Perfection

Posted on June 23, 2002 in Blogging

Damnation! Damn the Internet! I put my heart and soul into this journal entry and Explorer crashes! Let me attempt to reconstruct:

“The desire for perfection is a misunderstanding of the aims of art.” — John Ruskin

“Only what is bad is perfect — in it’s own bad way.” — John Ruskin.

“The only perfect people I know are perfect assholes.” — Joel GAzis-SAx

Oh if I could find a way to give some of the writers I know Ruskin’s religion! It is true that sometimes when you write you have to pare away a lot of shrubbery so that the truth is like an apple standing in the center of a white tablecloth. But some people, it seems to me, lay down the tablecloth and never get to setting it for fear of staining the muslin!

I’m still looking for authors to feature on this site. The people I have sought out so far are those who haven’t given themselves a voice yet, either online or in the broader media. They’ve hung out in chat rooms mostly and I’ve listened to their stories and thought They should write about this. The enemy each faces is what writing teachers call “the inner critic” or what I term the premature editor, the fellow who runs his needles through my frontal lobes so that I won’t be tempted to be creative. I’m the founder and only active member of a group of nonwriting Orange County, California, writers who share a mailing list. There are others, including a very good writing teacher through whose classes we all met (and she pitches in), but mostly it has been silence. The promise of getting together for critiques hasn’t been realized.

So I’ve looked elsewhere, to the people who I have met on the net. There’s probably more to build on with these faceless character sets spilling out in chatrooms than in all the real faces I have met in classrooms. I know these people, mind to mind. I figure if I can’t get writers to write, maybe I can get some nonwriters to write and maybe they will have interesting things to say.

There’s a parallel to this in #news_garden that meaghan just pointed out to me. “I think that all of us have a handicap of some sort,” she says to me, “….some are just more visible than others.” Skip a line. “And none of us are perfect.” Perhaps we do live in a world without even perfect assholes. From my own experience dealing with asthma, major depression, gout, and diabetes, I can say with authority that a handicap is a very personal thing. No one can see the pain you are feeling. They might witness the swelling, the spurting of blood, or the rapid fire, constantly shifting chain of thought you sputter out in moments of maniacal lucidity, but they can’t know if you are numb, ticklish, or screaming the screams of the tormented in hell. They have to take your word for it. They have to trust you. And when they don’t, you have to trust yourself. Write.

“To believe that your impressions hold true for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality.” — Virginia Woolf