allergic to imagination.
~
After the Lost City is unplugged, her partner encourages their daughter to keep trying to figure out what went wrong. He tells her how Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
While the quote is generally accurate (“Results! [. . .] I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”), the thousands of experiments with different materials relate not to Edison’s work on the light bulb, as many assume, but instead on his later work with storage batteries.
Light bulbs or storage batteries; of course, this distinction hardly matters when a dream is dead.
As Bachelard tells us: “Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.”
Perhaps it is important to mention at this point that Edison did not, in fact, invent the light bulb. He simply refined it — trying filament after filament after filament — until at last, one — made of carbonized bamboo — was able to hold the light much longer than all the rest.
And isn’t that what we’re looking for? Discovering the things that make it possible to see deeper, to see differently? To feel that one belongs to something unimaginable, a moment that holds the light longer than the rest?
~
This is what she loves most about the work of visual artist Miyanaga Aiko: you are not certain you can trust what you are seeing. A ghostly key resides inside a nearly transparent book; both are encased in a block of clear resin. Other blocks of resin contain different apparitions: clocks, shoes, keys inside a suitcase, a chair. Each sculpture is devoid of color, recognizable only by shape and texture, like a frozen breath or cloud. In the “waiting for awakening – clock,” ornate minute and hour hands are just barely visible, scrim written in air.
You know the kind of art she means. The type that situates you in a different experience of time. The kind of thing that makes your whole body crane forward, some kind of electrical circuit stuttering its current from the tips of your toes to your amygdala. That object you now want to possess because it’s thrown open some kind of door that’s shoved your depressed, disillusioned self back to curiosity, back to life.
And how does one make such a thing, a thing to defy seeing? Miyanaga’s sculptures are made of naphthalene — the substance used for mothballs. She encloses naphthalene forms in blocks of resin, and drills a tiny hole that allows oxygen to enter. Over time, the naphthalene sublimates. Surfaces frost over, tiny crystals appear, some of the objects fragment and then disintegrate/disappear completely. Miyanaga says they “shift not as fast as melting ice, or as slowly as a weathering Greek sculpture.” Forms that are white will eventually turn clear — the moment, Miyanaga describes, they “awaken- from sleep.” Miyanaga’s sculptures contain shoes, clocks, suitcases, chairs —“impression[s] of something already used, something that holds time.” Her sculptures transform the real, the ordinary, into the unimaginable.
The sublimated objects fail to hold their shapes. But this failure is failure as the possibility of time’s reframing. Failure as an alternative to chronological time. (If naphthalene was again placed in the mold, the shapes would reappear, then disintegrate again, over and over.)
It’s all she realizes she’s ever wanted. To make something that keeps someone up at night, their heart buzzing like a bird’s. After she first saw Miyanaga’s work, she lay awake on her couch thinking of alternative modes of time — modes in which pasts and futures might exist simultaneously or inversely or in a way that defies language and description. And art that might capture that. That such an imagining might at first seem to be a failure due to its nonsensical and counterintuitive presentation. Such a vision might, at first glance, appear to be a failure because it seems an unwieldy, unrecognizable, even somewhat spectral mess. But that such a creation might later be understood as a breakthrough, a revelation.
~
Her favorite writing workshop she’s ever attended was taught by Sueyeun Juliette Lee and titled “That Forward Trajectory: Poems from the Future.” She remembers the night Lee taught the workshop she showed up despite battling a bad cold.
The required readings were like unwrapping a star on your birthday. An NPR article on predictive technologies. Raymond Williams’s chapter “The City and the Future.” FM-2030’s Are You a Transhuman, and more. A rewatching of La Jetée. She reads notes she’d scrawled across one of Lee’s poems: Human possibility can expand through different convolutions of language and other modes of “presence” and “inhabiting.”
In that workshop and in a subsequent interview, Lee spoke of the role of imagination: “The speculative is the only way we can have a vision for the future, because the circumstances of our collective lives right now strive to tell us the world can never be any other way. To have fantasy, to dream, to have righteousness or hope, we must open ourselves to the speculative, we must summon its transgressive-ness and non-conformity into us. I always felt that to really be an artist of any stripe was to rehabilitate the human imagination, to intervene in it. And what we see when we see injustice is a failure of the imagination.”
It was partly because of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s workshop that she began to write a novel inspired by a speculative future — one in which the future of species loss could be more directly experienced and imagined.
~
In the book she’s written that is her failuring is a scene where the two lovers first see footage of the sun rising over the Rioja mountains and disturbing a flock of migrating flamingos that lift their wings in the air. At the time of the viewing (set in the future), flamingos have been extinct for many years, and the recently discovered footage is rare:
“Somewhere around the middle of the lecture, the lights were dimmed to stream some archived 3D footage from the Laguna Brava Nature Preserve, a saltwater lagoon high in the Argentinian Andes. A landscape in muddy, predawn colors rose before us, mist swathing the landscape like steam rising from a rag soaked in boiling water. Salt crusts flanked the lake edges in ribbons of pale and gritty gray-brown, colors that corresponded precisely to that particular sensation when life feels flat and dull and has the texture of wet cardboard. It seemed a desolate expanse, scrubbed of life and color.
Then suddenly, it changed.
We watched as sunrise spilled over the distant orange and blue edges of the La Rioja Mountains and small ripples on the lake began to coruscate with sunlight. There was absolute silence, the light advancing quickly, the scene panning to the left. That’s when we saw them. Hundreds of Andean flamingos, previously hidden from view, lifted their wings with the dawn in a great wave of pink.
When I saw her, often when I think of her, I think of that moment. How everyone in that darkened auditorium gasped. How she slipped her hand into mine and clutched it to her breastbone, the air around me seeming to rush beneath my skin. We stared down into those beating wings and I felt a sudden wave of dizziness, my heart thudding from a long way off, as if it had been wrapped in cotton and set adrift on some distant continent.”
Sometimes when she finds herself awake at night, she thinks of this moment. A moment whose making created some different space inside of her. Like her friend describing some essays he loved — that somehow you’re looking around like you do every day, but suddenly your eye catches some impossible shiny object. Some secret bright thing.
It mattered that much to her — the idea of having people feel the weight of species loss. Those hours spent. That maybe she doesn’t know now what that failure will become but trusts that that space will engender something. Perhaps this essay. Perhaps something else.
Because to think of failure differently — as unmaking and remaking, not knowing, and dismantling — may be part of a creative process that yields more surprising and generous ways of being in the world. To see imagination as a practice to be honored and cultivated. To understand that part of the reason we are living our current sixth extinction and climate crisis is perhaps because we have failed both in our practices of failure and imagination.
So what is the alternative? Halberstam encourages us to ask. To consider failure as process means to consider a mode that revels in detours, celebrates the unexpected, upsets hierarchical and/or established modes of knowing. And “to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor, and to put such a vision into practice.”
So that the detour, the experiment, is, in fact, also arrival.
Not just for the ornithologists, the ecologists, the sculptors, the poets. It is a call to arms for all to the realm of the speculative, the as-yet-unimagined, the as-yet-unrealized possible.
~
At the moment, her daughter’s grief is too fresh. She does not want to build another aquarium, or shape another Atlantis. But the way one can work with a glass jar is still fresh in her daughter’s mind.
And so, instead of making a replacement Atlantis, her daughter makes her son a night-light because the other night-lights have failed him. Takes a mason jar and turns it on its side. She paints it green, but a kind of pale translucent green, then hot glues several glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs on top and puts a small string of LED lights inside. “It has to be a different kind of night-light,” she explains, “because T has a different kind of fear of the dark these days.”
Later, long after her daughter has gone to bed, she walks by her son’s room and sees it glowing there like something living and bioluminescent, full of a kind of beautiful calm.
/ / / / /
To read Ron Slate’s review of Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry (2011), click here.