A Galah reader writes in with thoughts about invention.
Words Sue Hall Pyke
IT'S a fine line that separates innovation and invention. Both acts are creative, but one requires the introduction of something new while the other is manipulation, involving dull incremental shifts. Inventors are original but innovators plod along, held to mediocrity by the limitations of what already exists. So the definition goes.
This means that even while having children feels inventive, even while my sons seem as completely original as me, other people see them as simply incremental. Broad of forehead, large of chin, zoning in tight to what interests us in ways that get people who feel zoned out muttering about the spectrum. Breeding is just a little shift along what is already established. Having children, another form of manipulation. Tell me about it, my boys would say. If they were listening.
This definition also means that my father is a manipulator, not a brilliant inventor. Achieving the exact bend in the wire to hold a gate shut. Increment. The perfect smear of glue, invisible, yet enough to get another year out of a shoe. Increment. Wire bent into a handle for a bucket made from an empty oil drum, strung with an offcut of hose to keep a hand comfortable. Increment. Glue to fix, yet again, Mum’s topple-prone ornament. That elegant ceramic woman has spent more time headless than is comfortable to think about.
