Touching Perfection

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I'm not sure how long ago it was. We were having lunch with my older daughter on the deck of the Columbia Yacht Club on the lakefront of downtown Chicago. If memory serves me, which it rarely does these days, we were married, she was not. That would narrow it down somewhat if I wanted to look it up.  But the point is, it was an awesome day. A sky blue enough to put anything from Carolina to shame. The sun dusted the gentle breakers out on the lake with glitter. A soft breeze filled the sails of the multitude of boats dancing out to the horizon.  Temperature somewhere in the mid-seventies, humidity lingering somewhere south of 30 or 40%. It was, in short a perfect day. 

"If the weather was always like this, everyone would want to live in Chicago!" opined my daughter, a confirmed Southern girl.  

We have had a few of those days this week here in the Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge.  Leaves etch a palette across dozens of shades of green, yellow and crimson as they dance across skies so clear they would bring tears to a constant gaze. Breezes that hinted equally of summer and autumn sent the leaves, not quite ready to fall, gossiping across the tree tops. They have been, like that luncheon so many years ago, perfect days, perhaps more so in that I have been free to walk the lanes in relative solitude.

And in the midst of such perfect days, I have found myself contemplating the notion of perfection and its relationship to creativity.  No surprise. The beginning of every creative act dips its toes in the temptation of perfection, and often concludes with our, albeit transient, refusing to acknowledge that we have missed the mark.  Our creative selves ride into the eternal sunset of a land of make-believe. Perfection lies, we almost believe, just around the corner, there, in the next sentence or phrase, note or brush stroke, subtle movement, gather of glass, the framing or lighting of an image - there! Just there! Almost.

Cosmologists and astrophysicists tell us that at in the micromoment just after the big bang the known "universe" consisted solely of particles of matter and antimatter that were busy scurrying around annihilating one another. Fortunately there were a few more particles of matter than antimatter and so, Ta da! Here we are.  I have never been quite comfortable with that significant touch of fortune.  And recently, lying awake in the tiny hours of the morning I was struck by the notion that it is perfection that occurs at that moment when matter and antimatter merge into some form of exquisite nothingness. And the creative spark within us demands that we attempt to extend that moment through love, through art, through poetry, religion, physics.  And then, come morning, I try to recapture just what I meant by that insight, which seemed then so clear, but now seems obtuse enough to blame on some other consciousness.

Here is the progress I have made to date.  If we think of the "matter v antimatter collision" in terms of Distilled Harmony, that instant can be seen not as annihilation, but as a moment of perfect balance, of total harmony. And that is, again in terms of Distilled Harmony, the manifestation of the first two, and dominant, tenets of the Distilled Harmony world view: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty

Perfection is harmony, is balance. The matter v antimatter collision only appears to be destruction. On closer inspection we can see that it is balance, but in a time frame so tiny that we do not understand it or it lies beyond our comprehension, our observation. We need to remember that much of our understanding of physical reality is the direct result of the invention of the technology necessary to see it - telescopes, microscopes, etc.  I often wondered why folks put so much effort into increasing the sensitivity of atomic clocks. I mean you can only be so late for a meeting. Now I think that perhaps if we can "see" time on the scale that reveals that moment when matter and antimatter merge we will come to see the harmony, the beauty, that resides therein.

So let us consider tenet two, Enable Beauty.  Art in any of its various guises is as close as we can come to creating beauty; it is our attempt to mimic or to capture that beauty hidden - seemingly frozen - in the matter-antimatter merge.  Think of meditation, grace, nirvana, how ever we attempt to name it. It is not in motion. It is a constant state. Can perfection be sustained? In the arts, music and dance seem to be our efforts to marry perfection and motion. The recent attention to and efforts in “performance art” may stem from a desire to attain sustained perfection. But, to date anyhow, they have an end point. Exhaustion, if nothing else, mandates the end of the dance, the conclusion of the performance. And while digital devices seem able to drone endless musical tracks, it is not long before such compositions become more tedious than transcendent. It seems that this notion of sustained perfection currently lurks more comfortably in the intriguing realm quantum mechanics rather than in the arts - but that too may be a temporary situation. And one I am not yet ready to trace.

For us, as rather time-bound, creatively inclined individuals, the more fulfilling challenge is, it seems to me, to pursue that most illusive of goals; the path to, and personal expression of, sustained harmony, aka perfection. So we continue to love, to write, draw, dance, sculpt, compose, choreograph, sing, hum, design, etc., etc., etc.  Always seeking that next baby step toward perfection.  And no, I have no illusions that the goal is attainable for me, or for most of us in our current “go around.” But who knows what we all may attain after a few more existential cycles?

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