Missive 52: Funeral for a Friend
You don’t have to be an arty type to be a Spectacular Failure.
But it certainly helps.
Arriving at being a Spectacular Failure is accepting a vocation of living to fail. Membership into a club where there are no benefits — only dues to pay.
For those who set out wanting to — or believing that — they were an artist, the coming to grips with being a Spectacular Failure requires a fatalistic desire for a lifetime — a long lifetime — of self-immolation and regeneration. Death is the one thing no one can fail at, so the Spectacular Failure puts it off for as long as possible.
Artists live a life of cataloguing themselves. Either in a never-appreciated canvas of words, images, or objects, only to one day — every day, actually — be able to see those past creations as a quilt. An interwoven journey of their lives’ misery. Of just not being good enough. Taking an almost perverse, smug pride, every artist can’t resist revisiting the patches of failures — if only to cosplay the myth of the tortured artist in the mirror before putting on their green Starbucks smock.
The trail of generated artistic artifacts dropped by the Spectacular Failure — unlike the breadcrumbs of Hansel & Gretel, which lead to safety — guides him further into his own mythology. Into the dark forest of his own unfulfilled ambitions. Filled with longing for something he knows will never be his.
Whenever the mood chooses to come, the Spectacular Failure lowers the brim of his hat and walks the petrified breadcrumbs of the never-were’s of his life — entombed in drawers filled with papers. Visiting the graveyard of his past works — reading all the tombstones — recalling the brief and hopeful lives that each lived. The closest he gets to religion. Conversing with his past — now removed and unmade — like the friends he never had.
It is a ritual of unrealised redemption. The pain of each failure still falls hard, but it is the ground that has now softened. The erosion of the years, of always returning to effort and creation — while knowing that just because something is created doesn’t necessarily mean it should have been created — somehow he can move on.
By revisiting all the markers of his failed past endeavours, he will find — not meaning as there is none — but the will, strength and recklessness to try again someday. As a Spectacular Failure must. To look forward to visiting that new thing, one day in the graveyard. To reminisce, reevaluate and say: “You know, it wasn’t all bad.”
It wasn’t all good, either. Or, more clearly: it was not good at all.
An artist’s creations are inherently abstract. Outside of themselves. Once released, they no longer belong to them — but to an inattentive world. Embracing the ritual of reconnecting with his failed attempts at creation, the Spectacular Failure understands there is no point in letting go, as everything is already gone.
The non-arty Spectacular Failure visits a graveyard of eternal intimacy. Lost jobs. Missed opportunities because they failed to act. The apology they never gave. Memories of those who left or chose to leave behind. Things that will stay with them and haunt them forever. Without forgiveness or reconciliation.
But all Spectacular Failures — artistic or not — hear the same words as they leave the graveyard. Heard in time, when hope has returned, and their pencils are sharpened. When they seduce themselves — once again — into thinking, “YES! This time will be different!”
It is in these moments that the words of Christopher Hitchens sit atop the mantel, like Poe’s Raven:
“Everyone has a book inside them. Which is exactly where it should, in most cases, remain.”
Next: Missive 1: The Final Roster
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