Something on my mind at the moment is failure. Not broad anxieties around inadequacy, the impossible quest for “good enough” - concrete, specific failure to realise a dream in reality.
In a sense, all dreams fail. The ones that succeed in being realised become something else, changing through their interaction with the world and their own internal logic so that the original vision is buried. On the other hand, the dreams that fail utterly keep the original vision alive with searing clarity.
There’s something powerful about a dream so vivid it’s able to become a concrete failure. So much of the time our hopes are vague, the extent to which they’re ever accomplished is vague. They lack the power to destroy us, just as they lack the power to animate us. As a result, there is something ambivalently optimistic, almost heroic, in the idea of total failure.
In reading about Van Gogh’s hopes for a commune in the south drenched in bright yellow light, where painters would exchange ideas and bring their art to life, I felt the sting of that failure. Not only is the vision deeply appealing to me, the human inadequacies that ultimately killed it are my own inadequacies. But - perhaps - I am not heroic, without that clarity of purpose. That kind of utter failure is beyond my capabilities.
Being what I am, I can only keep putting one foot in front of the other.
i love this, very much