Further to Ian Warden's Key Focus: Working Works of Art, this is my column in tomorrow's The Canberra Times:
A gracious
lady I met this week asked, after a long, probing conversation, “Yes, but what
do you dooooo?” The emphasis on the second “do” clearly implied that writing
one newspaper column a week, collecting and servicing typewriters as a hobby,
and sharing house with two sons and a cat, was insufficient to keep the mind
occupied, to fertilise the brain cells and ward off dementia. In her own case,
this lady uses her 60-year-old typewriter to write long, chatty letters to
friends around the world, selectively watches TV and reads a communal Canberra Times, devours Der Spiegel and occasionally, if the
weather is right, plays hookey from housekeeping by mending her garden with her
helper. She does all this in a place that she calls “me”, a unit with a
longed-for window seat and comfortable wicker chairs and a table. This, as
became abundantly evident to me, keeps her mind as sharp as a tack. At “80
going on 81” and after a life living with academics and scientists and mixing
with writers and poets, my new friend has formed the opinion that anyone who
still reads books, real books, regardless of their occupation, education or socio-economic
background, still has some grip on
reality and is OK.
Searching for something extra that I do,
I offered “play a lot of solitaire”. This drew a deep, furrowed frown. “But
that’s a mindless exercise.” Ah, I explained, this is not the game of chance
played with randomly dealt cards, but on a machine, to wit a computer. Ergo,
it’s man against machine, Kasparov versus Deep Blue like (or so I like to
think). And since machines, even computers, continue to be, at least for the
time being, fundamentally very stupid, one can exercise one’s mind and sharpen
one’s wits by working out a way to beat them. This, of course, means winning
every single game, which may seem to some to be exceedingly boring. But there’s
a certain satisfaction to be gained in being in such complete command. And I
reason that since I own my computer, along with its operating system (including
the game of solitaire), it is my absolute right to manipulate it and beat it as
often as I like. The one system component which occasionally causes this
reasoning to falter is Word Document, which continues to try to tell me how to
write and spell (and not even think about being e.e.cumings) - just as
solitaire, ridiculously, continues to try to beat me.
Machines are not just very stupid but,
worse still, they are in the main exceedingly ugly. The one notable exception
to this rule is, of course, the typewriter, which, as I explained to Ian Warden
for his Gang-gang column in yesterday’s Canberra
Times, is the rose in an iron garden. Aside from beating my computer at
solitaire and Word, I also manage to give my grey matter a fairly constant work
out by studying the history of the typewriter, particularly its social history,
which means trying to put some flesh back on to the bones of the long-forgotten
people who developed it.
One such is Lin Yutang (1895-1976), the
celebrated Chinese writer who is not so well known for his strenuous efforts
over many years to perfect a Chinese language typewriter, the Ming Kwai.
Lin
was a friend of Lewis Mumford, “the last of the great humanists” and a fellow
anti-modernist. Mumford, an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of
technology and influential literary critic, wrote in Art and Technics (1952) that “The great problem of our time is to
restore modern man’s balance and wholeness: to give him the capacity to command
the machines he has created instead of becoming their helpless accomplice and
passive victim.”
Mumford added that “man’s relation to the machine must be
symbiotic, not parasitic” and that the machine had the potential to “wantonly
trespass on areas that do not belong to it”.
Arthur C.Clarke, clearly, was on the
money when in his Space Odyssey sage
he forecast a situation in which an artificial intelligence computer, HAL 9000
(Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) wantonly trespasses and tries to become
the master of men.
To me, Mumford’s thinking goes a long way
toward explaining something of which I seemed unable to convince Ian Warden.
And that is the reason why so many writers today, including our own David
Malouf, Morris Lurie and Les Murray (and my new gracious lady friend) prefer to
use a typewriter to a computer. As the lady in question said, her old
typewriter is “a part of me”, “my writing companion”. And yet, friendship
aside, she is conscious of being in total command of it, of being its mistress,
not its slave.
Warden wondered whether using a
typewriter was not a distraction. Au contraire. Its mindless, slavish patience
and tolerance allows a seamless transference of the creative flow to the
written word, not once offering the temptation of the scroll back and
correction. But the big difference is that a typewriter’s operating system is conveniently
situated between one’s ears, and has an infinitely superior imaginative
capacity than any computer yet created.
*From
A to Z: Robert Messenger’s Typewriters opens at the Canberra Museum and
Gallery in Civic Square tomorrow afternoon. This exhibition of 102 old, rare
and beautiful machines, none of which tries to tell its user how to write,
continues until September 16. There are also four
typewriters available for members of the public to find out for themselves how
much more control they can exercise over their own writing than they have when
using a computer.
Robert, your posts are consistently entertaining, educational, and exotic. I look forward to them to show up in my email. Good luck with your exhibition!
ReplyDeleteYou make a number of excellent points here.
ReplyDeleteLin Yutang's typewriter seems like such a brilliant creation, far superior to the tray-of-characters approach. Too bad that it apparently was not produced in series.
I've been playing Scrabble against the computer recently and have managed about a 30% win rate, while learning a lot of new vocabulary from the arcane words the machine plays. (Rax and surroyal have stuck in my mind.)