Against Perfection*
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
If there was ever an irresistible tool for controlling people, their minds and their lives, and to keep them distracted, it is the irrational and deeply-ingrained notion of perfection. People who cannot ever be either physically or psychologically "perfect" chase their tails and compete with each other their whole lives in the vain hope of being considered flawless by those around them. This is pernicious and must be resisted.
What follows is the story of an unexpected triumph . . .
Over the years, English teaching in non-English speaking countries has become a major industry in its own right, mainly because people from other countries have realised the potential not just for communication but also for being able to leave their own country in cases where they perceive opportunities at home are not as good as they appear elsewhere. The other side of the coin has been a huge increase in often well-paid opportunities for suitably-qualified native speakers of many nationalities to live for extended periods in the countries of those who wish to learn; and I myself now fall into this second grouping.
In this blog, I want to share a realisation with you, a realisation which must surely be part of what well-travelled individuals refer to as "broadening the mind" – the change of perspective which results from essentially getting out of what is frequently a distorted viewpoint and conception of the world (often laughingly referred to as "home") and seeing how other travellers' experiences both resemble and differ from your own. This realisation sort of crystallised recently as a result of a closer personal relationship with a very long-term foreign inhabitant who came to me because he knew no-one else who could help him, someone with whom my relationship was originally rather distant but whom I came to both respect, admire and sympathise with greatly over the past few months, and for whom I became somewhat dismayed when the project he proposed finally bore fruit in the form of a "travelogue", an account of his journey from his native South Africa northwards to Egypt and thence via Turkey to Asian countries and then back to Korea to resume his post, which he undertook during an extended vacation, and which did not attract uniformly encouraging comments from the readership. All of what transpired made me reflect upon how human opinions are formed and moulded, and in fact how utterly unrealistic and unfair the criticism often is, not because the results themselves were particularly bad, but because the expectations of those around him as to how it should have looked seemed so unfair and unrealistic; as if "perfection" was the only acceptable outcome.
First, let's introduce the man. He hails from South Africa, and this has an important bearing upon what we are discovering here. He has been working in South Korea for many years teaching English, and as I am sitting here, he has only reently returned from another pan-Asian jaunt during the long academic winter break, which one would certainly hope would result in another lengthy little tome like the previous two, as he had already got a first book published before sitting down to work on the one mentioned here.
Now as some readers of this blog might already know, I realised how difficult it is to put together a book (see mine at http://finpubs-dwh.demonweb.co.uk/books-and-cd-roms/new-books/index.html). Our friend had already had a first travel book published in Canada and was returning to the same publisher for his second. This time, however, there was something of a problem; for his first book, the publisher had helped him with the illustrations and cover graphics, but this time around, they insisted that he had to arrange all of that for himself. This presented a problem because – like many others in his generation, and as he readily admitted himself on more than one occasion – he was a complete duffer with computers, and what the publisher was asking was absolutely not anything for which he could acquire the necessary skills, and therefore he had to ask around for help. Where he was fortunate was in being in a place where a large number of foreigners with many different skills sets which he could use would congregate – all he had to do was make contact.
As we discussed his latest project, I acquainted him with the things I could do for him and started to take down some necessary details, such as what he was thinking about for the cover layout, taking copies of the pictures for processing to the publisher's requirements and asking him what he thought about any ideas I might have had. In fact, this was to herald a period in my life which was stressful and complicated, as at that time I was becoming fed-up with the difficulty of maintaining the hagwon job and had also been asked to cobble together a simple web site for the International Pub in Changwon, which is owned and run by the internationally-recognised artist, Lee Soonyoung, as the previous one had fallen into a moribund state for various reasons. So I was manually coding a web site, contemplating changing from the hagwon job to a state school post (and straining to get the necessary documents together at a very unhelpful time) and then also had to find time to help with producing the book; and yet, looking back now, everything that I had to do during that period bore strange and wondrous fruit, not just in terms of the final products but also because it required me to revisit old skills from about ten years ago and become more capable at using other software, principally relating to image manipulation and some basic graphic design for printing. I would add to this that there was also a great sense of achievement which is only now finding its conclusion as the final part of the equation – the new teaching job – becomes finalised.
So for something like two or three months, any and all available free time was spent at home, at the computer, trimming and scaling and formatting some of the pictures he had taken on his travels and formatting the text which they were intended to accompany. This as well as performing likewise for Soonyoung's new web site, which also required appropriate graphics. Whole weekends were taken up doing this, as well as working into the early morning, but in the end I completed the process and with the help of a newly-purchased copy of SoftMaker Office, converted it to a PDF file and it was then essentially ready for colour separation and printing. He was very anxious to get this process finished because he wanted to visit his family and friends in South Africa before beginning another journey around Asia, and wanted freshly-printed copies to distribute to them. So everything was put together and saved on CD-ROMs, and then he went off to a local print packager.
Later that day, he showed up at the IP again and Soonyoung handed out copies to all of us. But . . . something didn't look right: the physical size of the book was about twice as large as I had originally intended (he asked me to use my judgement and I plumped for A5 page size, but it was actually perpetrated in B5 instead). Also, the fonts didn't come out right because – by the looks of it – the printer's system (Windows, predictably) didn't have the same fonts installed, and although this can be rectified easily, it was one regard in which a little research should have been undertaken beforehand.
Despite the fact that it was not quite as envisaged, however, he expressed his thanks and flew back to South Africa able to give copies as gifts to the people back home, after making sure that as many of us as possible still remaining in Korea also had our own. But it was at this point that we were reading through it and although I had thought that the whole package came together extremely well – it was essentially the work I did which turned the edited text into a book – comments started to be made about the quality of his writing, comments which I felt to be completely unfair.
Why?
Because – strictly speaking – he really wasn't a "native speaker" of English at all, having grown up in a mainly Afrikaans-speaking environment. Of course, in due time and with the help of better speakers, his English improved and he became fluent, but he had always felt some lack of confidence, and therefore, despite the fact that he had been teaching English and clearly, even in Korea, they don't keep you in a teaching job like that if you can't do it, his doubts had always remained. Yet, he had spent some two years writing about his adventures in English, and the result was simply a triumph not only for him in writing about so many things done in so many places, but also for myself as the skills I acquired in the course of preparing it for print had made me much more versatile. I felt honoured that he had asked me to assist and deeply gratified when I showed him the finished file for the first time and saw how happy he was; and so adverse comments, while constructive in terms of anything he or I might have missed, were wide of the mark because what he had been trying to create was not some incredible work of high literature, but rather a fairly straightforward account of his travels and the experiences he had had, firstly as a member of a trans-continental tour group, and then on his own hopping between countries in Asia.
And so we come to the essential point of this diatribe: people who almost certainly have never written extensively themselves, and who probably have never done so much travelling and then concentrated upon putting it all into writing in a language which was not their prime tongue, still feel somehow entitled to comment and have an opinion. In doing this they show how they are conditioned to respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way, which involves making an unfair comparison with works written by famous writers whose publications are often held up as examples to others, irrespective of the fact that this may be completely inappropriate and even insensitive. In fact, this is a pernicious type of social control; a "norm" is set and a product judged according to that norm. This is the diametric opposite of what is required to create a vibrant creative environment. It is amazing to me sometimes that people would even consider putting pen to paper at all when I reflect upon the level of adversity they might run into with their armchair critics.
The man himself should now be encouraged to get to grips with his next writing project, with help as necessary along the way, as he certainly has a tale to tell; and we, the honoured onlookers, should avoid inappropriate expectations and accept that he has the right to undertake and complete his work as he sees fit. He is the writer, the one involved in the creative process; we are not. He will produce something which is not perfect, and we should respect him and accept his product.
Perfection is an attribute of machines, and writers, no matter how competent or capable they may or may not be, are not machines; we desire to read novels and tales of travel and adventure not only because they entertain us but also because they inform us by bringing to our attention the experiences of others, experiences which we might recall at a later time and find useful without having to do the hard work ourselves. Every writer's style differs from that of his or her fellows, and it is precisely this variety and intrinsic individuality which makes any of them tolerable to read rather than being perennially identical and contemptibly insipid.
If that were all that we as readers desired, then we would indeed be contemptible ourselves, and deserving of nothing more than synthetic pap thrown together by a publisher's computer program. We would be completely controlled as to what was or was not acceptable for us to read, and there would be no imagination and no originality worthy of mention; we might as well just go to work every day and empty our wallets and purses into the pockets of profiteers, and call it "entertainment". And we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that the "entertainment industry" has any other plans for us as customers. They exist to make money at our expense; they want a replicable "formula" for profit; and variety must inevitably decline as writers become increasingly similar in their styles and the readership becomes inculcated into an increasingly narrow stylistic range.
I return finally to the man we in Changwon are honoured to call our friend. I have my copy of his book next to me right now, and the temptation to just lie back on my bed tonight and perhaps fall asleep enjoying it yet again is very great, even though I went through it with a fine-toothed comb so many times when I was putting it together for him. The simple fact is this: his travels took him to many places and as he writes, all of his accumulated wisdom and his knowledge of diverse areas such as history and nature, the customs and the ethnography of the areas through which he travels, and the humour and absurdity of so many of the situations in which he finds himself and his fellows are all melded together into a seamless whole. The result of his long toil is not perfect, but it is priceless; it is the unique work of a unique person whose presence here is greatly valued and desired by all of us.
All of this needs to be said because some time soon, we may lose him. He has been here, as I mentioned earlier, for many years and the impulse within him to travel seems to be very great. Korea can be a very frustrating place to try to teach English for a number of reasons – some of which I have mentioned here in previous blogs – and even those of us who have been here for a long time feel that frustration welling up within us periodically. He has mentioned his intention to me several times since he returned from his recent travels, and now that I know him better, the idea saddens me deeply. I have no desire to have him stay here forever if he doesn't want to, but if he does leave, he will be missed very much.
And so it was that the idea for this blog came to me this Sunday afternoon, as the train took me slowly back through the wonderful rural landscape of Kyungsangnam-do from a weekend in Changwon back to my new home in Milyang, with an overcast sky frowning upon the brows of the hills which looked down on the plains of spring crops. The move to Milyang has led to my rediscovery of the simple joy of sitting in a train and watching the world pass me by, but in a way it has also been saddening, as it has taken me away from the place and people who kept me happy in Changwon when things got depressing, and made it all bearable. And it came as such a surprise to me when I started to tell people that I would be changing jobs and they wouldn't see me much any more; they actually said to me: "What will we do? This place won't be the same without you!"
And I guess that's what I've been trying to say here, in my typical long-winded manner. No matter how much we desire it not to happen, the parting of the ways comes soon enough, as night follows day and summer gives way to autumn. We won't see you or hear your voice again; and who you were and what you did were not perfect, but that was what made being with you enjoyable.
I guess that's what I really wanted to say.
"Friend, this place won't be the same without you."
Andrew.
* This is a reference to the seminal work about the philosophy of Science, "Against Method", by the late Paul Feyerabend.
