Perfection Incarnate

IN GRAMMATICAL VERNACULAR, “PERFECT” MEANS “COMPLETE.” NOT “WITHOUT

flaw, not “unimprovable.” When I teach the Perfect tense to my eighth grade Latin students, they struggle to grasp it. It’s an elusive tense, especially when you consider it closely. In English, we require at least three different translation formulae to capture enough of its essence. The Perfect tflawense conveys an action in the present time, and completed aspect, meaning it’s an action we’re concerned with imminently—imminently concerned with the matter of its completion, but it is a completed action. “The present” is a moving target, on a line we’ve mostly invented to conceptualize the flowing of time, or our movement through it. If something has been completed by the time it’s relevant to weld it to the mold of language, we call it “Perfect.”

Some teachers find it simpler to teach their students that Perfect tense means past time, simple aspect. “I did it,” sometime in the past. One-and-done. That’s how I was taught as an eighth grader. And I don’t blame those teachers—it’s a hard concept to grasp, let alone teach—let alone, teach to thirteen and fourteen-year-olds who still sometimes confuse their parts of speech.

But framing Perfect tense as only “past simple” erases much of the tense’s connotation, and speaks too much to its denotation. Perfect tense is concerned with the immediate relevance, the necessity, right now, of that action’s completion.

AS FAR back as my memory spans, I have been obsessed with perfection. Nothing has ever really felt complete to me. Projects haunt my creative mind long after they’re hung on the wall, or distributed to my students, or tucked away in my files and piles of creations. The burden of creativity has been stated simply, and Perfectly, in the grammatical sense, long ago by prophet-poets: “And GOD…saw that it was Good.”

To explain the Perfection of All, of the Universe, we’ve had to conceptualize a seven-stage parabolic process of Creating, and delineating, dividing Naming, with checkpoints at each stage, and finally, resting—to conceptualize Perfection. How can we possibly aspire to share in Perfect creation, to make something Good, when even the Divine Oneness of All had to labor so completely? This tale, too, has haunted me.

Many of us know the leprosy of perfectionism—how it tears at the flesh of the spirit and mind, and drives others away in fear of falling short, and causes us to recede in fear of noticing more details that will hook our disease-addled, blind-falling, fixating vision upon. How it causes us to trip and fall over smaller and smaller obstacles, like the brushstroke beneath the iris, or the spacing of the lines on a Latin test, and whether or not the period after a single italicized word should be also italicized (it shouldn’t)—and how quickly that micro-view unfocuses our periphery. How long have I been lost in moments, too lost to see their collection into a whole life, too lost to see the ongoing expansion of my Self in this healing flow we call Time?

I, the weary leper, faint more because I’ve seen those Human works which approach Perfection—that is, completion—so closely. And I’ve known them right away. Michelangelo’s David, and Antinoös at Delphi, and the Blue Mosque—there’s a palpable harmony in witnessing these things. It’s not just seen, nor only perceived in any sensory way, but also deeply known and absorbed.

I’VE NOT created Perfectly. Nothing I’ve done has been complete. But in my struggle to teach Mia, and Charles, and Lydia, and Klay, and Serenity, and Kai, and Ari, and Braxton, and more than three-hundred other little souls so far, about the Perfect tense, I’ve seen perfection. In my wrestle with kids who want to memorize a formula and copy it automatically on a test, and alleviate that gnawing, primal fear that what they do is never done, not really, and what they produce is never Whole—in the sense of being complete, without gaps—

in my mental struggle so complete that it has been somatic—physical—in the hours spent at the whiteboard making tense timelines and mnemonic devices and silly, storied scenarios, raging against the human inability to know something without first imitating it, seeing and perceiving it, creating an Image; in all this, I’ve found where Perfection concentrates, which is also where it originates, and whence it emanates. So perhaps THIS I can teach, if I’m careful. If not Perfectly, perhaps consistently, at least, I can teach my students week after week, one chapter at a time, year and year again, that Perfection is in them. From them. IS them.

I love them, not despite their behaviors that aggravate me, nor because of the magnificent moments they do enact, but because at all times and in all things I Love them, no matter what. That’s the proof I’ve needed that Perfection is real, if not creatable. It would be inaccurate to say that I love them because of the aggravations, though their antics do amuse me when I’m at my best.

How badly I want them to see, and perceive, and know—Completely—that the joy I feel when they produce excellent work, when they create beautiful work, when they succeed and excel, is an entirely separate phenomenon from my loving them. To love the artful illustration my ninth grader created in response to Emily Dickinson is largely an intellectual loving. What I really Love is that they have grown closer to understanding the truth: that beauty came from them, ands they are already Perfect—Complete—and have only to learn to know that.

AND, I KNOW that they’re Perfect not only through my intellect, but because I cannot stop loving them. In me is the constant expansion of the Universe, and in them, too, and the more we realize our Completeness, the more we grow into it. A paradox: growing, as something already Perfected. If I can love them so much, so completely, perhaps I have created Perfection by Loving. Loving Perfectly does not mean showing love without flaw, but rather, Loving Completely.

And in all of this—ALL of this—I have discovered my own Completeness, which has been hidden from my Knowing before. Love folded upon Love creates a More Perfect Love.

In Latin, we call it “Pluperfect,” short for “Plus quam perfectum”—“more than Complete.” That one had stumped me for years: a paradox. A seeming nonsense that frees us.

SAID THOSE prophet-poets in mystery: “All is vanity. All.” For so long I’ve read only the surface of those words, interpreting its proclamation: “nothing matters; everything dies.”

Not so. The things we do, and the products we release, and the moments of failure, and the polysyndeton of shortcomings which could accumulate into a litany to rattle our faiths forever, are the vanity—the artifice—of our essential ability to Love, which comes in the doing, the making, the being, and not predominantly in the things which are done, which are made, which ARE. ✺