Those Rough Spots on Michelangelo’s Marble: Perfection

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“Live defensively—the multiverse isn’t perfect.”—The Wordspinner

“Glory be to God for dappled things . . . .”—Gerard Manley Hopkins

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—11/26/2012—Though Tina Fey recently argued that perfection on live television is boring, she meant it’s impossible. I recall several Saturday Night Live skits featuring Gilda Radner that were not only flawless from concept to delivery but hysterical. What no one knew at the time was Radner was dying of ovarian cancer.

Of course, this example crosses the thoroughfare between art and life. Thus, a cleaner example of the impossibility I’m referring to would be that seamless episode of Frazier in which Dr. Niles Craneis waiting alone for his date in his brother’s condominium. The candles are lit, Eddie the pet dog is napping in the glow of the hearth, Schubert is wafting from the stereo, the table is set, and supper simmers in the kitchen when the date calls to say she’ll be there in five minutes.

“Perfect!” Niles thinks, sitting down to take a sip of his wine. As he eyes the crease in his trousers, however, paradise trembles, and he goes for the iron and its upholstered board. Gingerly stepping from his pants to hone the dull crease, our romantic anti-hero notices a loose thread dangling from a cuff. Leaving the iron on the trousers, he hastens to get the scissors and starts to hurry back to the board when he remembers the ancient admonition of his mother. As he slows his gait, however, he loses his balance, trips, and cuts his finger on the scissors. Seeing a droplet of blood, he passes out on the couch, whereupon Eddie licks the guest back to consciousness. Before these spiraling calamities can wind down, the condo fills with smoke, supper’s thrown on the fire, and a fire extinguisher has been emptied across the walls, ceiling, and furniture.

That’s when Niles’s date arrives.

As Niles said, “Perfect!” but his definition of that word and mine are light years apart, for one man’s chaos is another’s perfection: Niles’s disastrous date is my perfect comedy.

Such was not the case in Eden, where disorder was an infernal concept and there were no creases or threads because everyone was impeccably nude. As we know, our ancestors were soon evicted in animal skins sewn by their Creator to clothe his suddenly mortified children. Thus began humankind’s conflict with dull creases and loose threads et cetera because in a millennium or so, Jesus would tell the world, “Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father is perfect . . . .” But how perfectly just, I wonder, was Eden’s policy of “one strike and you’re out”?

Though Eve had tainted everything from the moon in, most thought that original sin had left the geocentric universe perfect from the moon out. When Galileo reported that there were spots on the sun and craters on the moon, few sublunaries believed him even as they burned their corneas starring through his telescopes. When Kepler announced that the planetary orbits were elliptical, many including Galileo scratched their heads in disbelief that Venus could circumnavigate the Earth or the sun in anything less than a perfect circle. After all, the reasoning since Pythagoras had been, God created the universe in six days because six is a perfect number. Why? Because one plus two plus three (the divisors of six) total six. Has the knife of logic ever been keener?

In the 1960s, one episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone explored the conflict of heaven and hell, perfection and imperfection, when a mobster was shot and killed. On waking (!), the dead man found himself in a cloud-obscured village. Inside the town’s tavern, he discovered to his initial delight that when he played pool, he sank every ball except the cue ball on the break. Tiring of his sudden mastery, he sat in on a game of poker. Again to his initial delight, every hand dealt to him was a royal flush. Tiring of winning, he found that every woman at the bar was receptive to his advances. And tiring of his conquests, he complained to the bartender, “This is boring!”

Replied the barkeep, “Well, where do you think you are, heaven?”

In the world that the gangster had departed, nature has taken pains to see that no species is perfect. Indeed, no predator including man is always successful in the hunt, nor is all prey including man always successful in escaping. Take the barn owl whose soundless approach to a meal is so nearly perfect thanks to its downy feathers and night-flying goggles that nature has programmed the bird to warn of its approach. Without a hoot of warning, mice and squirrels would soon be extinct. Indeed, on microscopic examination, even the Hope Diamond is flawed.

And that is why so many urns from Utopia to Erewhon have failed in the firing. As the experienced potter knows, some cracks in the glaze are inevitable. Such was the case about fifty years ago when a new dean of students took office at Maryville (Presbyterian) College in Tennessee. Eager to ingratiate himself with the student body, the “liberal” dean announced that his charges could attend mandatory devotionals in town rather than in New Providence Chapel (commonly abbreviated NP) on campus. Attendance was taken on the honor system by having students fill out cards stating where they had worshipped. With the fervors of spring, however, attendance in New Providence began to fade. The dean, therefore, investigated and soon learned that “NP” was also an abbreviation for “no place.” Though no lies had been told, off-campus privileges were revoked, and the dean returned to the history classroom.

Somehow the imperfect students at a “perfect” institution intuited that God’s benevolent supervision was “no place” on or off campus. Likewise, the Belgian printer who changed Sir Thomas More’s original title from Nusquama (Latin for “no place”) to Utopia (Greek for “no place”) surely knew the neologism meant both a “perfect place” as well as “no place.” One nameless missionary, however, who apparently did not know Greek or understand irony, announced plans to sail to the Commonwealth of Utopia and convert all the misguided natives to Christianity.

Too young to appreciate how perfectly lovely she was, our adolescent daughter began to feel self-conscious about the freckles sprinkled across her cheeks. I told her that mature beauties without them often resort to a substitute: a “beauty mark” drawn somewhere on their faces to cool the ardor of their suitors. The marks amount to truth in advertising, and we all know that truth is beauty, and that Keats’ urn assuredly had cracks in the glaze.

Note: The image accompanying this essay may be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimberley-sarah/3553924008/