By Robert Sheckley

 

On the Recession Of Perfectability

Until very recently, I worked on a laptop with an early version of Windows and Word. Now I am working on a desktop machine with Windows 2000 and Word 4. Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case, the difference between the old and the new is the difference between a bicycle without gears and a modern jet airplane with all the bells and whistles.

One of my difficulties at the beginning was that the computer was too slow. It appeared that Word 2000 was too big for my 64 megs of available memory, and that more memory would enhance the performance. It seemed that putting in an additional 256 megs of memory would take care of that. A friend came over this afternoon to do that very thing. He was going to buy the ram and I was going to repay him. Turned out he didn't buy the ram because it was too expensive this week, he decided to wait a few weeks for a price drop.

This is only reasonable. I didn't tell him, but I'd rather have had the enhanced performance than the ten or twenty bucks I might save by waiting. While the present slow rate is still on, I guess I'll avoid attempting much in the way of research.

Among my difficulties, at first I couldn't even find the document I was working on, once I had closed down and started up again. I finally have learned enough to negotiate the maze of menus and find the one I want, in a place I could remember, and call up what I was working on. I still haven't learned (if there is indeed a way) to stop the computer or the program or whatever is doing it from throwing up more copies of my piece, for reasons best known to itself. These copies often don't even seem to be Word documents. I don't know what they are, but I have to give up trying to find out what is happening until I can acquire a copy of one of the MS Word manuals. Or until my resource friend comes over next week and I can ask him a few questions. But each question branches out into various possibilities, each solution presents fresh problems, and I just don't have the time to learn at this moment what to do. I'll wait until I can get the book, and struggle along in the meantime as well as I can.

It also seems to me that AOL is coming up a lot, whether I start it or not. This also is a problem I'll have to deal with later. To try to deal with it now would require more theoretical knowledge than I have presently available, or easy to find.

There are a couple of other things. There are programs that I like from the old machine and software I haven't gotten onto the new one yet. Same reasons. But I do miss my Inspiration outliner, and I miss Ideafisher.

This version of Word will let me make an outline in the middle of my document, and presumably turn it into text if and when I want, but I'm a long way from having mastered the steps. It'll have to wait.

I also don't have my zip drive up and running. I'll have to download the software from Iomega, but that's a little much to ask of me at the moment.

The learning curve of my life feels too steep at the moment. I want to write a historical novel, and some historical short fiction. My friend has supplied me with an impressive list of sites. I've made a test run, and find a bewildering amount of information. I even have some ideas on how to narrow my search, direct it. But I am putting off doing that until I know how to copy the info to a Word document, and that must wait until I can get securely from AOL to MS Word and back without losing my way in the mists of technology.

I called this piece "On the Recession of Perfectability" because that's how it seems to me. I want to be able to use my writing instrument in the way I want to use it. It seems to me no different, basically, from wanting to drive a car well if I have or want to do a lot of driving. I want to use certain resources of my computer, over and over again. But to do that I have to learn them the first time, then repeat them often enough for them to wear a path in my head. I can't put myself into the position of wanting to do a certain operation and finding it takes me 15 minutes to half an hour to learn how to do it, and then perhaps so imperfectly that I can't do it again unless I waste even more time doing it over and over again to fix it in my memory.

The smooth operation of my computer and the resources I want on it constitute technical perfectability for me. But I find that the more I learn, the more that blessed state recedes from me. Will I ever reach the degree of computer competence I am demanding of myself? I think I will, but it won't be by next week or next month. Maybe by next year. But in the meantime, I have to get writing written and sent out.

I am left with a philosophical problem. It deals with fractalization. This term, invented I believe by Ossip Mandelbrot, deals with the many operations you need to make to achieve a desired result. Each of these operations in turn can be broken down into smaller operations, sub-operations, which themselves are composed of smaller sub-operations. To try to learn, to understand what you need in order to achieve a desired result is a project of almost infinite extent. I have to cut off the process somewhere, otherwise I'd never get anything written.

Fractalization seems to me a normal process, as I proceed along the steepening learning curve. I suppose I should never want it to end. Because if and when it does end, I will be left with the irreducible heart of the matter--how to say what I'm trying to say.

RSheckley@aol.com