Sunday, February 11, 2007
The merits of Inefficiency
Surely any self-respecting, unconscious conservative should read those words and move on.
Good riddance.
John Ralston Saul talks a lot about our obsession with efficiency. I think he has a point.
We have an obsession that things be done faster, cheaper, to perform better.
These are all worthy attributes. They are the engines of economic growth.
But are they, in themselves, a meaningful end? Or are they just a means to an end that needs to be first defined?
There's this article I read about two weeks ago. In the National Post. It was about this young writer, who's name I can't remember, and he's written some novel I also can't remember but I'm sure you could find it in the front display of chapters and coles.
We love young novelists.
Anyways, he said that he wrote about 2000 pages to come up with his novel. His novel was about 400 pages.
And it made me wonder, can beauty be efficient? Can creativity be efficient? And, of course, can writing be efficient?
This opens up a whole can of worms. Because I think it really puts to question the value that we place in our society on efficiency.
That which is most beautiful has many layers. It arises and exists in a web, textured, confusing, often with a structure so subtle that it might not even be detectable.
Efficiency, on the other hand, is all about being linear. Achieving an end as directly as possible. With time as the crucial component.
This writer, of whom I still can't remember the name of, he said something like 'you can take the most direct route, using a map, to get from here to there, or you can take the route intuited by your senses, and that route is maybe all over the place and full of dead-ends, but it may be also be full of a beauty you would otherwise never find.'
So yeah, if we were more inefficient we'd miss out on growth. And our corporations wouldn't make as much money and all those stock operators wouldn't get so rich.
But I wonder what else we'd find?
Thursday, February 01, 2007
It don't matter where you bury me.
I'm sitting around on a saturday night eating cheesburgers and getting ready to write. That's all and that's it.
But don't get me wrong, life isn't anything dull.
Earlier tonight I was looking at myself in 20 years and you know what, I liked allright what I saw. I might have shaved the beard and I do think cognac tastes like sewer water but all in all its all right.
I'm getting ready to write.
But not a post. For the first time in a month, my god has been a month, I'm going to write something longer than the length of my hand.
This is what I'm going to write.
I'm going to write about this fellow. This fellow who used to think he was really all that and knew it all and he didn't need no god telling him what to do.
A blasphemer. That's what he was.
He blasphemied most anything that you'd spell with a capital. Didn't buy any of it and said so. Was a real thorn in the side of tradition.
Well anyways, this fellow, its been some time now since he walked away, and now he's coming back.
And he's coming back crawling.
He still doesn't buy it, doesn't believe it any more then when he left, but now he knows he needs it. And he's begging it for mercy.
He no longer can handle the markless desert.
And having been there and seen it all and tried it out, he now realises that it doesn't so much matter whats real and what isn't as it does what works and what doesn't.
He learned what doesn't work, and so now he wants to come back.
That's it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
