Hunting. And Gathering. Wisdom.

 

I really don't want to hear from anyone, no one, not a soul, how the passage from Mark Twain below. I don't want to hear that the passage that today's post is about, is antiquated, mean-spirited or heaven-forfend, gendered. 

Twain wrote the passage more than 150 years ago, and things were different then. Smart people can take things from the past and move beyond "judgment." They can use old books not as a bygone norm, but as a "time machine" to see how life was lived.

It wouldn't do me any good to castigate, disparage and otherwise dismiss the brilliance of, say, Edith Wharton because her Jewish characters were often portrayed with antisemitic stereotypes. They were greedy, socially ambitious, and racially "other." This reflected early 20th-century prejudices--and Wharton's haughty New York class. But to throw her on the ash-heap of history? That means throwing out almost everything. And we can't learn from things we flat out reject.

Anyway, back to Twain.
A good person to go back to.

I ran across this quotation last night during my typical Mexican jumping bean of reading, where I jump from topic and author to topic and author. 

Last night I was betwixt and betwain.

"There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This desire suddenly came upon Tom one day."

I don't want to hear about "boy." Or "rightly-constructed." I want don't to want to hear about Twain's misuse of "boy." Or the heinous nature of his "judgey" "rightly-constructed."

I want to talk instead about hunting for hidden treasure. And how it's essentially disallowed in a modern task-focused, 100-ads-a-day ad agency.

So much of life is hunting for treasure.

In fact, Desmond Morris in his great book, "The Nature of Happiness," (ignore the Cialis overtones of the cover) pointed out that from an evolutionary point of view, more human happiness comes from the pursuit of a goal than the accomplishment of that goal.

The chasing is better than the getting.

Early humans were most fulfilled when the hunted together. Forming a group, sharing cohesion and a goal, dividing labor and pursuing that goal. Early humans were happier hunting aurochs, a breed of 1500-3000 pound prehistoric cattle, than when they actually killed one. 

I think most people are like that.

I love searching for rare books, or fountain pens, or 1950s era skee-ball machines, or a good, fatty corned beef sandwich--even though searching in pre-internet days was time-consuming and, at times, exasperating, it was fun, exciting. You never knew when, if ever, you'd hit paydirt. The internet's ruined those searches. 

My wife and I spent five years searching for a rare book by my favorite author, Joseph Mitchell, "My Ears Are Bent." At the time (around 1990) it was out of print. And Mitchell disowned it because of some language which would today be regarded as racist. I finally read it in one-sitting on microfiche, at the New York Public library. Some years after that, my wife found me a first-edition and returned enough soda bottles to cover the not-inconsiderable asking price. 

I have the copy with a dozen or two other first-editions hermetically sealed in acid-free ziploc bags in my Manhattan apartment.

Today, you can find anything (except who's in the epstein files) in under 17-seconds.

What occurs to no one is what is so plain to me. 

That efficiency in creativity, in love, in treasure hunting is missing the point of the endeavor.

The point of the endeavor is to chase.

To hunt.

To search.

To trip and fall.

To find things we didn't even know existed and which might be more valuable than what we had set out looking for when we began our quest.

Back literally almost 50 years ago, I was working as a copywriter for the in-house ad agency at a department store called Bloomingdale's. I had a great and wise boss, Chris, who was like a great New York City handball player. He could cover the entire court and he knew all the angles, though he hardly ever wasted a motion.

I was working on a very high-profile ad that was important to Bloomingdale's and it was getting more scrutiny that blood and filaments at a crime scene from the seven-digit salaries that ran the store. The copy had gone through a dickens-worth of revisions and now was in the final stages through the platter of my red IBM Selectric II.

I pieced together all the changes like I was going through a three-dimensional periodic table. I took words from here and there, listening to everyone and dotting all the eyes and crossing all the oolong.

Chris came into my 6'x8' office with a door and took the copy paper from my machine. He read the first sentence and without pause or ceremony, tore the copy I had pieced together with such forensic acuity into little pieces.

"Start over," he said, leaving my room. "You're not writing anymore. You're not trying to make it good, anymore, just correct. That's no way to be."

I was pissed at the moment.

My five-carbon-deep copypaper represented a week of work.

But Chris was right.

You don't ever find treasure trodding over well-tread ground. 

You have to hunt.

Better without a map.

--

Of course, the opposite of digging for hidden treasure is the destruction of treasure, wealth, good fortune and riches over time and overtime.

I am constantly amazed by the corporate treasure destruction that I see in the world today. Once storied brands have, over the last 20 years or so, while convincing themselves that they can stop doing "real" advertising and rely on small, impact-free digital ad units that give viewers no differentiating information about their products--flushed figuratively trillions of dollars of brand equity down the toilet (which they've MBA'd into "the funnel.")

From a CPG POV, why would anyone spend $7 on Listerine when they can spend $4 on CVS brand. I grew up in an era where advertising provided the reasons why to buy a product as opposed to a cheaper alternative or a no-brand alternative. Advertising no longer supplies those magical drops of retsin or eight tomatoes in every can. So, people buy only on price. Which has, back to my point, destroyed the treasures built up over decades or even centuries.

The latest case of treasure-destroying has been effected by WPP. Apparently there's no more "Ogilvy." A brand that no longer has any distinguishing place in the marketing universe.

To be an Ogilvy writer--regardless of what you think of Ogilvy--was to be stamped with integrity, intelligence, logic and a soupçon of David's with and hauteur. 

No longer.

Now you are a part of WPP Creative.

A vomitous name with no standards, meaning or added value. As meaningless as clear soup. 

Which is what they sell.

Or what they've buried.

The downward slope of the WPP logo reminds me of a torpedo'd ship.