try Error
Try I’ll, and Error –a mechanical meditation on failure, the dance of intention, and the function of direction. Be sure not to fail at reading. You are under the clock.
"There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing." - Derek Walcott
In a given undertaking failure is contingent on attempt, success is contingent on non-failure, and non-failure is contingent on intention. Attempt is the key- without attempt there is no action.
Without action there is no dynamic. Dynamic is the only thing that gives human life a leg up on moss and sand. A concept often relayed from the East is that water can both flow around and carve into rock. Water is without intention but not without force- it shapes mountains and carves great channels. It is the action of motion that gives water this force. A stagnant pool carves nothing. Humans, unlike water and for whatever reason, are dependent upon conscious motivation and reaction to give us force. Being un-compelled by gravity, we must manufacture our own motion. Intention is what gives direction to these actions.
And through the open door of intention storms the bawdy pair of success and failure. Success and failure are a codependent coupling- each is described by the negative space of the other. Multiple success/fail states may be embedded into any process, but each will have its inverse. While success and failure become an intrinsic property of any intentioned undertaking, their placement in that undertaking may be freely manipulated. For example, an objective may be conceived where the probability of failure could be nearly zero. Imagine a project where the only objective is simply its own beginning. Finishing the project would be beyond the scope of the project's objectives; therefore any activity after the initial success would be mere icing on the proverbial cake. Certain conditions exist that would be nearly impossible to fail to meet. With this axiom established, the inverse could be imagined where the probability of failure could be nearly 100%. This could be achieved by setting objectives far outside the scope of the project or by insufficiently establishing context. Imagine a game where the only instruction is: Enter (or say) the correct word. It must be presumed that there is a correct word, but the chances of guessing it, and therefore succeeding to meet the success condition, lacking any additional cues or information, must be almost zero. This experiment may be taken to its logical extreme by flipping the states entirely- setting out to fail. This proves quite problematic and gets immediately stuck in a recursive loop where, in order to succeed you must fail, which would then be a success... This is all simply to demonstrate that there is extreme flexibility over success/fail conditions and their relationship to a process. This may be played to an advantage in movements and actions.
The conditions of failure often seem intrinsic to an activity, but a great many success/fail scenarios are passed into an action only through assumption. A book, it is generally assumed, is to be read through till the end; however, intending to read the book, there is no obligation to accept the assumed conditions. Just as reasonably it could be intentioned to read the book till the first occurrence of the word "bogey". If the word occurs on the second page, the terms of the objective would have been successfully met, and the process would be complete. However, the word, or whatever arbitrary object, may not necessarily occur. The whole book may have been read cover to cover with no success. This suggests that the supposed states are arbitrarily defined, but have as properties actual consequences over the relationship and definition of the undertaking. Identical processes can be either a success or a failure based on the established objective conditions.
If one is plagued by fear(s) of failure remember that without attempt failure is not possible. If one is inversely aligned and driven by a mania to succeed, note that without attempt, success will never come. Both states are only possibilities of action. There is no potentiality in non-undertaking- not for success or failure. Perhaps this is desirable, perhaps this is horror realized.
Let's have a look at some lines. First this one:
__________________________
Fine. An insufficiently established premise, so there is no way to gauge whether the above line is a success or not. It must be assumed that the author put it there to illustrate a point and is therefore exactly as intended. However, there is nothing external to this line. There are no conditions specified and the line is devoid of context. Like the vaguely established word game, it's hardly a game at all, hardly a process- a gesture only.
Next:
__________________________ *
Now a point has been added past the end of the line. It seems to indicate that this is where the line was intended to terminate. Now that a condition has been established, it is apparent that this condition was not met. This condition also serves to contextualize the line. There is now a clear direction and goal.
But to extend the conditions of a project beyond the horizon of control may compromise the projects integrity. Keep the considerations for success/fail states within the system. Utilize the mechanisms of success and failure as dynamic generators- to motivate action and encourage motion. This is obviously not a practical method for all undertakings. Architecture, for example, has numerous success/fail states external to the process that it must be accountable to. To set a condition so low on, say, a museum: "stack bricks on some other bricks until it looks pleasing" could potentially result in the calamity of structural collapse; and whereas the architect may have fulfilled his or her internally set objective, the implicit conditions of the structure: to stand and not injure people- would not have been met.
Next:
_______________ _____________*
Here is another ambiguous case. The endpoint is now met, but the line is broken. Rules have been insufficiently established for the undertaking. Is the objective simply to reach a point, or to reach a point with a single continuous line? Lacking additional information, there is no way of knowing.
Returning to the second line, this illustrates another property of the success/failure split in that, in sufficiently established premises, failure is an infinitely modifiable scenario, whereas success is the completion of the objective. Example two may well just be a snapshot of a line in progress- if it is incomplete then the label of failure could not be comfortably applied. There is an infinite amount of time for the above lines to un-fail, either by starting over again and again, or merely continuing on until the objective is reached. If this line is taken:
____________________________________*
And it meets all the criteria for success (say it must reach the point as one single continuous line) the process is at an end. Having met the conditions the action cannot now de-succeed. If the process would have failed, it can always start again. (In the cases of lines this may be less true, we could always go in and erase something, but in the context of real process there is almost no recovering from success).
For low stakes, exploratory projects fear of failure can be paralyzing- better to set objectives to initiate motion and allow for the unfolding be the outcome in and of itself. There may be no idea what lies ahead- clearly a journey for the sake of the experience can be an objective, and it is very hard not to have an experience.
This is not a proposition for a way to create un-failable, protected projects for fragile individuals unable to deal with the realities of rejection- it seeks a way of internalizing the conditions of success to elements directly within the initiator's control. Satisfying as opposed to stultifying. The benefits are reaped of our own unfurling rewards systems:
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Most of the above effort exceeds the conditions of completion. With so much of the action beyond the scope the function of the objective may seem quite dispensable. The objective, however, does serve a purpose in indicating an initial direction. The line with no intention may strike off in any direction. As in Zen, the arrow loosed with no intention may hit an innocent bystander or nothing at all, but the arrow loosed in the right direction with no greater intention than its own flight may hit a target- inconsequential if it's a bullseye.
All for the pursuit of movement, motion, action, life. Art is not the objective, progress is no excuse- there must simply be movement. The rock that the water carves is not carved into anything in particular. We are building nothing, but we must continue to build- otherwise consciousness is a still pool. Life is a river. Failure is its continuation.