Failing into the New Year

on things dead and not dead

Hello again, slugs! I just want to thank everybody who took time to fill out my reader survey, and the hundred or so of you who wrote me very lovely messages about why you read this, saying things like “All interesting to me! No notes!” and “I sincerely feel like it's changed my life”!?! One reader described my work as “pre-digesting & critically regurgitating” information for them, a la mama bird, and I think that is probably my favorite description of my writing that I’ve ever heard lmao.

From the feedback, I think I had the cadence right when I first started this, with a free essay in the beginning of the week and one for paid subscribers on the weekend. I’m going to try to get back to that, but I am inconsistently consistent, so we’ll see what happens! (Most of you said you don’t notice the timing and frequency nor do you care, which is so good to know.) This one has some pictures (I want to make more pictures this year), and here’s a recording for the ear-readers:

I’ve been killing my houseplants. Not all of them — the pepperomias are doing fine, their succulent leaves can survive my forgetfulness. But the calathea and even the hardy string of bananas in my bathroom have shriveled to a crisp. It’s not like I don’t see this happening, it’s just that these pots don’t have trays underneath them to catch the water, which means I have to put them in the bathtub, which makes the bathtub dirty, which makes the whole thing feel too hard. A process with too many steps makes me want to give up.

The only plants that do alright sit in a large and easy-to-fill tray under a window in the yellow room, where I find myself most days now, within three steps of the kitchen sink. We got our first proper snow today, and the flower border I designed last spring looks frozen and haunted, but I know life is waiting underground. 2023 was the year I learned I could grow things, but that growing also means dying, and that dying isn’t so bad, because everything cycles back around somehow.

the little yellow room from whence I write to you

I’ve been reading a lot in this rocking chair lately, and the more I read, the more I realize how much I still need to read, how the things I wrote a year or two or three ago have always just been practice for the things I will write in five. It’s that old Socrates quote: For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing. But it’s also life with a faulty memory, I guess. I went back through my copy of The Queer Art of Failure the other day and found it all highlighted and marked up, but it felt like someone else did it. I forgot that I read this,¹ but the sentiments — losing, forgetting, failing — have clearly remained in my work.

A couple weeks ago, Gray and I went to our favorite thrift store, a warehouse in a hideous Pennsylvania suburb made of stroads,² and I found a collection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s speeches and essays called Dancing At the Edge of the World. In it, she takes an essay published in 1976 about how she approached gender in her book The Left Hand of Darkness, and she annotates the essay from 1987, writing:

“It doesn't seem right or wise to revise an old text severely, as if trying to obliterate it, hiding the evidence that one had to go there to get here. It is rather in the feminist mode to let one's changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence — and perhaps to remind people that minds that don't change are like clams that don't open. So I here reprint the original essay entire, with a running commentary in bracketed italics…And I do very much hope that I don't have to print re-reconsiderations in 1997, since I'm a bit tired of chastising myself.”

The Left Hand of Darkness, if you’re not a sci-fi nerd, is about an alien race called the Gethenians who are physically androgynous except for when they go into an estrus state, during which their bodies briefly become sexed. This happens multiple times throughout their lives and can be different every time, which means “the mother of several children can be the father of several more.”

Le Guin talks about how feminist critics of the book wanted there to be a particular message, but really, she says she was just exploring. The Getheniens “are questions, not answers; process, not stasis.” She goes on:

“I still think that this was a rather neat idea. But as an experiment, it was messy. All results were uncertain; a repetition of the experiment by someone else, or by myself seven years later, would probably give quite different results. [Strike the word "probably" and replace it with "certainly."] Scientifically, this is most disreputable. That's all right; I am not a scientist. I play the game where the rules keep changing.”

I assume the game she means is art, but I’m not sure science is so different. An experiment that fails to replicate in science still tells us something important, even though researchers often try not to publish those. All of us have to hold lightly to the things we think we know, because time will certainly change them.

I know this in my head, but there’s still a part of my body that is so terrified to fail, I would rather not try, and reading one of the most influential writers of the 20th century revise her old work in public was comforting like nothing else. Of course I’m going to write things that make me cringe ten years later! Of course I’m going to kill some plants!

how pretty is goldenrod weighed down by snow in winter???

I also recently picked up Waithera Sebatindira’s book on addiction, Through an Addict’s Looking Glass, and found them discussing an openness to failure as crucial to recovery programs like AA. “Failure is the point,” they write:

“And not only is this failure expected — it’s public and shared. I learned that I was expected to fail from people in recovery meetings with more time than me who opened up honestly about their own recovery. The promise of failure allows me to wear recovery loosely rather than be caged by it; the flexibility of failure is what makes my recovery sustainable.”

I like this idea, failure as a promise. Sebatindira opens the book by framing addiction as a different kind of time, a fragmented, non-linear “it’s-not-time” outside of normal, or “straight time”, which is really just a normative ideal of time that everyone feels obliged to strive toward. In this straight time, they write, “failures are only acceptable when they are part of the journey to success.” But recovery itself means something different to Sebatindira:

“…When I say ‘recovery’, I don’t imagine a phenomenon governed by some linear conception of time, an image of diversion and return. Instead, I picture the tide tirelessly reaching out to the shore and pulling away again. Unceasing and timeless.”

“Process, not stasis,” as Le Guin wrote. A shoreline actually has a lot to tell us about our own striving, according to Bayo Akomolafe:

“..the ocean never reaches the shore. There is no simple arrival here; that's an inadequate portrayal of what is happening. Instead, the ocean enacts the shore..

The inside and the outside are not easily divided. By acting as cleaning agent for ocean debris, the shore characterizes the ocean; and by the mereness of its material complexity, the ocean creates shorelines. The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. We want to get ‘there’ — whether ‘there’ is a beautiful techno-utopic world, or a more just arrangement that works for the many and not just the few.

But there is no ‘there’; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle for ‘there’ — and in the struggle, we change.”

it is almost time to gather seeds

1. very ironic, bc there’s an entire chapter on the value of forgetting

2. “I can’t stop thinking about how much I love auto-oriented city planning” (my favorite meme this month)