The Instrument and the Failure

An essay by Spike Humer — from The Aperture

6 min read

There’s a mountain ridge west of where I live that I have photographed more times than I can remember. It’s not remarkable in any fashion. It has no name I have heard anyone use. Its top is flat and slightly industrial — cut and graded by whatever work happened there before I arrived. It shows off a low structure of some sort, maybe two along the crown and what might be an antenna. Below it, warehouses. A rail line. Townhomes in rows. It is the shape the sky ends against on the west side of an ordinary place.

And every evening for a few minutes it becomes an instrument.

The sun comes down behind the flat crown and the whole ridge goes to a dark bar with fire behind it. Light spills over the top edge in ragged tongues, catching on the low structures, throwing rays up into whatever clouds have gathered. Then the fire drops below the line. The clouds keep the color a while — coral, then rose, then a bruised violet on their undersides. Then a thin orange seam at the horizon. Then not.

We moved here in May. Take out the travel and the rain and it comes to maybe fifty evenings. I have never once gotten it right.

My iPhone camera fails in specific and repeatable ways. It flattens the rays — what the eye reads as depth, as light traveling through air toward me, the lens renders as streaks laid flat on a plane. It compresses the range. The eye holds the burning crown and the dark warehouses in the same glance without effort; the sensor must choose, and whichever it chooses, the other goes to mud or to blank white. It oversaturates. The color that looked like a live thing comes back looking like a color, which is not the same. And it loses the weight of the hill. In person the ridge is heavy. It sits. In the photograph it is a shape.

Every one of those failures is structural. No better camera solves them. A better camera fails more expensively.

And still, I take the picture. Most evenings, I look and I snap. Sometimes eight or ten frames in a few minutes, the light changing fast enough that the third one and the ninth one are different events.

For a long time, I thought the picture-taking was aspirational — that I was trying and not yet succeeding, and that some evening the conditions and the equipment and my attention would align and I would finally have it.

I no longer think that. I think the attempt is the practice, and the failure is not a defect of the practice but the mechanism by which it works.

Here’s what I mean. If the camera could hold the sunset, I would look at the camera. I would frame, shoot, check the screen, adjust, shoot again — my attention traveling in a tight loop between the device and the thing, mostly landing on the device. Success would make me an operator.

Because it cannot hold the sunset, I look at the sunset. I take the frame and then I lower the phone and I stand there, because the frame was never going to be enough and some part of me knows it. The failure returns me to the hill. It is the failure that makes me a witness rather than a technician.

This is not a consolation I invented afterward. It is how the evening minutes actually go.

The same thing is true of every instrument I use.

A sentence is smaller than the thought it points at. Always. There is a shape in the mind, whole and simultaneous, and to say it I must break it into a line — one word after another, in an order the shape does not have, with everything the words leave out simply left out. The page flattens the rays. It compresses the range. It loses the weight.

Writers know this and mostly do not say it, because it sounds like an excuse and because saying it too often becomes its own kind of pose. But it’s worth saying bluntly at least once: I have never written the thing I meant. Not once, in any form. The journal entry, the meditation, the aphorism that seemed for an hour to be exactly right — all of them are photographs of the hill.

And the response is the same. Not disappointment, not despair, and not the fantasy of a better instrument. The response is: take the frame, lower the phone, keep looking.

There is a second thing the repetition does, which took me longer to notice.

Fifty evenings on the same balcony did not teach me the sunset. It taught me the hill. I know the crown now — the two low rises near the middle, the pale scar of erosion down the eastern face, the notch on the right where the ridge drops toward the road. I know where the sun broke through in May, and I’ve watched the break slide north through June and July. I’ll see how far south it goes by October. I almost know which cloud heights will catch, and which will simply gray the whole thing out.

None of that is in any single photograph. It accumulated in the space between the photographs, in all the standing around that the taking made an occasion for.

This is, I think, the actual argument for practice, and it’s not the argument usually made. Practice is not primarily how you get better at the thing. Practice is how you come to know the material — not as information but as familiarity, the way you know a room in the dark. You cannot get that from study. You certainly cannot get it from one good evening. You get it by returning, without much expectation, over a long time, to something that does not require you to do so.

The hill doesn’t need me on the balcony. That is exactly what makes standing there a gift and not a duty.

There’s an ending here I won’t accept. The easy move is to say: and so the failure is really a success, and the incomplete photograph is complete after all. It isn’t. The photograph is genuinely worse than the sunset. The sentence is genuinely smaller than the thought. Nothing about the practice repairs that, and a craft that pretends otherwise is a craft that has stopped looking at its own work honestly.

What I would say instead is narrower and I think more useful. The gap between the instrument and the thing is permanent, and it is also the working space. It is where the whole craft happens. Close it and there is no craft — just transcription, just a machine copying a machine. The gap is not the obstacle to the work. The gap is the room the work is done in.

So, the minutes go like this. The light comes over the crown. I raise the phone, take the frames, five, six, seven, and I already know that none of them is it. Lower the phone. Watch the color move down the cloud bank and go out. Take one more, for the record, of something that is no longer happening.

Then go inside and try to write it, and fail at that too, in a completely different way.

Then do it again tomorrow.

—sh

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