Manifesting Time - an art installation by NC Weil

For at least forty years (I’ve lost track), I’ve been collecting Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap boxes. Originally, my notion was to build a house and use them to wallpaper the bathroom. Well, it’s become unlikely that I will build such a house (darn!) – but I have continued to collect these soap boxes, flattening, bagging, and stashing them deep in cupboards. 

Recently I took a pair of wool gloves off a shelf in my closet, and was alarmed to see that they had been mostly consumed by moths. Other wool garments in there have so far escaped being ravaged, but that discovery spurred a decision – time to put those soap boxes to use, lining the closet with them. The soap is strong-smelling (although the reason I’ve been using it exclusively all these decades is that it lathers up well, cleans effectively, then washes off completely, leaving no residue of scent or soap. I challenge you to find a soap comparable to that!) – so I figured the boxes would deter moths. 

Soap Boxes? 

Since my collection began, the Grandpa Soap Company (“since 1878”) has changed the box design twice, so I have bright green (1971), dark green/ black with a smiling Grandpa (2002), and the current mostly-black version, a Grandpa playing sidekick to his product: 

The last 2 versions have come in 2 sizes, 3.25 oz (per the older style), and 4.25 oz. The factory moved from Cincinnati, OH, across the Ohio River to Erlanger, KY, between versions 1 and 2. The oldest of my boxes recommends “Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Toilet Soap for toilet, bath, and shampoo.” The next iteration touts being Cruelty Free. And now the boxes say it’s plant-based, cruelty free, and vegan, and “Recognized by the National Psoriasis Foundation” as well as being “The Original Wonder Soap.” 

I found it first in a family-owned drugstore; once they discontinued it I had to special-order a dozen at a time. Chain drugstores wouldn’t order it for me, so I requested it from natural foods stores, and at some magic moment in the last decade, they began to stock it. Pine tar soap achieved its pinnacle of visibility in 2021, in a Super Bowl ad(!), when Dr. Squatch put their product in front of a mass audience – such a thrill for a longtime fan! 

I’ve been accused of obsession – my son wrote “A Statistical Analysis of an Obsession” about the hundreds of Scrabble games mi esposo and I have played, whose scorepads I’ve kept. But art often revolves around obsession – Picasso drawing, painting and sculpting bulls; Cezanne repeatedly painting Mont Saint Victoire; Samuel Beckett writing about pointlessness – that compulsion to revisit an image, an idea, a place, is a way of situating ourselves in time. Here’s this subject/object: what’s new? what’s the same? And how have I changed over that same span? So I’m not apologizing for a collection of hundreds of soap boxes, acquired over four decades and saved from mold, rodents, and people who purge. 

The Project 

I was so happy the day I realized that though I wasn’t going to wallpaper a bathroom with them, I’d found another place they could live. I emptied that closet, cleaned out 14 years’ accumulation of dust, and yes, even filled several boxes with things to get rid of. I took off the closet doors, set up a lamp and a stepladder, and measured the space. 

I taped together vertical strips of boxes to fill the different spaces, then glued them onto the walls using regular white glue, nothing volatile or toxic. As I got further into the project I started to play with the variables: 3 Grandpas, 2 sizes, and how many of each I had. 

And, serendipity! For reasons unknown, I had a single 4.25 oz box featuring a Golden Grandpa! This smiling Grandpa style is also described in French or Spanish, tho not both. The apparent gold behind Grandpa’s face in many ovals is an optical trick of my cell phone camera – there’s only one Golden Grandpa; the background of the others is silvery, no matter what it looks like in this photo. 

But, Why? 

In a world overflowing with misery, loneliness, and destruction, I offer walls of Grandpas, lovingly collected and delightedly displayed, albeit in a closet. You bet it’s silly. And over time the boxes have lost their pine tar scent, so it’s unlikely they’ll keep moths at bay. But I don’t care. I have marveled at the printing variations – really bright green vs moderate; Golden Grandpa; and the price tags from places I bought them off the shelf: Lee’s Drugs, Cash Grocer, and the many that didn’t put their name on their price sticker. 

When enough years have rolled by, and you’re still doing something, you have created a through-line from an earlier version of yourself, to your current being. And this collection, this obsession, is an element of your evolution – think of it as your Control Group in the great experiment that is your life.

Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

It's been a while since I read a Vonnegut novel, so it was fun to fall back into his wide-open storytelling style: dramatic tension? Nah. Good guys and bad guys? To him, we are all both. Mysteries solved by the characters? He deflates those by telling us right away what they do not know: how it turns out, who did it, etc.

Vonnegut does offer up a real mystery, about the Galapagos Islands ecosystem, without pretending he knows the answer:  How did the creatures documented by Charles Darwin on the islands get there? A thousand miles of deep water separate the islands from mainland South America. No land bridge, no evidence that they were ever part of the continent. They are volcanic in origin, which suggests they formed by erupting from the sea floor. Some evolutionary biologists have posited that animals floated over there on rafts of vegetation, and Vonnegut states this theory in a way that would make you squirm if that were your explanation. He just leaves you to ponder. This calls to mind lines from Cat's Cradle: "Fish got to swim, bird got to fly, man got to sit and wonder why, why, why."

What he does tell us is who's going to die, when and where. Which they do. Having laid bare the fates of his characters from the very start, he then shares their defining moments of life so we can appreciate them anyway. He weaves the twin species drivers of sex and death into an often funny story, whether he's describing the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies or the way one character met her husband-to-be.

In brief, a cruise ship runs aground on one of the Galapagos Islands. Some of the dozen people on board repopulate the world with vastly-modified descendants while everyone on the mainland is rendered sterile by a virus invading their reproductive systems.

As in previous stories, Vonnegut shows little respect for intelligence, finding it cause for misery far oftener than benefit. He calls us big brained creatures, making clear that this is no compliment:
"If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example:  It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.
Thanks a lot, big brain."

His characters have no more consistency in their behavior or judgment than any batch of humans you could assemble: the retired school teacher heroine marries a con-man who stalks wealthy widows then disappears with their money. She believes the lies he tells, including his made-up name. But he dies before he can do her any harm, thus bringing her happiness. And the ship's captain, an arrogant racist, is the father of the only surviving branch of the human family, though he doesn't even know it. The fertile females, members of a primitive tribe rescued from starvation in the rainforest, are able to communicate among themselves but with no one else among the shipwrecked. I'm sure Vonnegut took special joy in launching this stone-age tribe past modern technology and culture (all doomed) to give birth to our future.

In Happy Birthday Wanda June, Vonnegut took us to Heaven where everyone dead is hanging out, including Hitler - and they're all happy and getting along wonderfully. In this writer's cosmos we are all good and evil, no matter our sins. He faults our brains, which are as attracted to creating havoc as to helping one another, and our fecundity, which keeps us from acknowledging the precariousness of life.  Your big brain may very well enjoy this book. Just keep in mind that the world as you know it could change drastically in an instant. And when you figure out how those land tortoises got to the Galapagos, let me know!