I learned another wonderful thing about the world the other day. Going to work, I was informed first that it was -17 degrees Fahrenheit outside ??? and second, that ordinary soap bubbles will freeze in the air if it’s -10 degrees or colder. Bubbles freeze in the air!
It is true. Strange and true and amazing.
When you first blow the bubbles, they sail out like any regular soapy sphere ??? slightly iridescent, transparent, gently adrift on invisible currents. But gradually you see them begin to grow opaque ??? still afloat, they cloud over with a subtle increase in gravity, a kind of solemnity that seems to overtake them.
Then several things can happen. Some simply burst, as bubbles do ??? punctured by some sharp, external point or at the beckon of a secret internal cue. But when frozen bubbles burst, they shatter into ice! One firework of shards sparkling in the air.
Others begin to cave. As they move through space, craters appear on their once slippery surface, like the dusty grey seas of a moon. This delicate, crumpling planet will then often crash to our earth while its shell tends to remain. Lining the ground, clinging to fenceposts ??? you can see these half-domed, fluttering husks ??? an abandoned carapace of a creature born to air.
Or if you catch it ??? an ice world melts hissing on your hand.
* If it is cold enough where you are right now ??? please run outside and try this right away! If you are not lucky enough to be living in such arctic climes ??? I discovered a series of photographs that actually does capture some of this otherworldly bubble beauty (perhaps not surprisingly, through a site called BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things). Behold:
A series of planets in aligned orbit, with soft-focus fence in background.
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Which lead me to think further about beauty. Why was I so drawn to this image of the bubbles ??? to want to tell you about it, describe it to you ??? have you experience it firsthand or, at the very least, be able to experience it through words or photographs?
Elaine Scarry addresses this phenomenon in the beginning of her book On Beauty and Being Just:
What is the felt cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even require, replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.
Yes ??? exactly! She goes on to describe how one replication of beauty often inspires further replications in other forms, and the replications themselves may beget further replications, which “sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops.” And she likens that longing for eternity back to the first startled moment when we behold beauty:
“the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday act of staring. The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later“. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep them sensorily present to us.
We are startled into delight. We stare. We try to follow William Blake’s advice from “Augeries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ A Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”
Returning to the image of the freezing soap bubble and why it is so appealing ??? I think it has to do with this idea of holding eternity. Not only is the transformation of the bubble itself from liquid to ice beautiful ??? but because of the soap bubble’s inherently fleeting nature, it also speaks to our secret longing to make the ephemeral last a little longer. To make a watery moment more tangible. We ache for the beautiful while it is here, knowing it will soon be gone: but transformed, partly remaining ??? the frozen bubble does sometimes stay! It is beautiful, and perhaps a little terrifying, to see an object of air take shape in a body more akin to ours ??? not meant to live forever, but more solid in its form, a body grown strange and to be dealt with. Our longing for eternity is brought closer to the surface by its being partially fulfilled.
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Mark Doty in his poem “A Display of Mackerel” describes the pile of fish he sees in a market in similar terms, comparing their collective scales to “the wildly rainbowed / mirror of a soapbubble sphere, // think sun on gasoline. / Splendor, and splendor“” The fish are ephemeral, beautiful ??? and the poem desires to replicate this beauty in words and images. In Doty’s essay “Souls on Ice” where he unpacks the process of writing this poem, he recounts his feeling of being first struck by the beauty of the fish just as Scarry has described ??? and then his further pursuit of the image’s depths through metaphor and philosophical inquiry. In terms of craft, what I found most helpful in his essay was his reminder that this process also requires a trust of the imagination ??? to notice when we notice beauty, and to trust whatever it was inside ourselves that drew us to it:
“I’ve learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there’s something I need to attend to.
In other words: Pay attention to what you are paying attention to. Draw what draws you (and you see yourself drawn). Until his poem asks:
Suppose we could iridesce,
like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer–
Embracing our own ephemerality ??? unfreezing our own sense of (corporal) self. Doty says as he wrote the poem: “Soul, heaven… The poem had already moved into the realm of theology, but the question that arose (???Suppose we could iridesce . . .’) startled me nonetheless.” It startled me as reader too ??? a beautiful astonishment. Along with my moment of frozen soap bubbles, I want to hold onto this question too. Universe of shimmer ??? Suppose we could?
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P.S. For a playful ode to a soap bubble’s beauty and transience, see also Grover’s “Poem to a Bubble” ??? “You last but a teeny while….”