I have a new watch that's black, with lots of buttons, watertight to 25 fathoms, and it beeps and flashes and has about 20 functions... including the time, which is really all I want a watch for. It's Japanese of course, and though I've worn it ever day since I got it I don't like it much. For one thing it's digital, which means that it's never half past or quarter to in my life anymore. Instead it's 11:32 . . . 16-17-18-19 as if I needed the information the way NASA needs it to keep everything systematic. And instead of sweeping around a fixed point the way the planet sweeps around the sun, the minutes sort of mince down a finite line, disappearing before you. I've always like to think of time as an circle. After all, the old sweep watch face gives you 12 full hours right there so you can look forward or back. On a digital display, when a minute's gone, it's gone.
But I could forgive all that. What I really don't like about my new watch is the pretense of perfection it carries. Space-aged accuracy and all that which means that every time I spot one of it's digital cousins on a bank or a microwave I get to wondering which one of us is off. Even though I don't care, or don't want to anyway.
Life for me is comfortable only when it admits a certain offness, an idea that didn't have anything to do with watches when it first struck me. It had to do with ceramics. I always threw my pottery with my aim at perfection and I wanted to make bowls, pots, mugs and vases that were evenly balanced and accurately symmetrical, without slants or crooked. but when I finally ended up without bends and sways in my art I realized it was too strict and precise and closer to perfection than I wanted. I didn't like it because if I wanted more of it I might as well have gone to Wallmart for a collection that would have come off unappealing. You see, all the dents, slants and mis-shapen form is unique and so my pottery had character; something a set of machined plates from a manufacturer could never earn because they're cookie-cut and cloned and that's what bores the hell out of me about perfection. I don't want things to be perfect because it makes everything the same and that's tragic. Something proven by a girl's face. A beautiful girl, with dark hair and a big, quick smile. In fact, she was geniusly beautiful except that she had a delicate crook in the bridge of her nose that sat in the middle of all that prettiness as if an artist might have laid it in by accident and then left it there because of the stunning focus it lent to what otherwise would have been just another lovely face.
As it was, that small off-angle captured me. Got into my dreams even, and for a long time I never saw another face that I would rather have just stared at. It's gone now though. She reached 20 at a time and in a suburb that valued a certain sameness above almost everything else and so she delivered herself to the hands of a plastic surgeon who gave her a cute little cheerleader's nose that looked as if it had been designed with calipers and French curve. The first time I saw it I got angry and then just sad. I still count it as one of those signal moments in which I realized that it's our imperfections that mark us each for who we are and make us attractive for the difference.
I remember trying to persuade my English professor that. I might as well have thrown rocks at the sun to keep it from setting. He was a strict, military-style order of teacher who if he had been a barber instead of a teacher, would have cut off your head to correct a cowlick. He had a rule that anything you wrote for him -anything- that had more than three errors of punctuation, grammar or spelling was an F paper. And that would have included the poems of Emily Dickinson if he'd seen them in original manuscript. I was and am a particularly bad speller and I'm not really good with the rest of the fittings of the language and he lashed and pounded and failed me over that fact until I thought I'd have to quit showing him my work altogether. "I write to express myself, not to do mathematics" I told him once before he took me aside and said, "You know, to write as well as you do and then muck it up with your mechanics is like showing up at a formal dance in the nicest tuxedo in town but with grease and filth all in a messy hairdo". Actually, I liked the image. But he also warned me that there was a small marching army of people out there who couldn't do anything but spell and punctuate and that if I didn't tighten up my form they were going to be ahead of me all my life. Well, I don't know if he was right about that, and though I'm not arguing sloppiness for sloppiness' sake here, I still believe that writing and spelling draw on two different skills that exist in the same head only by wild coincidence. I finally took to a good method of proofreading my papers and it worked a wonderful job. It was my roommate, and he's a mathematician.
These days, or course, you have to have a computer that will root through your prose like my angry English professor, throwing out typos and spelling errors until it delivers something quite a bit closer to perfection than most human-beings can produce. For me, there is something bogus and flat and irritating about those robot manuscripts. I don't trust perfection and I don't think most of us do. It isn't natural. It doesn't invite us the way rumpled things do and if you think about it, we seem to have an instinct that mistrusts the exact.
Take for example, the story of how Mount Everest was discovered to be the highest mountain in the world. In 1852 a survey team of Indians and British took readings from six points that triangulated into a height of 29,000 feet. On the dot. When they handed their measurements to
Sir Andrew Waugh, the head of the team, he decided no one was going to believe nature would make it's highest peak exactly anything so he added a couple of feet and made the official figure 29,002. It turned out that his impulse against the exact was right. In 1955 more sophisticated methods found the mother of mountains to be 29,028 feet and it may be that everybody learned a lesson from that first survey because the 15
th edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica lists the elevation of Mount Everest this way; "29,028 feet (plus or minus a fraction)."
