Ellen Graf's Articles on Lions Roar

Alternative rock bands belt out songs about it, great poets honor it, and all of us have smacked headlong into it. Sit with failure long enough, says Ellen Graf, and it always transforms. My father’s best friend was Gilbert the carpenter, whose right hand often had a hammer-purpled thumbnail and whose broad mouth was always almost laughing. One summer when I was a little girl Gilbert made a St. Francis bird feeder out of a hickory tree that had grown in a gentle curve. The seven-foot statue leaned slightly forward with its branch arms outstretched and was fitted with wideopen hands, palms up, for offerings of seed and suet. Its creased face looked kind of like Gilbert’s and its feet were bolted to a concrete slab under a white pine near the public sidewalk. One night, a thief came with a bolt cutter and in the morning just a few sparrows and a jay crisscrossed the empty space. Sometimes I imagine the thief sitting in a weedy alley on a green and white plastic lawn chair, gazing through a haze of cigar smoke at St. Francis leaned up against a cinder block wall. Why did the thief steal the saint? What a scoundrel. What a loser. Or maybe not. A thief may be called a moral failure and as such a failed human being, but such an assertion could be wrong. Imagine that his grasping impulse sprang from a longing to be a better man, the image of which eluded him until, on the way to the convenience store, he saw Gilbert’s statue and he felt its magnetic pull. What had always been abstract and missing was now suddenly and solidly before him—life-sized, made of hickory, and within his clever grasp. The St. Francis heist reminds me of frustrated ancient seekers of buddhahood, students of the Zen master Rinzai who lived roughly between 810 and 866. If the thief ached with longing, so did Rinzai’s students. They made themselves anxious and incomplete by their failure to get this thing called buddhahood and they didn’t stop scanning the Earth for what they were missing even as their master scolded, “What good does it do to look under rocks and pine trees for what can only be found inside yourself?” Then, just before whacking them on the head with a stick, he shouted, “Have faith in yourselves!” The one thing that can’t be stolen from the curbside or found under a rock is one’s own true nature. It’s a hard thing for people to understand and words don’t make it much easier. The clue inherent in the word failure is “lure.” “Failure,” a soft and beautiful sound, requires a curl of the tongue, a purse of the lips. It breaks on the “l” and seeps into the sand with no definitive end. It’s like wind coming and saltwater going, back into itself. If you think it unlikely that the thief of Gilbert’s St. Francis had anything in common with Rinzai’s students—that he was more likely a common thief trading saintly bird feeders on the black market—then let me assure you that he certainly had something in common with St. Francis himself, as Francis began his spiritual journey with a morally questionable theft of his own. He heard the voice of the Lord command him, “Go Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.” Francis, in eagerness to act, took the words literally, and, having no funds, stole from his father’s shop in order to buy the building materials. When he returned home, his enraged father beat and bound him. Disappointing one’s father cannot be called failure—it is what many must do to live truthfully—but Francis did fail to understand the voice’s subtle meaning. He failed in his methods, he failed in relationship, and only some time after failing into the cave of himself could he compose songs of praise for “every kind of weather.” My internalized definition of failure, as not being able to be what you want to be or to do what you want to do, is related to wanting, into which we are born, and to the abundance that comes from limitation. Some other definitions of failure include: a cessation of proper functioning; the condition or fact of not achieving one’s desired ends; the condition or fact of being insufficient or falling short; the act of failing a test; an American rock band of critical acclaim in the 1990s; and a song by the alternative rock band Sevendust released in 2006. There are dozens more songs themed on failure, but one titled “Insight to Failure” from the hardcore band Harp And Lyre out of Oklahoma City contains these striking lyrics, which present the idea of failure as a herald of self-betrayal: Awake! I’ve been sleeping I’ve been restless and reckless I’ve jeopardized my viability This is not me! This is not me! I’ve come up from the grave and met you face to face Awake! Awake! I’m awake! An unpopular topic in mainstream American culture, failure is a theme reflected upon creatively by alternative rock bands and honored by great poets. “Failure, background language from a more demanding space / it’s difficult to read between your lines,” writes Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas in the poem Fracaso—“Failure”—which is an impassioned ode thanking failure for not giving him another life, for having limited him, for having used a rough sponge to clean him off. “You don’t exist,” he declares to failure, “you’ve been made up out of delirious pride.” Fail is what we mostly do—even if mostly gradually and repeatedly rather than massively, and even if—as Cadenas claims—it is made up and doesn’t exist. But thinking as this poet did about how failure is both an obstacle and an intimate companion, how it both burns and saves, and how it both does and does not exist, is not what we mostly do. Singing about how it wakes us up to our truest self is not what we usually do either. But I don’t want to talk about how “Every success is the result of a series of failures,” as Thomas Edison said, or how every failure teaches a lesson. It is not my intention to talk about small failures, which are easily thought of as “for the best.” I don’t want to talk about the invention of the light bulb. I want to talk about crushing, scathing failures that break the world as we know it into a thousand pieces. Even if failure does not exist, I want to talk about how it feels like death and how it makes it seem impossible to be who you thought you were. Even if failure doesn’t exist, I will tell you of a failure that knocked two hearts to the ground. Mine and my husband’s. "I am junk,” he said. “Okay,” I answered. When someone believes they are a failure, it’s best not to argue. It probably will not help to remind them that failure doesn’t exist and might, if they let it, escort them inward to the germ of their existence. I wasn’t being flip, I just knew he was too heavy a package for me to keep afloat. My husband wanted to be a paramedic, but the struggle as he made his sleep-deprived, red-eyed way through two years of English as a Second Language, English 101 and 102, chemistry, anatomy, psychology, biology, and pathophysiology, had been monumental. I’ve heard that when a person reads Chinese, parts of the brain light up on a PET scan that do not light up when they read English alphabetical combinations. Different neural pathways are used to process pictographic characters than are used to process alphabetical combinations. The degree of activity shows up in terms of the colors of the rainbow, with red and yellow indicating where there is more blood flow and oxygen, and blue and black indicating not much happening. So having to switch languages at age forty-four must have been sort of like having a stroke for my husband. He had to dress in the dark and stumble across the uncharted realms of the cerebral cortex, stomping down blue-black weeds and pulling on blue-black vines. I had hoped the thready pathways would meet with the old surefire ones and create a familiar clearing in the middle of this strange land, but after ten years, this mythical place eluded. Just the evening before, my husband had taken a final exam at the community college. He got a headache trying to decide if the answer was a, a&b, b&c, d, none of the above, or all of the above. Afterwards, he chanced upon the teacher in the meat section at the grocery store. He waved and called out loudly “Hi, Professor, how are you!” Greeting friends or acquaintances with flamboyant waves, shouts, or hugs is not the Chinese way. My husband says in China people would think you were not right in the head. But here in America customs are clearly different and my husband overcompensates when something feels unnatural by trying extra hard to conform. His grocery store greeting may have been a bit exuberant. I’m only guessing, I wasn’t there. His arresting martial physique combined with his dishevelment of scholarly stress and expression of dazed goodwill may have thrown the man off balance. “What are you doing here?” the teacher asked. My husband, obliquely registering the gruff tone as unfriendly, answered cheerily that he was buying food, although he thought this should be obvious. Americans can be so strange. The next day the director of the paramedic program summoned my husband to her office and demanded that he sign a piece of paper called a contact report. His teacher had filed a complaint that my husband had stalked him into the grocery store late at night and startled him in the meat aisle in violation of an article in the student code of conduct stating that students must not approach a teacher outside of the classroom setting. My husband, thinking the director was accusing him of being a violent person, politely refused to sign, which made her even angrier. She gave him twenty-four hours to consider the serious consequences. He returned home, stricken— and that is how I found him. He had already been in the two-year degree program for more than two years. He was going down and—as his shaky academic tutor and clueless social coach—I was going with him. Whether the situation was the result of a failure of understanding, a failure of greeting, a failure of avoidance...

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