Error and Perfection

The Errors of a Wise Man make your Rule
Rather than the Perfections of a Fool

William Blake, from his notebooks (E:510)

Burningbird’s kind post jogged a few memories. Though I haven’t made pictures in a long time (I suppose you’d say I retired in favor of writing, like Delacour) I still tend to think of myself as a photographer. I remember those horrible critique sessions when I first started out.

Identifying error seems to be a big part of every discipline’s teaching process. In writing instruction, empirical testing has shown that it really impedes learning how to write. The focus on error to the exclusion of all other things makes writers timid, and unwilling to take chances. I think the focus on error comes from a real inability to really say much of anything else. I mean, what does a teacher do? Aren’t they supposed to tell you when you’re wrong? William Blake was error-centric as well. His idea of what constituted error was quite plain, as he proclaimed near the end of Milton:

I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination
To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration
That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
Cast on the Inspired, by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots,
Indefinite, or paltry Rhymes; or paltry Harmonies.
Who creeps into State Government like a catterpiller to destroy
To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin (M41:2-13)

Much contemporary photography strikes me, like Blake, as “the high finishing of paltry blots.” But far more damaging is the idiot questioner, who sits and merely enumerates the flaws of other people�s photographs.

I don’t know much, really, except to say that one learns more by looking at fine photographs than by enumerating the flaws of ordinary ones. Even the best photography (or writing) has flaws. A person could do quite well by emulating those flaws, not just the virtues. Perfection is boring.