ON PERMISSION TO FAIL
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better
Samuel Beckett
Last week I was invited to ‘top and tail’ a symposium for artist teachers in Belfast. My invitation was prompted by a think piece I had recently written entitled ‘Spaces of Possibility and Pockets of Hope’. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Myles Horton and other radical educationalists I look at the way theory can inform practice and support us in creating classrooms and spaces of learning that are more equal, more collaborative and more open to possibilities. Encouraged during someone else’s presentation to create a placard for a cardboard figure that captured something important we felt the arts offered young people I found myself writing ‘Permission to Fail’. It has never felt more important.
I’ve been thinking a lot about failure recently. I’m sure it’s a generational thing. Recognising and accepting all the things we will never do, never see or ever be. Sometimes it’s led by a deep despair that my generation, a generation that began in such hope after the Second World War, has failed to leave the world in a better state than it was when we arrived. It is difficult most days to look at the news and not to be reminded of our collective failures. As activists to end the genocide in Palestine. As feminists not to bring an end to violence against women, including trans-women. As anti-racists to prevent the rise of the far-right or counter growing Islamophobia and intolerance towards migrants. As pacifists to have prevented recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. As environmentalists to end our world’s destructive reliance on fossil fuels. On a more local level as UK citizens to resist the privatisation of basic human rights such as water and energy, prevent the sale of the NHS to hedge funds or rescue our schools and universities from the grasp of corporate empires. The list goes on.
On a personal level, nothing makes me more conscious of my daily failures than being a caregiver for someone with a neurodegenerative disease like bvFTD. A fellow carer recently recommended I read a book called Travelers to Unimaginable Lands by clinical psychologist, Dasha Kiper, wanting to know what I thought about it. In this book, Kiper, a young woman in possession of an online smile I find inordinately irritating, supposedly sets out to comfort caregivers. She does this mainly by letting us know that the mistakes we make are largely the fault of trying to apply our ‘normal’ reasoning to the ‘abnormal’ behaviours of those in our care. By doing so, she suggests, our ‘healthy’ minds begin to mirror the ‘irrationality’ of those we are caring for, our.own behaviour becomes increasingly ‘counterproductive’ and our brains begin to suffer their own cognitive damage. The book which focuses on a number of incredibly extreme case studies of people with Alzheimer’s (which is very different from bvFTD) and their caregivers has given her a guru-like status with journalists at places like the Guardian, Telegraph and Radio 3 Books. As one of the caregivers she is purportedly addressing, it reads like a compound list of the mistakes we commit daily, and serves only to remind us that we will almost undoubtedly fail to be the patient, tolerant and resilient person we know we ought to be. Or that our friends and family imagine we might be.
There are few caregivers who don’t already go to bed each night filled with unassuageable guilt. The compulsive behaviours that increasingly control the lives of those we love, from addictive cravings for sweet foods to swatting fruit flies, test us in ways we could never have prepared for. It has been harder than I could ever have imagined to learn to accept that the person who was once my soulmate, companion and ally in the bigger and the smaller struggles for justice in this world is no longer present or available for the passionate conversations about politics and art that have always marked our lives together. More recently I’ve found myself struggling, no doubt unreasonably in Kiper’s eyes, with S’s ‘adverse’ intolerances to certain sounds coupled with a strangely altered response to music. (Both distinctive markers of bvFTD.) In S’s case sound intolerances currently include ‘yapping’ dogs, seagulls and crows that ‘caw too loudly’, babies crying and police and ambulance sirens. The seagulls and crows are now treated to mock ‘shootings’ from the balcony, even in the middle of meals, while ‘yappy’ dogs in the park are regularly barked/yapped back at. Babies, thankfully, are simply told not ‘to cry because their Mummy (or Daddy) loves them”.
Like all the carers I know, I spend hours in the middle of the night on the internet, trying to turn each day’s failures into a place of learning by reading endless medical research papers. I do this partly in an attempt to understand why these things happen and partly in the hope that might help me find better ways to respond. I now know the medical terms for almost all the main bvFTD symptoms. Most of them are helpfully prefixed by the word ‘abnormal’, as in ‘abnormal hedonic phenotypes’, which basically describes those changes in emotional responses to sounds and music. In terms of music, S. has shifted from someone who brought his sons up on The Clash, The Specials, Elvis Costello, and Tracey Chapman, alongside Springsteen, Dylan, Baez and Jacques Brel, to someone who spends hours insistently tapping his feet and singing discordantly (another bvFTD symptom) to videos of mildly political parodies by The Marsh Family or the songs of folksy Arkansan troubadour Jessie Wells. It’s an impulse matched by an inability to understand why everyone, especially me, doesn’t want to join him in doing so. On a good day I can laughingly tell myself that he has at least stuck with musicians whose politics lean in favour of social justice. On bad days my inability to respond with the appropriate level of enthusiasm, or patience, makes me regret being a lapsed Catholic. A few Hail Marys before bedtime and, in the day, I might have been forgiven everything.
The impulse to make Permission to Fail my mantra for the arts was undoubtedly based on the enduring hope that, in the absence of Catholicism, making, producing and experiencing art might offer us a way of thinking about failure differently. Despite the fact I know it’s one of the things we find it almost impossible to speak about as a sector. It was probably inevitable, then, that while thinking about this possibility I found myself revisiting the lines from Samuel Beckett quoted above. ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.’ There are few arts educators or arts based trainers, myself included, who have not used these words as an upbeat motivational call to those we are working with, whether artists, entrepreneurs or tech start ups, to worry less about the possibility of failure and be more open to trying things out and taking risks.
Reading Worstward Ho, the prose poem these lines come from in entirety for the first time, the words take on a different significance. Nervous of wrongly interpreting any work by Beckett, I know too many experts, too many gatekeepers, I discover the piece speaks to me now in a purely visceral way. The strong sense of universe out of kilter, haunted by shadows, where words are emptied of their meanings and language is no longer to be trusted that Beckett writes about feels oddly familiar; an echo of those strange worlds carers for those with neurological diseases negotiate every day. The figures of the old man, the old woman and the child, ‘bowed down’ and ‘bowed back’, plodding through the poem towards some unidentified void, the ‘child hand’ reaching out to grasp ‘the old holding hand’, following a primitive human urge to ‘hold and be held’ move me beyond the bounds of poetry.
Beckett himself wrote in one of his letters that he was seeking as an artist to find a form that could accommodate ‘the mess’. Choosing to wrestle with that mess, to persevere in the face of failure, seek new understandings and insights even through the very act of writing, as he does in Worstward Ho, gives his exhortation to ‘Fail again. Fail better’ a richer and more potent meaning. Finding the determination to keep on making, creating, keep finding ways to respond to or resist ‘the mess’ of this world, as writers, artists, or human beings, despite success or failure, is something the arts can and do offer us. ‘A pox on bad’, Beckett declares at one point in the poem as if being bad is no longer enough. A pox too, I want to add, on the pernicious way those moments we ‘fail’ can prey on our minds, gnawing away at our sense of self worth and closing down our sense of possibilities. Giving ourselves permission to try and to fail matters. ‘No try. No Fail’ as Beckett notes, perhaps it’s enough that we try again and that is the journey. Even if some of the results are little more than ‘least worse’?
It might feel a little perverse to move from Beckett’s bleak poem to the new Pedro Almadóvar film Bitter Christmas which I saw with S. recently. Twice in two nights, in fact, as the first time we missed much of the dialogue after the subtitle system broke down. Probably because most of the audience were older and committed fans like us, we tried our collective best to hang on in there. After all, the things we love about Almadóvar, from the eye-searingly luscious colours to the thrillingly heightened emotions, wicked humour, stunning locations and costumes were still there. Although I did learn on our second (complementary) viewing that most of my guesses at the dialogue had been way off mark. But, despite its cinematic lushness which feels as far from Beckett’s austerity as possible, Almadóvar’s study of two film directors struggling with writer’s block is very much a reflection on failure and self-recrimination. Faced by their failure to deal adequately with their own grief and loss, or that of their friends, each of them is finally forced to acknowledge they have been mining the pain and suffering of others to feed their own creativity.
Describing it as ‘the riskiest film he has ever made’, Almadóvar fears his the audience may fail to follow its intricate film-within-a-film narrative. Following the slow revelation and realisation that the female director, Elsa, is simply a construct of male director Raul’s imagination certainly requires our careful attention; a skill Almadovar believes we are losing due to our endless consumption of ‘Netflix’ on the small screen. Certain critics, meanwhile, have responded by asking, almost gleefully, if it might be Almadóvar himself, rather than his imagined audience, who has failed. Has he, they have asked, stripped away too many layers, become too obsessed with his own self-analysis, that he is in danger of repeating himself?
It is true Bitter Christmas revisits familiar Almadóvar themes. But there are scenes in the film, such as those where he deals with the suffocating grief of two mothers who have lost a child that only Almadóvar could have captured with such painful rawness and truthfulness. The distress of a dying mother at a distant thunderstorm, Chavela Vargas’ songs and Natalia’s deep unhappiness continue to haunt you long after the credits come up at the end. And, although some have found the ‘ending’ that follows Raúl’s first-draft problematic, I found myself wanting to stand up and cheer as the screen crackled with the fierceness of his long-suffering assistant Monica’s anger as she accuses him of the parasitic and vampire-like nature of his cinematic auto-fiction.
I was oddly thrilled to discover that Almadóvar, Beckett when he wrote Worstward Ho and I are the same age; already seven years older than the three score years and ten promised to us in the Bible. However much one tries to disguise it, avoid it or cling onto one’s youthfulness, ageing becomes increasingly and painfully real as time goes on. Perhaps the realisation that one has so many fewer years to live than one has already survived, encourages the self-critical introspection and reflection Worstward Ho and Bitter Christmas exemplify. Perhaps it also gives one permission not to care whether one is repeating one’s themes or sharing increasingly darker thoughts..
Almadóvar has a new movie planned for 2027. Beckett went on to write two more pieces after Worstward Ho, still exploring language and meaning in the face of his own aphasia and neurological problems. ‘You must go on. I’ll go on’ as he once said. And here I am, old but not yet prepared to accept being aged. A beginner but not a beginner. Stuttering sometimes to grasp the words, hold the thoughts. But still giving myself permission. To try and to fail. Determined to ‘take heart’ as Beckett’s unidentified narrator urges himself, and to believe that in failure there is always learning, always growth.
Postscript
Yesterday (26th September 2026) was the anniversary of the poet, Tony Harrison. I have shared elsewhere how, when he was my tutor at Newcastle University, he gave me permission, as a young working class woman to be myself, when he wrote ‘more power to your elbow lass’ at the end of an essay where I spoke about Blake’s Songs of Experience as describing the factories and streets we both knew in Leeds. He often writes about fearing he had failed to totally capture the voices of ordinary people like his parents, although he always did it with such truthfulness and such power. Going back to some of his work I found this quote. I’m not sure where it comes from or when he wrote it but it feels like a timely piece of advice I want to take from him today:
I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.
Tony Harrison 1937-2025
Fail Again. Fail Better.
