@wayne,
wayne;149491 wrote:When my daughter was 8 years old or so, she gave me a picture of herself, in a frame she had made in G-pa's garage. The frame was made of small squares of wood, nailed together in no particular pattern, bent nails hammered into the wood, nicely painted, with many imperfect hearts of differing sizes.
At the time, I remember thinking the frame was a study in perfect imperfection.
My daughter is in college now and still shows a strong talent for abstract art.
I've been thinking of how nature seems to display this same form of perfect imperfection. I am incapable of producing that kind of work, I make straight lines and store all my stuff in little boxes.
I really don't know what I'm asking for here, maybe just a little help seeing this sort of thing clearly. I am fully capable of appreciating this kind of thing, I just can't get a grip on how it works.
Two things: Perfection is a word I don't even like to hear, and seldom say...I hold with the Muslims who often deliberately create a flaw in the beginning of any large project to avoid sacrilage, since only Allah is perfect... And I find that good enough is good enough while those who obsess about perfection are impossible to be around...
Second: it is out of imperfect reality that philosophy arrived at a theory of perfect forms... Just as a creator begins with carefully drawn blue prints and the best of materials and only ends up with an imperfect product full of flaws, so they must have seen all that was caused was created with a perfect form in mind... It led to a metaphysics that is, and was, a bugger for humanity... What we form ideas of is naturally conceived as perfect... The conceptual Cat is a perfect Cat, and the conceptual circle is the perfect circle, but we can find no such thing in reality, nor create such perfection in reality...Yet the form would be useless to us if it contained all the imprefections found in reality...Our forms are the mental essences of the thing, and in our meaning of words like ideal, we say as much, that it is perfect, and no one looks for such in reality though everyone talks in that fashion, of an ideal world, and etc.
If I can guess, I would say that love as an ideal corrects all flaws in the object of love, that your child's work as an act of love, like your child's life is corrected by your love and made to seem perfect...If I look at my wife, and isolate all her characteristics I can find many imperfections, and yet the whole, as she is, could not be more perfect... Love makes perfect, and that presents a problem since she does not much look at me with love and so she sees me as imperfect, as I am, in a cruel light...