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.

Infinite Jest

I finished David Foster Wallace's massive novel today - whew. At this point I'm not sure whether he just ran out of steam, or reached what he considered an end-point - certainly some large issues are left unresolved.

By the end we know why Hal Incandenza, sighted at the beginning having a meltdown at a college interview, cannot produce words to back up whatever interest he's supposed to have in matriculating. And we can infer what happens to Don Gately, the live-in staffer of a halfway house for addicts whose story holds our attention for the last 40% of the book. But we don't find out about the Quebec Separatists - does their rebellion succeed, or do they remain in the shadows, waging guerrilla warfare on choice targets? Do they get their hands on a master (reproducible) tape of The Entertainment, a film so compelling that those who view it are reduced to an infantile state, incapable of any action except repeated viewings, so that through broad dissemination they can bring O.N.A.N. into helpless compliance?

Instead of answering these questions, Wallace introduces even more characters through recollection, only some of whose stories feel satisfactory (satisfactory in the sense of having a beginning, middle and end, with characters developing and changing as a consequence of the narrated events).

What can an editor say? He invests in certain plot-lines and devices, only to abandon them short of resolution. It is a novelist's prerogative to "throw in the kitchen sink," including whatever shows up during the writing - short stories are required to be to-the-point, with extraneous material cut. But whether we're talking Ulysses, Moby Dick or Anna Karenina, the longer form accommodates digressions. However, those books, in my experience, have cohesion in the sense that everything in them leads one, by varying paths, to a conclusion. Melville's hundreds of pages of riffs on whale behavior, the polycultural milieu of a whaling ship, and the obsessions of its crew, prepare us thoroughly for the grand finale in which the Pequod and the white whale have their fatal encounter.

I can't say this of Infinite Jest - some of its subplots, while fascinating, contribute nothing to the fate of the characters we have come to care about, and things we want to know are left hanging. Is this incompleteness an enticement to obsessives to dig deeper, through multiple readings and heated discussions, to some mystic level where it all meshes? I feel as though I have committed many hours to a particularly long and convoluted shaggy dog story.

Not that I wasted my time - Wallace was a gifted user of language, from such well-coined phrases as "advanced worry" and "windbagathon stories" to "gave him the howling fantods" - it is always a pleasure to read someone who can give us those Aha! moments when words mirror the world. And though he only uses first person with Hal Incandenza, episodes are frequently in the POV of a character, with that person's imprecision and self-interruption coloring the descriptions: "Gately has to monitor the like emotional barometer in the House and put a wet finger to the wind for potential conflicts and issues and rumors." If I have a criticism of this, it's that even in omniscient narrator mode, Wallace sprinkles "like" through the text, Valley-girl style, as though this cousin of "y'know" has a contribution to make.

When one invests a whole book in a mystery, the revelation had better be good. I admit to disappointment with discovering the content of The Entertainment - would that really render every viewer a semi-comatose drooling idiot? Perhaps Wallace's appeal is principally to obsessives, who can dig to their hearts' content through the minutiae he has provided.

I'm more drawn to the Douglas Adams school of revelation: a spectacularly egocentric character, Zaphod Beeblebrox, emerges unscathed from the Total Perspective Vortex: "When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."" (from Wikipedia quoting "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe") This reduces most people to babbling. But not Zaphod. "When it showed him the "You Are Here" marker, Zaphod correctly interpreted the Vortex as simply telling him that he was the most important being in the universe." (Wikipedia again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Total_Perspective_Vortex)

Infinite Jest, Round 1

My son Ernesto gave me a copy of David Foster Wallace's doorstop of a novel, Infinite Jest, a few months ago, and we agreed to read it together this summer. Alas, summer will be long gone before we finish. But on we trudge. I am now a third of the way into this exploration of obsession, addiction, waste and tennis in the near future.

Obsession and addiction are the same thing, experienced by different aspects of one's being. Obsession occurs when the mind is trapped in orbit around a particular object, behavior or interest. Addiction is the same stuckness, manifesting physically. One is hardly superior to the other: if you can't play your best competitive tennis without your special rituals, clothing and equipment, you're addicted no less than the person whose body has been invaded by need for a particular tickle: coke, 'drines, sex, alcohol, pot, etc., and will do whatever is necessary to obtain it. 

Either one diminishes the rest of the world.

Almost 400 pages into IJ, I've found a character who seems "normal", though that is a consequence of damage: Schacht is an "under-18" tennis player whose ranking is on the wane thanks to the one-two punch of Crohn's disease and a permanently injured knee. He can still play, but not at the champion level. Unlike his classmates who oscillate between obsessives' poles of tennis and recreational drugs, he accepts his lot. He's studying to become a dentist, and his game has reached a Zen zone with a high achievement-for-effort ratio because winning no longer matters. Likewise he can take or leave the drugs. He is free, and so far he's the only character I can think of able to make such a claim.

As for waste: as we learn the history of O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations, which excludes the Concavity where separatist Quebec seethes), we begin to grasp that the consumption on which our economy has been built since the end of WWII has generated a waste stream so massive that we've run out of places to dump it. It appears that the waste zone for toxic North American residue is The Concavity, and from the Boston area, near its border, regular launches by the E.W.D. (Empire Waste Disposal) are shot skyward - though probably not into orbit (I haven't got there yet).

An obsessively notated book offering obsessive amounts of detail about its topics seems a natural spawning-ground for obsessives, and all you have to do is Google Infinite Jest to see that they are legion. DFW's end-notes expand in likewise obsessive fashion on the subject of mention, whether that is a game of chicken played by young men in Quebec, or the filmography of the Incandenza family patriarch, or a phone conversation between brothers which reveals a great deal about certain events in that family. You can no more skip the end-notes than you could skip dozens of pages in the body of the novel - they are part of the story. Whether much of the information offered in the almost 100 pages of end notes belongs there (as opposed to nested in the narrative), is a moot question. There it is, and there you'd better read it.

Still, he has a way with words. How can any writer fail to love a sentence like this:

[Schacht is] one of those people who don't need much, much less much more. ?

There are some very funny moments (which I won't relate here, since that would both pull them out of context and spoil the surprise of coming upon them) - not infinite, perhaps, but some good laughs. It has taken awhile, but somewhere between a quarter of the way in and a third, I have identified the outlines of a story I want to follow. What happens to these people? What happens to these nations? I'm sure those answers lie ahead.