The Well and the Cathedral

Kahlil Gibran writes about work:

You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,

And all work is empty save when there is love;

And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

It is to charge all things you fashion with the breath of your own spirit,

And to know that the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.

It’s important to remember to go about working joyfully and with a sense of purpose. Sometimes my work challenges me in frustrating ways. Library patrons can try my patience several times a day, but I still must treat them how I would treat loved ones. Even when people are rude or express romantic interest at work, I have to brush it off and continue to serve. And when I’m building websites, I’m working solo and run into impediments that I have to research to make my way past. I continue to learn more and push on, trying to do right by the world. These reminders are everywhere and I stumbled on this one on a particularly stressful afternoon. The older I grow, the more I notice these serendipitous things happening at strangely appropriate times.

Six years after learning about Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire from a botanist friend, I finally got around to delving in. The theory is one of those mind-stretching exercises found in the most engaging pop science books:

Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

This in the middle of a chapter about the history of the tulip, a flower I’ve felt endeared to since reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook. We’ve been taught that plant evolution is a force of nature outside of human forces until we capture this force and manipulate it. But what if these mutations that would never work in nature compel humans to take this plant and multiply it like crazy? Pollan applies this to the apple, the tulip, the potato and marijuana. In talking about the tulip, he emphasizes the appeal of symmetry:

… but the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization – of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. [...] Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

The same holds true for bees. How do we know? Because symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can’t do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn’t go to the trouble if the bees didn’t reward the effort.

But if the pleasure bees and people take in flowers have a common root, standards of floral beauty soon begin to specialize and diverge – and not just bee from boy, but bee from bee as well. For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves. Whatever the case, the more perfect the symmetry, the healthier – and therefore sweeter – the flower.

Suddenly in the midst of all of this botany narrative business is a paragraph about formal organization, purpose and intent. It’s the kind of pontification that addresses the most root issues of information organization. Here is symmetry, which we as a species utilize for nearly all of our information in some way or another. And here is a suggestion that different types of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry, much in the same way that different types of people seek different kinds of information. All of these connections emerge, especially relevant in my life where I help people find information at the library as well as help people organize and present information through my web development work. SQL, Joomla!, WordPress, various search engines for specific purposes give people (and especially me since I use them all the time) tools and lenses through which we work with information.

How do we organizers, presenters and retrievers of information take this way of seeing information, mutation, and evolution and take it from theory into praxis? By using advanced methods of organizing information we can take the most basic, oldest ideas and translate them into something useful. The power of many people influencing content, creating mutations and evolving has resulted in some of the greatest and fastest growing successes on the internet. Of special note is Firefox, which has rightfully and righteously carved out a bigger piece of browser use statistic pie than Internet Explorer. The superior product was developed by a whole army of programmers and regular old internet users. Of course, Wikipedia and Facebook would have never been successful without their user-generated content.

This bottom-up organizing has been criticized for producing unreliable or inconsistent results. However, this is what evolution is all about. These are the mutations that bring about improvements.