The notion of “success” and “failure” has been swirling around my reading lately. It’s not intentional; in fact, the intentional reading I’ve been doing is a bit strange, all relating to late colonial road trip chronicles in Africa. At the temporary apartment I rented last month in San Antonio, I found a book from 1941 entitled Behind God’s Back, by a fantastically named journalist, Negley Farson, about an extensive trip through mostly sub-Saharan Africa that he and his wife undertook in 1939. That inspired me to look for other pre-independence travelogues of Africa, and I stumbled upon Inside Africa, by an intrepid American journalist, John Gunther, who went with his wife for a year-long adventure across the entire continent, this time from late 1952 to 1954, just as the independence movements were really starting to take off.
Both books – and I’d add to that a few more that I’ve read over the years of similar ilk; something about the foreigner visiting the colonial unknown is just a genre of endless interest to me, which I’ll explore towards the end of this missive – explored in depth the idea of whether the European colonial experience in Africa would “succeed” or “fail”. Both works had definite ideas of what constituted the absolute measures on that axis. Communism, or the descent into a kind of corrupt and deadly chaos, would both be considered failure (although the fact that there would be two different failure endgames is telling). Success was simply the full acceptance into the community of (white, rich, historically imperialist and definitely capitalist) free nations.
Both authors – and I think it was telling that they both, while owning the byline, credited their partners on the trip as fully equal intellectual contributors – saw that success as acceptance in a more singular sense than what might constitute failure. They shared a vision that African countries – run by Africans, with no European or American “oversight” or overly paternalistic “help” – would be reasonably wealthy, well-educated, progressive states with some form of liberal democracy or broadly defined republicanism, engaging on the world state as equal partners of European nations and in an economic sense without the entrapments of resource dependency but with a strong and independent service and trade sectors of their own ownership and creation. The idea that they would be captives of Total, or ExxonMobil, or Fremont Mines or Barclays would have offended the authors, despite the fact that they were white males and generally associated with London and New York types who would be looking forward to dividends from such companies.
While written decades before the emergence of the IMF and World Bank “Washington consensus”, their vision of success was still painted in both the political and economic terms that late 1990s neoliberalism would well recognize. But sitting twenty years after the temporary triumph of neoliberalism, staring at the rise of fascist notions of propaganda (under the new modish terms of “fake news” and “collusive social media manipulation”) and the not-coincidental entrenchment of wealthy elites and slow squeezing of the middle class educated tertiary sector that the neoliberal consensus relied upon to be sustainable in the long run, one wonders whether their shared vision of success would still hold.
Both authors – Negley and John – are spirited, witty, adventurous; one senses their wives in the background as a combination of even more adventurous and even more liberal in the non-neo sense of the term. Their books are entertaining if dated in some ways. Nelly worries incessantly about the likelihood of a Nazi victory and its impact on the liberalizing tendency of at least British and Belgian rule (hold your fire for now, people). John, in the early years of the Eisenhower administration, is obsessed with sexual habits of Africans and colonial European overlords in a way which made me realize why the 1960s sexual revolution happened. Paired with Africa from Coast to Coast (I think – I can’t find the book as it’s in storage and I can’t remember the exact title), written by a pretty amazing woman from Boston who traveled by steamship around the continent in the early 1920s, who beats both of them hands down in terms of élan and sheer audacity, one emerges with a sense of how non-colonial, non-invested people with some education and a belief in the potential of individual human beings may have experienced the endgame of colonial Africa.
All these works make one struggle with what “success” and “failure” mean in the context of a multigenerational, cross-cultural human experiment – you know, what we all are engaged in as members of the human race, with African colonialism as simply a focused example. It’s not that any of these authors deny that there is a clear sense of boundaries on what can be success of failure, of course – all of them face unflinchingly the massacres, the atrocities, the sheer waste of humanity that colonial rule involved. But they also point out that – even back in the first half of the 20th century, before the internet, before widely available global trunk line telecommunications, before reliable air travel and reliable roads and automobiles – the world was already rapidly imploding. Africa – no less than Wyoming, or Nunavit, or Siberia, or Laos, or Samoa – was not going to be off the map ever again. And being on the map meant engaging with a wide, rapacious, moral, immoral, multifaceted, state-organized with extra-state entities, with free transfer of “wealth” regardless of what you thought “wealth” was, world. That meant that whether you organized around a small unit – a tribe or a town or a county sort of place – or a larger unit – a small or medium sized nation state, measured in terms of population as well as physical space – or whether you tried to agglomerate into a major nation, like the US or Nigeria or South Africa or France, you had to be ready to engage. Success was the ability to engage coherently, and the ability to cohere sustainably as that engagement evolved. All the authors, at a certain level, would sign up to that as a marker of success.
Let’s go back to their two-pronged notion of failure. On the one hand, Communism – absorption into the singular Communist bloc – was a failure (I’ll point out that Negley views Nazi or Japanese fascism and Communism as broadly equivalent, while the other authors focus just on “Bolshevist” Communism). On the other hand, a descent into unmitigated, Hobbesian chaos was another danger. They are, really, quite different. Success is a premised around a singular notion of how we will engage in a modern age; failure involves either a descent into pre-modern hell, on the one hand, or a rigidly anti-liberal modernity which, in the eyes of the author, destroys the individual self in the pursuit of a sustainable overall order. In essence, they viewed “success” as being the emergence of a complete and wholly embracing participatory system which at once grants individual freedom while acknowledging the need to coordinate amongst individuals in some structural form of group collectives, while “failure” consisted of either destroying the safe environment that enables individuals to emerge in the first place (Hobbesian chaos) or destroying the individual entirely in pursuit of collective stability and sustainability.
As I write this, I should note that all the authors had a third sense of failure: the continuation of a system where one group of people exploited, or ruled, or dominated, another group of people. They all viewed such a situation as essentially “impossible in the long run” but it was still a form of failure. John Gunther came closest to acknowledging that this outcome – whether it be traditional colonial rule or just the exploitation via third parties of capitalist enterprises – was not in any way different from Communism, but oddly, he saw capitalist or colonialist domination as a clear false start, while Communism might be a delusionary but sustainable pathway to permanent enslavement. Odd. Anyhoo.
That’s not what I’m really writing about. I’m writing about success.
Mark wrote a couple of days ago about failure, but really, he was writing about the dimensional expression of success versus failure, and how our understanding of what constitutes success and failure changes as we move through the finite space of our lives on earth. At its heart is a very nuanced mathematics: the descriptive characteristic of success (which embraces its opposite, failure), is actually a time-dependent process, with time being in reference to our lifespan as we experience it. Failure early on is easier to bear – is a superior failure, or more of a success, all the same from a maths perspective – when we are young. As we get older, failure or success are both reflected in a diminished future potential for both, and thus become more “meaningful” or, put another way, force a kind of decisioning about what we “do” next that isn’t as imperative as when we are young. More than that, though, as we move through that finite lifespan, we gain access to more knowledge which shifts our understanding what, in fact, the spectrum of failure and success consist of.
As someone about to turn 44 years old – birthday is October 22, and as always, gifts are appreciated in the form of large quantities of non-sequential well-circulated $20 and $50 bills, although fingers crossed, I hope to also be able to use large quantities of £20 and £50 bills as well, so let’s not be currency snobs this year – I’m sort of at that inflection point where my future potential still remains almost limitless, but my past experience has also radically reshaped my naive notions of what constitutes success and failure versus what I had when I was 20. I am, as I told someone recently, the age I always wanted to be – I never thought being in your 20s was anything other than a lark (which begs the question, why the hell did you get married at age 25 to another human being of equal potential and intelligence), and being in my 30s was an extended exercise in watching failure and success pendulum back and forth. My 40s have simply involved confronting the barrier I now face: at what point does the diminishing marginal future lifespan I have start to impinge upon the infinite choices I still have in front to me? So far, I stand solidly in the camp of “no point yet”; indeed, the infinite of the future that I face, even in the next two hours, will always exceed the finite experiences (though infinite interpretation of those experiences) that I’ve already lived. So onwards, I say – keep striving, to use Mark’s very apt phrase.
Failure and success are just one of many dimensions that we use to describe the moment in which we live, and to describe our interpretation of the moments that we have experienced, and to estimate the desirability of the potential future states which we are trying to achieve. Failure isn’t absolute, nor is success – but the dimensionality of failure and success, I’d argue, is absolute for each of us. It’s absolute in the sense that it forms a ruler, a unit of account, that in each moment we view as inviolable and in general, from moment to moment, we don’t question. It isn’t absolute over the course of our lives; what “absolute failure” and “absolute success” consists of is in constant flux, mostly in minute ways but occasionally in massive, earth-shattering shifts – when we meet someone who is different than anyone we’ve ever encountered, say, or when we view an artwork which expresses beauty in a totally new way, or when we hear a vision that is so repulsive, that expands our idea of what can be repulsive, that we see a new vision of Hell in it – at those moments the spectrum of failure to success can change like a supernova changes a star. But in this moment – in the present, the ineffable and uncapturable moment of now – failure and success are an absolute dimension, as much as height and width and time and spin and dipole.
As sentient beings, we (unfortunately? awesomely? magically? incomprehensibly?) have the ability to remember what we thought before, and yet apply the logic we now have available recursively to those remembered states. We also have the ability to project forward to future states – albeit only with our current understanding of the vector of failure-v-success, much as we can only possess a current view of moral-v-immoral or pleasant-v-unpleasant – not only our current understanding of our dimensions of measurement, but our remembered past states of what those dimensions consisted of. We are immature children at this art of recursion, though; we are very good at projecting forward our current state, and decently good at projecting forward past notions of the good, or the successful, or the moral, or the pleasant, onto future potential states – but we remain terrible at understanding not just the trend but the potential future non-linear jumps in our understanding of such notions of good or moral or pleasant or successful that we must project to make truly decent assessments of how we will understand future states and, therefore, assess what our current actions “should” be to achieve the best of those future states.
This is all very metaphysical – I’m not referencing very much at all, despite my original discussion of pre-independence African travelogue books, that is specific. Here’s what I’ve really been thinking.
I write these essays because I need to. When I read what Viktoria and Mark post, either as comments or as essays, or when I read the New York Review of Books (recent pablum in Ian Baruma’s bizarre and incomprehensibly curated “fall of man” issue aside), or when I look at the better of what’s posted on Aeon.co or The Guardian’s long read’s or the FT’s lunch interviews, I realize that what I write is not going to survive any test of time. Success for me is the act of writing, but also the act of posting my mediocrity to you, outside readers, and exposing myself for ridicule and criticism. Success is simply being public and consistently being willing to be public with my thoughts. Failure – and it was failure for a very long time – was keeping these thoughts inside me, or worse, thinking that only sharing them with people who “loved” me somehow was an expression of love. Frankly, I’m happy to call bullshit on myself: the people who love me needed the space to ignore my ramblings whenever necessary, but so long as I didn’t share this in some kind of a public forum, their love for me demanded that they read it, and on a certain level, that demand eroded the possibility that they could love me.
Loving anyone means having the chance to say “I really hate this about you and want nothing to do with it, although I love you unconditionally anyway”. But if you get so tied up in your own thoughts – of success or failure, of right or wrong – so tied up in your own mind that you lack any outlet, well, then people who you love will bear the brunt of that entrapment. Each of you can read this and ignore it; each of you can read this and comment on it; each of you can read this and write something inspired by it or rejecting it. All of that is valid. But for too long I thought I could only express this to one or two people, which meant that I failed those people, whoever they were at any given time. What I write now may or may not be “successful” – and there is an infinite way of defining that. But I’m not failing any one or two people any more by saying what I mean to say.
I’ve thought quite a bit about how this applies to art lately, especially after the rather ambiguous experience of seeing the Sargent exhibition in Chicago but recently also after reading an article on a Magritte retrospective that’s currently on tour and I’m really now anxious to see. I don’t think successful art is that which is appreciated, or that which is celebrated, even given Mark’s theorization that Van Gogh would gladly give up his ear or his life if he knew that the world would grand him the acclimation that he has received since his death. I think successful art is an imperative – I think pursuing success is an imperative, and the physical or metaphysical output is incidental to the imperative to create. If we were to define a Planck vector for “success”, then it would consist at the one extreme the actual act of creation, regardless of whether that act produced something that others viewed as successful, and at the other, it would be the denial of creation, the withholding – out of fear, laziness, indifference, it doesn’t matter, those are different vectors anyway – of the creation that could be great.
If I look to Africa – and oddly I’ve traveled more there than I ever thought I would – there has been some of the failure as defined in the point-in-time analysis of John and Negley. A lot of it has been the fall-back-into-chaos form, but on the other hand, most of what has happened has been somewhere between the extremes of success and failure. Even where success has unambiguously emerged, like in Botswana, exogenous factors such as HIV and climate change have shifted what we can really say “success” can consist of. Several examples of “failure” – Liberia, say, or the genocide in Rwanda – there has also been a kind of post hoc “success” (free elections, stabilized economies, an intentional and internally derived process of forgiveness and healing) that mean you can’t describe the result on a simple axis of success or failure. But there have been peoples and countries which have tried – and Botswana, and South Africa, and Ghana I’d include in that mix – and even in the face of setbacks and individual fault lines, the art of trying has been more than enough. And there have been peoples and countries which haven’t tried, which have abandoned themselves to corruption (oil field Nigeria) or to the promises of ancient (but failed) hierarchies (northern Nigeria, or most of the Sahel), or to a combination of the two (Zimbabwe), and without question, those peoples are suffering from a kind of general collapse, of a real failure, which reinforces itself through time, in which failure feeds fear which feeds more fear which feeds despair.
Failure is really a kind of inaction, a kind of vacancy; success isn’t popular acclaim – as most essays that I’ve read about such notions recently claim – but it’s the fulfillment of the promise of something being created. Some works of art, in that regard, are properly viewed as failures – because they are cynical, because they are created not out of an imperative to explore or create or transform beauty, but because they were created to fulfil a dead need, like greed or status. A wonderful quote in an essay on Rene Magritte in this week’s NYRB captured the tension perfectly: Magritte sometimes painted copies of prior works for cash; these are rightly thought of as derivative failures as art. But sometimes he created dozens of “versions” of works, some of which he’d sell as quasi-copies, as he pursued a singular version that required recursion and experimentation to ultimately achieve. He knew damn well when he was doing one versus the other; he knew when he was being a hack, and also knew when he needed to do something twenty times to build towards the one version that was in his head as the “right” version all along. I’m not saying you shouldn’t reject doing the hack job when you need some cash – we all have to consult, or get a temp job, or contract, to get some quick dosh sometimes. But we all should know the difference between a hack job and a repetitive, derivative job that has to be done to create that which we hold as the good, as art, as a success.
I’ve written over 70 essays in the past year and a half, and let’s face it, I’ve gotten nothing tangible back as a result. I can state with confidence that I write as a recursive exercise to find out more about what it is to be me, and what it is to be alive. I say that, because no one would pay or spend any effort of their own to read my work, let’s face it, so I have no cynical motive – or if I do, it’s misplaced and foolish and simply an example of my own stupidity. But I don’t think that’s the case. I’m writing – striving, to use Mark’s word – to discover. There is no point. I will find no prestige, no pot of gold or laurel wreath, as a result of any of this. Success will sustain itself in the way that the authors I started out with saw it: it will be a sustaining process, writing will lead to more writing in an open and free way, hopefully with more writing (thank you Viktoria, thank you Mark, thank you anyone who writes me letters) to challenge me and sustain the dialogue, which is just as country will engage with country in an open and free and equal way if we build both individual expression and collective tools in a respectful way.
So I’m a successful writer, I have to say. You all probably think I’m a hack, and you’re probably right in the sense of what will or won’t get me a commission from the New York Times or get a byline on Aeon.co. I’m right now a hack banker, but I’m trying to be something more. I’m a good dad, which is pretty amazing all in all. I’m a success, even if outwardly, I look like a confused nomad. I don’t need to tell you, who are reading this to the end, to bear with me. Thanks.