Another way to consider the bubble is as a represention of thought. Most obvious is the thought bubble — the cloudy cartoons that bubble from our brains. In depictions of the process of thinking, three smaller circles join together to show the action of actually having a thought, while the representation of speech is a lone bubble, created in a single swoop. The elliptical bubble of thought, like the ellipsis itself, is always in a state of suspension, omission, and silence. The words in a thought bubble are silent, unlike speech, yet discernible through the language that depicts them and the comic image below. The bubble leaves thought in a state of suspension between one and another, allowing the bubble to represent the action of thinking and the trace of thought, as it simultaneously expresses and omits the non-linguistic and muted processes of forming ideas. The representation of thought bubbles in image and text is explored in Andrei Pop’s essay “‘If you think the World is a Balloon in your Head:’ Rethinking Vignettes.” Focusing on the vignette’s likeness to our own visual fields and subjective perceptions, Pop weaves his way from Romantic tales and Symbolist illustrations of the nineteenth century to the ubiquitous comic bubble. In fact, the levity of the thought bubble is best expressed in comics, particularly in their depiction of human-animal relationships. Whereas human characters fluctuate between thought and speech, Jim Davis in Garfield represents the conversing and imaginings of the orange cat through thought bubbles alone. Suspended between speech and thought balloon, Garfield’s thoughts lightheartedly emerge in small globules to form a hazy cloud of both his and our own imagination. In these instances, the thought bubble becomes a hyperbole of what we cannot know — further exaggerated in this strip from September 28, 2015, with the response of "nothing" and the smile we cannot see. The bubble is as much about what is going on in our own heads as it is a form of telepathy.

In bubbles, we not only find thought, but also the world of dreams and reverie. The bubble as a symbol of illusion as opposed to reason is predominant in depictions of bubbles beginning in the eighteenth century. Take, for example, the engraved frontispiece of Pierre Poiret’s De Eruditione triplici Solida from 1707, in which men blow bubbles inside of a cave filled with ancient philosophical texts — like in Plato’s allegory of the cave or a world based on imaginings and illusions. Whether by way of philosophy or dreams, the transparent, yet reflective qualities of the bubble may tempt us to mistake an image for reality and lead us to good or bad ideals far beyond. In Thomas Couture’s painting, Soap Bubbles, a young boy sits in a cavernous study, looking dreamily past the bounds of the space. Two floating bubbles reflect the grilles of the window that are otherwise cropped out of the image. In “Bubbles in Northern European Self-Portraits: Homo Bulla est (The Individual is a Bubble),” Liana Cheney provides an iconographic history of the bubble as an allegorical motif of mortality in Dutch vanitas still lifes. The ephemerality of the bubble is also explored in Mariana Fernández’s essay, “Bubble Murals and Muralist Jokes: Asco’s Skyscraper Skin,” in which she extends the transience of the bubble beyond allegory to the performative dimensions of Asco’s public interventions. However, as imminent death haunts life, the bubble as an allegorical motif is still present in the nineteenth century. In the Couture, the allegory that penetrates the space is not only symbolized by the bubbles but is also reflected in the mirror by the word immortalité. While he ponders the bubbles as they glimmer and float to their own demise, his mind is also elsewhere, in the air, while his body remains grounded with his hand poised on the sole of his shoe.

The suspension of the thought bubble in a world of dreams and reveries is perhaps best expressed by the nineteenth-century French artist, Odilon Redon. The mind is no longer grounded in a subterranean cavern nor by holding onto a shoe; instead, heads detached from bodies float freely in an ambiguous bubbly space of ether. In his painting, Evocation of Roussel, all the elements harmonize through tone and color to suggest the reflective interplay of light at the heart of a bubble. The gold mass at the top of the image gently breaks, folding and disappearing into the curvature of the azure of sea or sky, commingling the worlds of water and air. The man’s head is barely tied to his body and levitates upwards into the layered haloes of reverie. Microscopic forms, flowers, and decoration hang over and around him as if to share with us the aspects of his imagination made visible.

The subjective play at the heart of the bubble is complemented by the philosophical and scientific understandings of the bubble as matter. Bringing the bubble back to earth, we might stay with Redon a little longer and examine his paradoxical lithograph, entitled Le Jour (The Day) from his series Songes (Dreams). At first glance, the image does not seem to be in the suspended state of dreams like the majority of the artist’s work. The lithograph depicts an empty room illuminated by the light of a six-paned window that frames a single tree with branches and leaves slightly blown by the wind. However, strangely, bubbles move upwards from the ground as if they have been created by the floorboards. There is no one there to blow them, except for perhaps ourselves. The bubbles seem to pre-exist in space. It is easy to imagine that the bubbles contain within themselves a similar reflection to the bubbles in Couture’s painting — the window and space beyond. Like the boy’s state of mind in the Couture, the lithograph propels us to songer, to dream, but also to wonder, reflect, contemplate, and muse.

The interrelationship between the art and science of the bubble is developed in Anita Hosseini’s “Colors of Light: Newton’s Observations and Chardin’s Representations.” Central to the trans-disciplinary dimension of the bubble is its means of optically displaying scientific fact and artistic encounter by way of experimentation, drawing attention to the importance of observation in both fields. Redon’s composition also recalls popular scientific imagery of bubbles, such as the seventh plate, “La bulle de savon,” in Amédée Guillemin’s Les phénomènes de la physique. Here the bubble becomes a magnified image of an empty room with two paned windows and of perspective itself. Redon’s composition removes the first-person perspective to instead create analogies between things — the bubble and the tree’s leaves mirror each other in their movement upwards and downwards, their allegorical implications of transience, and can also both be understood as primordial forms of matter.

The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz hypothesized that the pressure of light against the earth creates tiny bubbles of matter, writing in his Hypothesis physica nova that “bubbles are the seeds of things, the foundation of bodies, and the ground of all the variety that we admire in things and all of the impetus we find in motions. The bubbles contain smaller bubbles, which contain smaller bubbles still, and so on to infinity.”⁵ While Leibniz’s claim sounds slightly ridiculous, it was not far off from the science of molecular dynamics and physics developing at the end of the nineteenth century. The British mathematician William Thomson merged the popular entertainment of blowing bubbles with new understandings of the physical sciences, stating “blow a soap-bubble and look at it — you may study all your life, perhaps, and still learn lessons in physical sciences from it.” The title of Redon’s lithograph, Le Jour, is extremely appropriate. The science of bubbles is the study of everyday things.⁶

The science of bubbles, although based in the quotidian, extends beyond the commonplace to the realms of infinite possibilities and speculation. This sentiment is expressed in Leibniz’s bubble hypothesis, imagining that the universe is composed of a series of little bubbles or multiverses. The bubble simultaneously forms the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. This idea does not stray far from discoveries and experimentation in contemporary quantum physics and the claim first proposed in 1955 by physicist John Wheeler: that spacetime is not a constant but is instead "foamy," composed of a series of ever-changing tiny bubbles and mini-universes forming inside our own. It is in the bubble that worlds of science and fiction collide. The possibility that other worlds may float just outside of our perception has tantalized writers since the concepts were first laid down. Some writers imagined entire civilizations growing and thriving within those miniature worlds, as Dr. Seuss did with Whoville, or Voltaire did in his 1752 story “Micromégas,” with the twist being that Earth is a tiny world, being visited by the giant inhabitants of far-away universes. For other writers, like Michael Crichton in his 1999 novel Timeline, the multiverse might offer an opportunity to travel between worlds and even times. Crichton spent chapters of the book outlining the quantum science that underpinned his narrative and had one character describe the universe as an expanding sphere with “tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out...at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles...There may or may not be wormholes in that foam.”⁷ One might also think of Lewis Carol’s Alice traveling to a dreamworld in Through the Looking-Glass. For the Queen, the seemingly fantastical aspects of multiverse theory, or the marvelous in the everyday, are of little concern; after all, as she says: “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”⁸

For other speculators, the bubble could be a form of transportation to a far-off land. In the Frontispiece to a 1687 edition of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. The narrator, also named Cyrano, attempts to discover the "exotic" beings of the moon, by bottling the fizz of dew to fly into the unknown realm of outer space. Miserably failing to capture the air, the narrator falls back to the ground and ends up in New France — an analogy for imperialism. The preoccupation with fictionalized “otherness,” particularly at the end of the seventeenth century, reflects the European desire to colonize and prosper from "far-off" regions and lands. The speculative imagination’s dream of exploration is not outside the context of imperialist conquest and the belief in the scientific betterment and advancement of humankind.

This history is also intimately tied to the materiality of the bubble. The lightness of the bubble contains an element of horror. The creation of the soap bubble itself is intimately linked to the European imperial drives to manufacture and produce soap from colonial, exploitative labor to cultivate oil palms from Central and West Africa.⁹ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the bubble not only became a symbol of the commodification of soap but also of the cult of hygiene and cleanliness of "civilized" Europeans. Paradoxically, the production of soap brought with it the polluted froth and toxic foams of steam engines and industrialization. In her essay “Death in the Air: Exploring Tension, Threat, and (In)visibility in Teresa Margolles’ En el aire,” Julia Banwell uncovers the tension between the fragile beauty of a bubble and its uncleanly and deadly associations through Margolles’ contemporary installation art. It is easy to mistake the levity of the bubble for simple playful jouissance or a world far beyond reality, yet within the bubble’s reflections, it carries the politics of a globalized world based on imperialism and industrialization.

The ties between speculation and bubbles extend to the metaphoric. In economics, speculation refers to the act of buying something with the hope that it will rise in value. When this is widespread, it creates a so-called “economic bubble.” During periods of inflation, people may become filled with excessive financial euphoria, as prices, and profits, rise and rise with seemingly no end in sight. Of course, eventually — the bubble bursts, often quite spectacularly, bringing ruin to those who pinned their wealth to its rise as well as the greater economy as a whole. History is full of these bubbles. The first “popping” of a major financial bubble occurred in 1720, with the demise of the British South Sea Company, which had been formed for the purposes of the Atlantic slave trade. Shares were held by aristocrats, politicians, and even the general population all eager to participate in what seemed to be a sure investment. This can be seen in William Hogarth, Emblematic Print on the South Sea Scheme, in which men and women from all walks of life are caricatured alongside the representation of financial speculation and corruption. At the center of Hogarth’s graphic satire, he depicts a wheel of fortune ridden by these comical Londoners flanked by allegorical figures, such as a mutilated Fortune, a naked Honesty, and even Villainy scourging Honor.

The nature of economic bubbles is paradoxical: on the one hand, they cloud and obfuscate the rational judgement of people buying into them. On the other hand, to those involved, they are completely transparent: no one recognizes that they are in the midst of a bubble, making them all the more surprised when they pop. In her essay "Like my dreams, they fade and die...", Esther Leslie touches on the myriad of metaphorical constructs in daily life that are centered around the bubble, encompassing economic and labor froth and the bubble as an ideological symbol, a reality of both protection and danger, and a commodity.¹⁰ In our current moment, there are concerns regarding our position in the middle of a bubble: the stock market continues to artificially surge in value, despite the overall economy remaining in shambles from the ongoing coronavirus, and millions of people are still out of work. The pandemic resulted in a second outbreak: one of exuberance.

The metaphorical nature of the bubble contains an enigma at its center. The bubble represents a world beyond and a world within, the transience of life, and a protective layer against death. Although fragile, understanding the many paradoxical qualities of bubbles might mean to look simultaneously within and without. As living during the coronavirus pandemic has shown us, the creation of personal bubbles are dictated by a larger bubble brimming with pathogenic ones. The term “bubble” has long been associated with one’s personal space. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this idea has taken on an omnipresent resonance. In his essay “Leavening Agents: Some Meditations on Baking Bread under Lockdown,” Charles Keiffer details the intimate and privileged, even revolutionary, encounter with yeasty bubbles in the art of baking bread during quarantine as a media craze and form of self-care. Indeed, today, the bubble is a form of care and caring: it is to the benefit of others, and to society as a whole, to maintain a distance and wear a mask, to keep our bubbles from intersecting. Of course, the bubble is also a form of privilege; only those with the wealth and means to draw back from society are able to fully live within these spaces of clean and protected air. Either way, the bubble has perhaps never been as ubiquitous in everyday discourse and thought as it is today.

To attend to the bubble is to attend to many aspects of life — the fleeting, the fragile, the transparent and the polluted, the simple and the complex, the privacy of worlds, thoughts, and dreams, the science of matter, the everyday and the extraordinary. With its special power of reflection, the bubble creates a bridge between worlds, and like it, the essays, poetry, and artwork in this issue attempt to do just that. Thinking of air bubbles might teach us how to be within and without, how to be mindful at a distance while not being wholly apart.