– AI-generated art based on Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais (1886) –
A reading of the first few pages (17-19) of Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles:
The child stands enraptured on the balcony, holding its new present and watching the soap bubbles float into the sky as it blows them out of the little loop in front of his mouth.
Now a swarm of bubbles erupts upwards, as chaotically vivacious as a throw of shimmering blue marbles. Then at a subsequent attempt, a large oval balloon filled with timid life quivers off the loop and floats down to the street, carried along by the breeze.
It is followed by the hopes of the delighted child floating out into the space in its own magic bubble, as if for a few seconds its fate depended on that of the nervous entity. When the bubble finally bursts after a trembling, drawn out flight, the soap bubble artist on the balcony emits a sound that is at once a sigh and a cheer.
For the duration of the bubble’s life, the blower was outside himself, as if the little orb survival depended on remaining encased in an attention that floated out with it. Any lack of accompaniment, any waning of that solidarity, hope, and anxiety would have damned the iridescent object to premature failure.
But even when, immersed in the eager supervision of its creator, it was allowed to drift off through space for a wonderful while, it still had to vanish into nothingness in the end. In the place where the orb burst, the blower’s excorporated soul was left alone for a moment, as if it had embarked on a shared expedition, only to lose its partner halfway.
But the melancholy lasts no more than a second before the joy of playing returns with its time-honored cruel momentum. What are broken hopes, but opportunities for new attempts?
The game continues tirelessly. Once again, the orbs float from on high. And once again, the blower assists his works of art with attentive joy in their flight through the delicate space.
There is a solidarity between the soap bubble and its blower that excludes the rest of the world. And each time the shimmering entity drifts into the distance, the little artist exits his body on the balcony to be entirely with the objects he has called into existence.
In the ecstasy of attentiveness, the child’s consciousness has virtually left its corporal source. In the orbs, his exhaled air has separated from him and is now preserved and carried further.
At the same time, the child is transported away from itself by losing itself in the breathless co-flight of its attention through the animated space. For its creator, the soap bubble thus becomes the medium of a surprising soul expansion. The bubble and its blower coexist in a field spread out through attentive involvement.
The child that follows its soap bubbles into the open is no Cartesian subject remaining planted on its extensionless thought point while observing an extended thing on its course through space. In enthusiastic solidarity with his iridescent globes, the experimenting player plunges into the open space and transforms his own between the eye and the object into an animated sphere.
All eyes and attention, the child’s face opens itself up to the space in front of it. Now the plain child imperceptibly gains an insight in the midst of its joyful entertainment that it will later forget under the strain of school: that the spirit in its own way is in space.