Perfection is Death: The Importance of the Occasionally Stupendous

It doesn’t work.

Punishing people into perfection.

I did not have the misfortune of being abused by world-class abusers, men in the restaurant industry, the ballet stratosphere, or the film industry. 

My abusers were small-town people with big dreams and few skills. They could scream, bully, pinch, and hit. They could tell you were nothing unless you worked harder, submitted more devotedly, conformed to the ideal they imposed upon you but were so far from themselves.

Muscle and volume, beyond their power of intimidation, are not much to hang a life on.

More like a business shirt stained with other people’s blood.

More like a skirt limp and dripping with other people’s sweat.

I will guarantee you that the easiest way to make people hate you is to bully them into being your perfection. 

Whether your perfection is a dish of food, an arabesque on pointe, or a fast lap around the track.

If you pummel people like dough, they will not rise.

If you mold people like clay, they will crack and shatter.

If you starve them and drive them, they will soon fall dead: despair, exhaustion, fatal depletion.

Perfection is death in its lack of flaws and fissures, in its lack of complexity and vulnerability, in its lack of humanity, the wrinkling and scarring, the shaking and bobbling, the smearing and popping.

An antidote enters my brain, as antidotes sometimes do.

Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in 2024 in Mahler’s Second, or Resurrection, Symphony. All the more poignant given the conductor’s diagnosis with terminal glioblastoma in 2021. Tilson Thomas has always encouraged musicians to color outside the lines, to go beyond obedience to the score, to find the original impulse, the passion, the line of desire that sings beyond black and white.

It was a performance I loved because it was not about perfection, but about living.

That even when death occupies your head, you can lead people into beauty, a sublime experience made all the more joyful in its ascent above adversity, in its revelations of frailty, in its desire to play above, beyond, and with mortality.

It is the struggling figure, I admire, not the control of the sadomasochist.

Perfection is a commodity bought by those unwilling to see the imperfections in themselves, the imperfections that make us who we are, however messy.

Capable of loving and being loved. Silly, somewhat shoddy, occasionally stupendous.

Desire that sings beyond black and white