Robert Willensky:

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Gian-Carlo Rota, unfinished textbook on probability:

If the monkey could type one keystroke every nanosecond, the expected waiting time until the monkey types out Hamlet is so long that the estimated age of the universe is insignificant by comparison ... this is not a practical method for writing plays.

“Give thanks today for Grit”

Give thanks today for Grit.
The chafe of small misunderstandings
That shape us to another
Until our surfaces reflect,
Until our colors deepen.
Give thanks today for Grit.

Give thanks today for Noise,
Insistent voices whispering new messages
That tune our ears to many parts,
That teach us to blend,
That teach us the beauty of dissonance.
Give thanks today for Noise.

At the intersection of what we are
And what life makes of us,
Give thanks today for Wrinkles,
The calligraphy that makes us
Intelligible to each other.
Give thanks today for Wrinkles.

Give thanks today for Flaws,
The tiny spaces through which Possibility can seep,
Give thanks today for the genius of Mistakes
That reconceive the world
And return it to us bright and vital.
Give thanks today for Flaws and Mistakes.

Give thanks today for All
That veers a little out of control,
That doesn’t quite fit the theory,
That somewhat breaks the pattern
That slightly changes the plan.

Give thanks today for All

Riff One: I’m Kidding

Pinch yourself right now. Did you ever think you were going to hear a Sunday sermon about typographical errors?

Garrison Keillor likes to poke fun at us, at our anything-goes religion. He says Unitarians founded his fictional home, Lake Wobegon, when they tried to convert the Indians through interpretive dance. But even he wouldn’t have come up with this. We’re stuck with it now, so let’s see if we can pull this one out of the fire

I remember the first sermon I wrote. It took on beauty, beauty with a capital “B.” To call the subject ambitious greatly understates. I struggled to do justice to this global theme, carefully pruning and polishing my prose. In it I hoped to evoke a sense of wonder at the way we are connected to the world and how, like other creatures, praise for existence is both our true work and a birthright. I used birdsong as an overarching metaphor.

I quoted an ornithologist’s answer to why birds sing. After citing territoriality, and the need to attract mates, he finally admitted that they also appear to sing for the joy of singing. This, this brought me to the very heart of the message, the thing I had to get across.

My fingers had a different idea. Imagine my surprise on reading it back. It said they “sing for the joy of sinning.” The joy of sinning! What a thing to interrupt my rhapsody! Suddenly naughty birds were extolling sin from trees and meadows everywhere. How delightful! In that miscreant spirit, let’s devote ourselves today to praising invigorating error.

Have you ever thought about what a typewriter is? Mostly, it’s an invention for mass-producing prose, a device to relieve the tedium of hand copying. Imagine the poor clerk of the past struggling over some dense legal text only to make a horrible mistake near the bottom of the page. What could he do but begin again? Now, think of that familiar keyboard, that assembly line for 10 busy factory workers who use standardized parts to bolt together all the words and syntax that any language can contain. When we type, we organize neat, uniform rows of letters into words no longer subject to the ambiguities of handwriting, ink blotches, miscalculations of space.

But even this simple device cannot eliminate error, for indeed, if you type as badly as I, it merely accelerates it. My incorrigible fingers defeat the relentless mechanical march of a prose army bent on imposing my will on virgin paper. The course I follow bristles with detours, detours that often carry me to more interesting and seductive places than I intended.

Sometimes an extra “e” is good for a chuckle, such as spelling three “t-h-r-E-E-E.” Other times, gaining an “e” illumines something deeper and richer, like when it turned potential into “poetential.” “Poetential” sounds so much more interesting than potential. “Is Johnny living up to his potential?” his parents ask, by which they mean, “Is he getting good grades?” It has become a very goal-oriented word. But what if we were to realize our poetential? “Living up to our poetential” would mean feeling truly alive, in the moment, it would mean savoring our experiences, not just having them.

Sometimes, losing an “e” can produce a quantum leap in thought. You are humming along one prose highway when the “e,” like an alphabetic electron, disappears. Where and how did it go? All at once, you find yourself on a different path entirely and you never felt the transition. I was typing a quotation in which the author said, “They live by their dreams.” When I read it back it said, “They live by their drams.” The writer whom I was quoting had sent me on a Florida vacation. Instantaneously, the lost “e” transported me to the seething core of a decaying city as I confronted the evidence of the many addictions that can afflict us and interpose themselves between us and our dreams. “They live by their drams.” Curious, isn’t it? Losing an “e” can hit you in the gut just like losing a dream.

With a tiny shift to the right, a finger turns an “i” into an “o.” How often have you done that? Look what it can yield. “I’d love to get together” becomes “I’d live to get together.” Suddenly, a brisk, routine e-mail reveals something truer than we intended, quickens appreciation of a friend. That same disobedient finger could stray again to the right, turning the prosaic sentence “I’ve lived here most of my life” into the much more intriguing “I’ve loved here most of my life.”

Another time, a westward jog from “i” to “u” can evoke an unexpected connection. In reading back the words “rich soil,” I found they had composted into “rich soul.” It brought me back to Thomas Moore, that student of the soul, and how he discriminates soul from spirit -- words we’re inclined to use interchangeably. To Moore, spirit, like its cousin, inspiration, carries us away; it is a thing of air. Soul, on the other hand, is everything that binds us, roots us to the particulars of our lives, the very soil of our inner life. Replacing the “i” in soil with its keyboard neighbor “u” revealed soil and soul as true synonyms, fraternal twins mirroring their common alphabetic ancestry. I could never have thought of that. Shouldn’t we pity the gifted typist whom skill confines to the precincts of one parochial imagination? How much luckier are we whose straying fingers provide accidental food for the imagination every time we touch the keys.

But why should I speak of typewriters? Soon no one will remember what they were. Today we are deeply enmeshed in the world of computers. Because of their inherent bone stupidity, computers open vast new territories, blunder vistas. We can cut, paste and copy our boo-boos and speed them over cables, spray them through the ether until they traverse the world 10 times over. We no longer bother to learn to type accurately because we depend on Spell Check to clean up after us. This, in turn, leads to wonderful mistakes because of the nature of English. Chances are, at least half of our typos spell other words, so Spell Check never picks them up. Months later, we examine a text with real chagrin on seeing what we actually sent out.

I once put in a couple of days for a friend, an accountant, while his secretary went on vacation -- dubious choice on his part. I slaved over a simple letter to the IRS. Good thing he read it before sending it. I had typed in the word “wagers” for “wages,” a distinction lost on Spell Check, if not the IRS.

It’s hard to say enough in praise of Spell Check. Have you ever pondered what it proposes as a replacement when you give it something it doesn’t recognize? I recently garbled the word “themselves” and it suggested that I probably meant “the elm elves.” “The Elm Elves.” What a discovery, elves inside of elms lurking inside “themselves”! Suddenly, I wanted to know more about themselves. They ceased to be a mere reflexive pronoun carrying the burden of my thoughts. They proved a riddle that only awful typing could pose and Spell Check could solve. The answer opened a magic door that invited me in. But I restored them to “themselves” and plodded on.

Imagine, I could have romped with Elm Elves, but chose the safety of themselves instead. Even so, in this unexpected brush with the little people, a great hope dawned. Given my dreadful typing and the reliable stupidity of Spell Check, who knows what future treasure and adventure might beckon? And next time, I might not say no.

Do you know, it actually happened again right here, as I was writing about this last example in preparation for the service. As if to prove the point, I misspelled “awful” in describing my typing. It came out “a-w-E-f-u-l,” bringing it back to its original meaning, something filled with awe, which exactly described my glimpse of the elm elves. It made my typing awful in both the old and the new senses.

Riff Two: Typos, No Kidding

Something in rightness forecloses possibility. Something in correction disappoints. Few things are deader than certainty. We can be hard-headed. We need typos. Just think of grass breaking through concrete.

Let’s talk about the title of this sermon, “Typographical Erros.” Here’s how it happened. Several hours into the writing, it occurred to me that it needed a title. “Oh my God! Title! What do you call something like this?” Thus began the familiar struggle to invent something brilliant.

I’m going to share with you some of the withered fruit of that desperate labor: It starts with “The Error of Our Ways.” Hmm, that certainly has a religious ring to it. Later came the humdrum “In Praise of Error”; “Don’t Get the Wrong Idea” followed and became “Getting the Wrong Idea”; similarly, the interrogatory “Is My Slip Showing?” became the declarative “My Slip Is Showing”; and finally, we have the truly embarrassing “Typos As Soul Food.” Yup, typos as soul food. It’s humbling to stand here and admit that I put those four words together in just that combination.

In disgust as much as despair, I decided to go back to basics: “Just start with the obvious; call it ‘Typographical Errors,’” I told myself, “and try to follow it with a catchy subtitle.” But that, too, stubbornly resisted me. My fingers jittered across the keys, ineffectually tapping. Then I did the classic thing the desperate do at such times. I decided to reread what I had so far. Maybe that would jog something loose. I looked up at the screen to see the title in your order of service: “Typographical Erros,” “erros” with only two “r”s. Instantly I felt the unmistakable tug in the gut, that inner excitement that tells you this could be good.

My first impulse was to give it a makeover, work it, clean it up. You know, the way Hollywood takes something that really happened (“based on a true story”) and tarts it up for mass consumption, refining and refining until they have refined away the very thing that inspired them in the first place. “Here’s a fantastic title,” I told myself, “‘Typographical Eros.’ All I have to do is snip away one more ‘r’ for cosmetic reasons.” I was right there. Maybe Meryl Streep would play me in the movie version. In my mind, I already saw someone coming up to me after the service saying, “How do you think of these things?” Of course, I pictured it as a compliment.

But then a strange thing happened. “Erros” shrank at the thought of losing another “r” and urged me to accept what my unthinking fingers had created, something so much more wonderful, an unfinished word, a word in transition, a verbal hermaphrodite, with its feet in all-too-human error while its face bore the nascent features of a Greek god.

But what of the link between error and Eros? It feels great, but how true is it? I reminded myself that it’s an accident of the way we think that we will reconcile and find meaning in even the most random juxtapositions. This very accident supported an entire art movement. Dada exploits the meaninglessness of meaning. If you take a text, chop the words apart and assemble them willy-nilly, somehow the mind will weave them together into a coherent semblance. That’s good to know. It can foster a healthy skepticism. That said, let’s go out on that limb just to see the view.

To Freud, Eros, or libido, represented our life energy. He attributed our creativity to it. If we stretch his definition a little to cover all life, not just humans, then whatever that font of life might be would also be Eros. Chaos theory points to emergence as life’s wellspring. Chaos describes the fecund properties of simple matter obeying simple rules over eons. Small, even infinitesimal variations can lead, given passages of time hitherto beyond reckoning, to divergent and completely unexpected results. What begins in mind-numbing repetition, a kind of cosmological catechism, becomes at length the peacock’s tail.

Nature seems to have an appetite for this brand of babbling. Nature seems to prefer an interesting miscopy to a dull original. Mistakes in the unthinking iterations of DNA fuel evolution. Life puts a high premium on correct spelling, but it owes its color and diversity, its magic, to its typos. To the extent we impute purpose to existence, we might justly observe that it is trying to make interesting mistakes. Sometimes it makes them at the horrendous price of stillbirth or deformity. Yet we take an interest even in these, sensing the potential, or maybe I should say poetential, inside the terrible process that produces them.

The structure of reality that we know forecloses perfection and everything tangible falls short, so what remains for us to do? Euclid taught us that a straight line marks the shortest distance between two points. Einstein refined that to teach us that it’s actually a curve. Confined between those same two points, Nature stubbornly discovers not the shortest, but the most interesting distances between them. It can zig and zag and tie itself in knots. It can coil, spiral, pleat, bob, weave, oscillate and meander. It can fold, spindle and mutilate. It all depends on what you value more, arriving quickly or enjoying the scenery.

We, too, are emerging from a worldview that mourned our imperfection, that saw flesh and substance as somehow fallen, as preventing our union with the divine. Now, science teaches us to see in incompleteness the very engine of life. Since it has no access to perfection, nature becomes instead a fabulist. It piles up one improbable design upon another in a limitless display of possibility, possibility curled inside the seed of a limiting world. Isn’t possibility, then, just another name for Eros, for the font of creativity? Nature produces and demands novelty, seduction, fear and delight. If that isn’t Eros, I don’t know what is. We might owe our very existence to some cosmic typographical error.

Let’s go back to Thomas Moore and the typographical error in Riff I, “rich soil” becoming “rich soul.” This typo hints at the very source of splendor emerging from messiness, incompleteness, from soil. To it belong all the recalcitrant, gritty, imperfectible things of existence. From the rubble of this broken, misspelled world, that source of splendor steals nuggets of pure gold to lay at our feet.

How vainly we have cast our eyes to heaven seeking the reassurance of some towering original cause. Where is our gratitude and praise for the humble process that supports our feet? Misplace a grain of sand inside an oyster and, in its irritation, it occasionally gives birth to a perfect pearl. To me, that’s the message in Botticelli’s iconic painting of the birth of Venus that appears on the cover of your order of service. Okay, I know she isn’t standing on an oyster. But like typographical Erros surfacing in a text, she emerges out of an irritation in matter, out of a wine- dark sea of possibility. Can you see in that the shameless pagan praise for the blind, dumb forces that give birth at last to the very idea of perfection? Can you see in that the very embodiment of love?

Nature babbles DNA and eagles soar, and peacocks strut, and monarch butterflies migrate 2,000 miles, and cherries blossom, and snowflakes send a shiver through a hibernating landscape. Even if the keyboard gibbering of a million monkeys can never produce Hamlet, gibbering in much the same way, our universe has created some pretty smart monkeys. Like nature, may we spend our portion of life in a passionate state of wonder, pliant and appreciative of surprise and not too fixed on results.

Closing Reading

The words of one smart monkey describing the idea of perfection emerging in his beloved: Shakespeare’s Sonnet CVI.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express’d
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.