IN PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

“No one is perfect”
How many times have we heard this? The child to father, student to teacher.
Man (in this piece includes woman) has been forever in pursuit of perfection which continues to elude him. He tries to find it in painting as in Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”, Michael Angelo’s “Creation of Adam”, and the inspired paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In music Bach and Beethoven strove for perfection. In sculpture that of David. The Greeks strained hard to slake their thirst for perfection through mythology. Adonis, Aphrodite, Achilles and so on.
The Hindus went even further. Perfection manifested in the form of deities. For wealth the Goddess Saraswathy, for wealth the Goddess Lakshmi, for the lover Krishna who was believed to be the eighth avatar of lord Vishnu. Even birth, preservation, death and destruction took godly forms before which the believers genuflect in awe.
The fifth Mogul emperor Shah Jahan wanted a perfect tribute to the memory of his favorite wife Mumtaz and so ordered the construction of a mausoleum to match her beauty and so the Taj Mahal came into being.
Christ received a make over in this pursuit of perfection. The Middle Eastern Jew who traveled on foot and fasted for long periods is now presented to the world with blue eyes, flowing blond hair and broad shoulders. The great Gnostic Master Valentines went so far as to say that Jesus “ate and drank but did not defecate.” His loss of cool in the temple when he turned the tables on the money changers is not uncontrolled temper but “righteous indignation.” his birth, an immaculate conception.
And before that Job was the perfect one. God challenged Satan to break the moral spine of Job. And so Satan threw everything including the kitchen sink at him. It is reported that Job did not budge. Think about it. With God having put his money on Job what chance in hell had Satan?
This may be part of the reason why Islam sternly forbids the pictorial proliferation of the prophet Muhammad and idol worship is anathema. The believer is free to picture the prophet in a manner he is comfortable with.
The pope human one day, runs for office and becomes infallible the next day. His pronouncements carry the imprimatur of a papal bull. All too perfect all too soon.
The kings and queens of England become kings and queens not by the prosaic path of mundane succession, sometimes even skewed by the rightful heir marrying a divorcee, but by “ Divine Right” and thus they bestow on themselves divinity. The Queen of England cannot be brought to court because the legal maxim “The Queen can do no wrong” is sacrosanct.
The Japanese Emperor derives his authority from the sun. The former North Korean dictator Kim IL Sung was “God” and that makes his son the current dictator “The Son Of God”
If we are to accept the biblical version of the origin of life the perfect man and woman ceased to be with the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.
Nothing perfect can come from things imperfect.
If we are to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution then man is continuing to evolve adapting to changing conditions – technology, environment, moral standards and so on. What appeared perfect one day is made obsolete by subsequent events, innovations and inventions.
An extract from Robert Penn Warren’s great novel, “All The King’s Men” is worth noting.
When the protagonist, Jack Burden is ordered by corrupt William Clark to get something on the “upright judge’, Burden replies that there can’t possibly be something on such an honorable man.
“There’s always something” Willie replies. “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud, there’s always something.” Willie Clark proves right. There’s something on the “upright judge” and tragedy results.
And in “Cider House Rules” Dr. Larch, the director of the orphanage is so dedicated to the kids one would think he is a saint, but then we discover to our disappointment he isn’t so.
Noted author Ayn Rand in her well known novel, “The Fountainhead” postulates, “I want to present the perfect man and his perfect life” and for this purpose selects for his hero, Howard Roark. This becomes her magnificent obsession.
In the 2008 Summer Olympics held in Beijing, China we saw “pigtailed and smiling, Lin, age nine performing “Ode to the Motherland.” In actual fact the voice was that of another girl, Yang was the one who was judged the best singer Why then was she not allowed to perform. She was not cute enough. The authorities believed “The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression.” Since they could not find all the attributes to project a perfect image in one person they had to resort to a “cut and paste” job of two kids.
Man will continue to “look before and after to pine for what is not…”