On the Problem of What Dissolves What

Nelson arrived twenty minutes late with a coffee so large it required two hands. McPhee was already seated at the kitchen table in my apartment, which I hadn’t planned as the meeting location but which became it after the cafe I’d chosen turned out to have closed three months ago. He’d let himself in — the door was unlocked, a fact he mentioned without judgment but with the kind of precise notation that suggested he was filing it away. He was examining a bar of soap I’d left by the kitchen sink. Not using it. Holding it up to the window light and turning it slowly, like a geologist with a core sample.

“This is a castile,” he said. “Olive oil base. You can tell by the color — this yellowish ivory. Marseille soap is whiter because they cut the olive oil with coconut or palm. The Aleppo version is darker, almost green on the outside, and when you cut it open the interior is the color of unripe avocado.”

“John, I haven’t even sat down.”

“I’m observing your soap.”

Nelson set her coffee on the counter and pulled a chair around so she faced him at an angle rather than across. “Of course you are. And you’ve already figured out where it was made, how old it is, and what it says about the person who bought it.”

“It says she buys soap at the co-op. Which tells me nothing I didn’t already know.”

I said I’d been thinking about soap as a subject. That I wanted to write something that took a single domestic object and opened it outward — into chemistry, history, labor, the body, the intimate daily fact of touching a thing that touches you back. That the hermit crab form would be a safety data sheet, one of those industrial documents that break a substance down into its component hazards and handling instructions.

McPhee set the bar down carefully, aligning it with the edge of the sink. “The safety data sheet is a good form. Sixteen sections. Each one addresses a different kind of knowledge about the same substance — what it’s made of, what happens if you inhale it, how to store it, what it does in a fire. There’s a section called ‘Ecological Information’ that describes what happens when the substance enters the water supply. I’ve always found that section moving, though I’m not sure the authors intend it to be.”

“Why moving?”

“Because it’s the section where the substance stops being yours. You used it, it went down the drain, and now someone has to account for where it goes. The document tracks the full life of the material, not just the part where it’s useful to you.”

Nelson was doing something with her hands I recognized from reading her work — a kind of folding-and-unfolding gesture that seemed connected to the way her sentences work, each one opening a thought and then turning it to show the underside. “The form is interesting to me for a different reason. A safety data sheet is a document about danger that’s written in the language of control. Every section is an attempt to contain a substance — to predict its behavior, to enumerate the ways it can harm you, and to prescribe the correct response. But soap is one of the least dangerous substances you could write an SDS for. The document is wildly disproportionate to the object.”

“That’s the essay,” I said, and immediately regretted saying it so baldly.

“Maybe,” Nelson said. “But you have to be careful with disproportion as a formal strategy. If the reader feels you’re making fun of the form — look at this silly bureaucratic document applied to this harmless bar of soap — then you’ve got a comedy piece, not an essay. The form has to earn itself. The SDS has to become the only adequate way to talk about this thing.”

McPhee crossed his arms, which I’d already learned meant he was about to say something he’d been thinking for a while. “I want to come back to the soap itself. You said domestic object, but soap isn’t domestic in the way a teacup or a doorknob is domestic. Soap is a chemical reaction. Saponification. You take a fat — tallow, olive oil, coconut oil — and you add a strong alkali, historically lye made from wood ash, and the molecules rearrange. The triglyceride breaks into glycerol and fatty acid salts. The fatty acid salts are the soap. What you’re holding when you hold a bar of soap is the result of a molecular event that occurred months or years ago and is now frozen in that shape.”

“Frozen is the wrong word,” Nelson said.

“Cured.”

“Cured is better. But I’m interested in the fact that you went immediately to chemistry. Not to bodies, not to hands, not to water.”

I felt the room divide along familiar lines — McPhee reaching for the material fact, Nelson reaching for the body that encounters the material fact. I said something about wanting both. That the essay should hold both frequencies at once: the sentence about what lye does to fat sitting next to the sentence about what it means to wash someone else’s body. My mother’s hands after a day of housecleaning. The hospital where they gave her a tiny bar of soap that smelled like nothing, and she held it like it was the only solid thing in the room.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. McPhee picked up the soap again.

“That image — the hospital soap — you’ll ruin it if you lean on it,” he said. “The best material is the material you trust to carry weight without announcing that it’s carrying weight. Put it in the section on ‘Composition / Information on Ingredients.’ Let the form do the emotional work. The reader will feel the collision between the clinical language and the human image without you having to point at it.”

Nelson shook her head slowly. “I half agree. The form should do work. But I don’t think you can keep the personal material subordinate to the form for the whole essay. At some point the body has to break through the document. The SDS is a container, and containers break. That’s what makes them interesting.”

“Containers don’t break if they’re well-made.”

“John. All containers break.”

I poured more coffee and tried to think about what breaking would look like in practice. The essay proceeding section by section through the SDS format — identification, hazards, composition, first aid — but with each section slightly more compromised, the personal material pressing against the institutional language, until by the end the document can no longer hold its own structure. Not dramatically. Not a grand collapse. Just the way a form stops being adequate, the way a voice that has been performing control finally drops the performance.

“I want to talk about Aleppo,” McPhee said abruptly.

“The soap?”

“The city. The soap factories. Some of them operated continuously for hundreds of years. The Khan al-Saboun — the soap khan in the old souk. It survived Ottoman rule, French mandate, Syrian independence, and then in 2012 the war reached the old city and the souk burned. The soap makers relocated, some of them to Turkey, some to Marseille. They brought their recipes. The laurel oil ratio, the curing time — eight months minimum for a proper Aleppo soap. They carried the process in their hands and in their heads and they started over.”

“That’s your thread,” Nelson said. “Not a history of soap. A history of what survives displacement.”

“I don’t think I’d state it that way.”

“Why not?”

“Because stating it that way turns it into a thesis, and I’m allergic to thesis statements. The Aleppo material should sit alongside the chemistry and alongside the personal material and the reader should feel the connections without anyone drawing arrows.”

Nelson pulled her legs up under her on the chair, which made her look both smaller and more certain. “I’m allergic to the pretense that not having a thesis is the same as not having an argument. You have an argument, John. Your argument is that the concrete fact, rendered precisely enough, generates its own meaning without authorial commentary. That’s an argument. It’s one I find beautiful and also insufficient.”

“Insufficient.”

“For this project. For what this essay wants to do. Because the question isn’t just what soap is or where it comes from or what happened to the soap factories of Aleppo. The question is what it means that we press this substance against our skin every day without thinking about it. That we begin and end the day with this chemical reaction against our bodies. That’s not a question you can answer with facts alone. That requires the writer to be in the essay — not as observer, as body.”

I said I thought she was both right and McPhee was also right and that this was the problem I’d been turning over — how to write an essay that is simultaneously a monograph on a substance and a confession about the body that uses it. How to do the McPhee move (patient accumulation of every relevant fact until the subject opens up) and the Nelson move (theory and autobiography in the same sentence, the personal as a philosophical position rather than a decorative frame).

“Don’t split the difference,” McPhee said. “Splitting the difference is the worst of both approaches. Choose a dominant mode and let the other one intrude.”

“I think I disagree,” I said, and felt the strangeness of disagreeing with John McPhee about structure. “I think the hermit crab form — the SDS — gives me a third option. The document is neither monograph nor confession. It’s bureaucratic. It’s impersonal. And because it’s impersonal, both the factual material and the personal material sit inside it in the same relation to the form. They’re both trespassers. Neither one belongs in a safety data sheet.”

Nelson’s eyes narrowed in a way that could have been interest or skepticism. “That’s good. But you have to actually commit to the form. All sixteen sections. Don’t cherry-pick the ones that lend themselves to lyricism and skip the ones that don’t. Section 10 is ‘Stability and Reactivity.’ Section 14 is ‘Transport Information.’ Those sections will resist you. Write into the resistance.”

“Section 13 is ‘Disposal Considerations,’” McPhee said. “I’ve read a lot of SDSs. Section 13 is always the shortest. Dispose of in accordance with local regulations. But disposal is the part of the object’s life we refuse to think about. Where does the soap go? Down the drain, into the water treatment system, into the river, into the ocean. The lather you made this morning is in the watershed right now.”

“And what about the body that washed?” Nelson said. “The disposal section should also be about what happens to the body that used the soap. Not death — I don’t want this to be about mortality, that’s too easy. But about the way the body that washes is always also being washed away. Cells sloughing off. The skin you had last month is gone. Soap is an agent of that removal. You think you’re getting clean. You’re also getting less.”

“That’s not how dermatology works,” McPhee said.

“I don’t care how dermatology works. I care how the image works.”

I felt the argument pulling in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, which meant it was working. The disagreement wasn’t about soap — it was about whether an image is permitted to exceed its factual basis. Whether metaphor is a kind of lying. Whether precision and beauty are the same project or rival projects.

“Let me ask something else,” I said. “Who is the speaker? In the SDS. Is it me? Is it an unnamed bureaucratic voice? Does the voice shift?”

“The voice should be yours,” Nelson said immediately. “Dressed in the costume of bureaucratic language. But yours. The seams should show.”

“The voice should not be yours,” McPhee said, almost simultaneously. “The voice of the SDS is institutional. That’s what gives it authority. Your material — the personal, the historical — should push against that voice, but the voice should hold. If the voice breaks, you’ve lost the form.”

They looked at each other across my kitchen table and I could see the argument that would take another hour: about authority, about persona, about whether a writer gains or loses power by disappearing behind a form. I wrote it down — both positions, the space between them — because I knew this was the tension the essay would live inside.

Nelson finished her coffee. McPhee was still holding the soap.

“You’ll want to research Procter & Gamble,” he said. “The Ivory soap story. William Procter was a candle maker and James Gamble was a soap maker and their father-in-law — they married sisters — their father-in-law convinced them to become partners because candles and soap both start with the same raw material: animal fat. Tallow. The company that shaped American hygiene for a hundred years began as an argument about who had the better claim to a shared supply of rendered beef fat.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“The Ivory soap slogan — ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure — came from a laboratory analysis that Harley Procter commissioned in 1882. He was trying to prove his soap was as good as imported castile soaps. The chemist found that Ivory contained only 0.56 percent impurities. Procter liked the number. He didn’t say ‘nearly pure.’ He said the exact percentage. There’s a lesson there about precision.”

“There’s also a lesson about marketing,” Nelson said. “About the way purity became a selling point in a country that was simultaneously committing genocide against Indigenous people and exploiting Black labor. Purity was never just a chemical claim. It was a racial and moral one.”

McPhee set the soap down. “I think you should write both of those sentences in the same paragraph. The chemical precision and the racial politics. Without transition. Let them collide.”

It was the first time they’d agreed on anything, and it happened so quickly that neither of them seemed to notice. I noticed. I wrote it down. And then Nelson said something about needing to leave, and McPhee asked if he could take the soap, and I said yes because what else could I say, and he put it in his jacket pocket and walked out into the afternoon and I sat in my kitchen alone, thinking about Section 13: Disposal Considerations, and what it means to be the thing that goes down the drain.