Perfectionist? Is That the Word?

It’s a forlorn hope but I’ve been trying for years to get together a series of short and snappy jokes, along the lines of ‘Pedantic? I?’ So far I have:

Pedantic? I?

Pretentious? Moi?

Wordy? I myself personally?

Ungrammatical? Me?

Avoidant? Them?

Defensive? You?

and finally, Perfectionist? I? Is that right?

And now I’ve ground to a halt. I suspect it’s a very niche market. But let us reflect on the last of these traits, namely perfectionism. Handmaiden to competition and midwife of depression, perfectionism is the enemy of every achievement. It’s Scylla to the Charybdis of apathy, it paralyses the will and disables excitement. It subtracts joy and replaces it with endless, grinding labour.

As I’ve said before going away tricks one’s demons into leaving you alone for a while. They take a few days to wake up and realise that you’re gone, but as soon as they do they stand up, shade their eyes and peer at the horizon to discover you. ‘There she is, lads!’ they cry, and they set off to overtake you with bags packed full of misery. Sometimes if you leave before they get there you can trick them by coming home by another route (like Mary and Joseph avoiding Herod) but before too long they’ll spy you out and come home again. ‘There you are!’ they cry, sounding like a solicitous but abusive father. ‘Now don’t run off like that without telling us, you naughty woman.’

I managed to evade this noxious tribe in Scotland but now that I’ve been home a few days they’ve spied me out and the first to settle on my shoulders is that old albatross, perfectionism. We know each other of old, her and me (is that right? should it be ‘she and I’? Yes, it should.) OK – we know each other of old, she and I, and she settles quite comfortably into the niche she’s made for herself on my right shoulder where, like a pirate’s parrot she monotonously repeats her few phrases. ‘Is that right? You got that wrong!’ and of course, her all-time favourite, ‘That’s rubbish! Do it again!’ Oh, when will I be free of this demon?

Answers on a postcard please. And they’d better be good ones…

Kirk out

Coincidence? I Think Note!

Since moving to Loughborough and not being within spitting distance of Jak’s stationers (http://www.jakstationers.co.uk) I have become a habituee of The Works where, once inside its atlas-strewn portals I head straight for the notebook section.  I generally use three sizes of notebook: A4 for general writing/diary stuff; A5 for poetry and novel notes and A6 for what I laughingly call my handbag (a handbag?)

which serves for writing down passing thoughts while I’m Out and About.

And I know this is going to sound odd but it does actually happen: that sometimes when I’m nearing the end of a notebook I will have certain thoughts.  I might be feeling discouraged (‘what’s the point of clogging up the place with yet another notebook?’) or on the other hand I might be feeling like flaunting myself: and when I sidle up to the notebook shelf in the works I can usually find something that fits the bill.  For example, this peacock notebook

came to me when I was feeling like displaying my prose talents to the world, and the ‘bike’ notebook

came when I was feeling like giving up.  And yesterday I needed a new A4 notebook and what did I find?  This one

which was very serendipitous as I’d been having thoughts along precisely those lines, to whit:

the average is the enemy of the good

the good is the enemy of the best,

but the perfect is the enemy of all.

There is no such thing as the perfect work, and perfectionism is the enemy of anyone trying to produce art.

Kirk out

PS I’m linking here to Brian’s article on a similar theme:

https://bmhonline.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/the-routine-of-writing-blogging-and-busy-lives/

 

A Tragedy of Perfections

It occurred to me at stupid o’clock this morning when my brain had done its usual thing and whacked me over the head repeatedly to keep me awake, that the opposite of a Comedy of Errors would be a Tragedy of Perfections.  That struck me as a nice idea, and I began to ponder what a tragedy of perfections might involve.

The crossword is a case in point.  I may have mentioned before that I do the Guardian cryptic every morning to get – I was going to say, to get my brain in gear but as I said it’s already in top gear and revving hard – well, to get the verbal juices flowing and to sharpen my sense of what words are and how they work.  Cryptic crosswords are very useful for poets, and if I ever teach a creative writing course I will recommend them to my students.  But of course part of the joy of a cryptic is the puzzle.  If it’s too easy it’s not so enjoyable: likewise if it’s too hard.  Most of the time I get through OK but sometimes I’m stuck, and then those few blank spaces torment me.  Oh, if I could only get this crossword finished!  But here’s the thing: five minutes (or half an hour) later when I finally get it, my immediate reaction is disappointment.  It’s finished.  No more puzzle.  Now I have to wait till tomorrow.

And I guess that’s what I mean by the tragedy of perfection.  One of DH Lawrence’s characters (I think it was Birkin in Women in Love) said of the place where he was living: ‘Now that my rooms are complete I want them at the bottom of the sea.’  And that is the tragedy of being human; that we strive to complete things and when they’re complete we feel heartsick.  It’s like that old Chinese curse: ‘May your every desire be instantly fulfilled.’  We must have something to aim for, else what is the point of our lives?  Or, to put it another way, ‘a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’  (that’s Robert Browning, from this poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-sarto

I like Robert Browning: he’s very direct and conversational.  But I digress.)

What, then, is the answer?  How do we deal with this utterly perverse tendency?  I’m going to turn to yoga philosophy now and specifically to the concept of karma yoga.  Karma is a term everyone knows nowadays – or thinks they know, anyway – and yoga is something every second person practises.  But karma yoga has nothing to do with yoga postures; it is a way of doing everyday tasks which somehow helps you to wriggle free of this endless cycle of desire and frustration – the tragedy of perfection.  For example: suppose I vacuum the sitting room carpet.  As the machine hoovers up the dirt I feel a great sense of satisfaction at the instant swallowing of every bit of dust and fluff (and don’t get me started on the hair-balls which can only emanate from OH’s head).  The task is done: I switch off the vacuum which dies with a satisfied sigh.  I look around me.  I see that it is good.  But! five minutes later someone walks in with dirt on their shoes.  The sofa is moved, scattering fine toast crumbs over a wide area.  Snacks are eaten.  People enter and leave.  OH pulls out tangles of hair and drops them on the floor (and nobody can tell me otherwise).  And in no time at all my (yes, MY) lovely clean carpet is covered in filth.  And if I’m not careful I can get quite miffed about it.

Karma yoga gives a way out of this.  First, when you undertake a task it is done without end-gaining; in other words, without attachment to the results.  This isn’t the same as not giving a toss; it means that if the vacuum doesn’t suck properly or you get interrupted or if for some other reason the carpet is not as clean as you’d like it to be, you don’t sweat it.  At the same time the job is done with focus.  You’d be amazed how much more quickly a job can be finished when you focus your whole attention on it.  Last year when digging the garden I was totally oppressed by how much work there was to do and was unable to concentrate on a little bit at a time.  This year I have made a conscious decision to focus only on what I’m doing and to let go of perfection – and guess what?  I’ve done four times the work in half the time.

That’s all for today folks.  Now to edit this post and make it perfect…

Kirk out