Not Knowing

Woke in the night, tried to get back to sleep, failed. Thoughts chasing one another. After half an hour’s dithering and still uncertain what to do, I came here, to the computer. I’m still plagued with uncertainty, not knowing. But who really does know?

— “You never know, do you?”
— “God knows. I haven’t a clue . . .”

All right, it’s the human condition, why lie to ourselves. We swim in the ocean of not-knowing. Even at this moment, sleep tugs at me, without any conviction. I better set down my thoughts before they are washed away like forgotten dreams.

I was thinking about Michelangelo and van Gogh, as examples of restless creative genius: driven men, pushed into action by that kind of continuous irritation that, in the oyster, produces a pearl. What these men have in common — as opposed to Shakespeare, of whom we know nothing—is a corpus of written work which lays their ideas open to the world. With Vincent, it was the letters to his brother. With Michelangelo, it was his letters and sonnets.

In both cases there was material enough for Irving Stone to write long biographical novels. I can well understand how Michelangelo must have felt towards Pope Julius II, in relation to the Sistine Chapel ceiling project: exploited, absurdly underpaid, artistically misunderstood, stupidly naïve to throw away years on this wretched fresco when he could have been following his first love, sculpture. In his life, the ceiling became monstrous: beautiful in itself, but monstrous in the way it devoured his time, his health, and the comfort of his bones. Yet he survived it, to a ripe old age.

These thoughts are prompted by having handed over the project I referred to in my last, that has devoured a mere three or four months of my life.* My patron, the Pope Julius in my life, likes it well enough, though I haven’t given him a copy of the software for his personal examination, out of fear (that he will suggest this or that change or enhancement). He surely knows that I am more protective of it than any she-wolf of her cubs. Inevitably, I’ve had to hand over a copy to our mutual client and end-user, with a presentation in which I concealed as best I might the emotional ties between programmer and programmed. If allowed to spill out, those feelings would manifest in hostility to any criticism, and a sense that the users must prove themselves worthy to be users at all, and handle the product only while wearing white gloves, to avoid damaging it. There is a little madness in the creative mind.

But now I am to transfer that creativity to a project of my own devising, and that is where I always draw back. I find myself too ready to put my skills in someone else’s hands: to help someone else edit their stories, or as happened two years ago, be a volunteer handyman helping elderly people maintain their own homes. This, though, is where the not-knowing comes in, that not-knowing that I started the piece with. For if these blog posts compare to anything, it is to the correspondence between Vincent and his brother Theo, not Vincent’s substantive output. What shall I do for my own self? Programming software, though it may get out of proportion and swell into a Sistine Chapel ceiling of complexity (in my imagination), is not really my thing, but a displacement activity. It demonstrates a certain dogged perseverance, that’s all. What is to be my substantive work? What do I really want to do with my life now that I have the freedom?

Many questions, but do they really need to be answered? My interim answer is “no”. Within this lack of sharp focus, I see three forces wrestling with one another. Wrestling or co-operating?—I’m too close to see clearly. What I do see is (a) a dedication to the medium (of writing) regardless of content; (b) an obsession with saying something about the nature of life, whilst always leaving it not quite said (whether through incompetence or intention); (c) the irresistible fascination of observing life and living it.

Later: I recall that the system I’d been struggling with was for a company called Oxford Gene Technology. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

The structure is based on a schematic “quality cycle” in which all processes are subject to continuous improvement.  It is sometimes referred to as PDCA – “Plan, Do, Check, Act”, and in the case of the OGTMS, this is represented by:

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. Business Strategy and Planning, corresponding to the “Plan” phase of the cycle.
                                 2. Business Development and Delivery, which together constitute the “Do” phase.
                                 3. Improvement, corresponding to the “Check” phase, which determines whether objectives have been achieved.
                                 4. The “Act” phase of the cycle is indicated by the three arrows coming out of the Improvement box, which indicate that the results of the checking must be translated into action, such as correcting failures wherever they occur and improving procedures.

The OGTMS structure diagram is augmented by two other boxes: Support, which links to other relevant documents, and Help.