Still, finally, last night, I came across a few lines (in my copy, bottom of page 324, top of page 325) that stopped me cold. A wrong turn, a false path, a poor construction. A flaw in the fabric. A fly in the ointment. I remarked to myself: "Nope. That's silly."
Pirsig writes: "You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it."
Hah. This is so laughably wrong-headed. Kind of stupid, really. There are no "perfect" Human Beings. No perfect paintings. No experts. It's just a ridiculously wrong-headed thought-train. Human Beings are complicated, tricky, flawed, damaged. They create art out of, or in spite of, their flawed natures. Name me any great Painter, (for instance: Picasso, Caravaggio, Warhol, Da Vinci, Pollock, Van Gogh, Basquiat, Johns, O'Keefe, Rothko, De Kooning, Gauguin), and you will not find a perfect Human Being, no, instead you will discover a very complicated collection of characteristics; unique characters, with some admirable qualities mixed up with qualities infinitely less admirable. I mean, all of the examples above have done fabulous work, but many of those folks were consumed with madness, over-flowing passion, crazed-obsessions. Creative & Destructive. Think: madness, suicide, drug abuse, murder, you know, all that Human stuff alive in a human package. The whole perfection idea is just completely off the mark.
Perfection is a utopian idea that doesn't exist. Maybe it's an aspiration, a chimera to chase. If Human History has shown us anything, it is that Human Beings embody beauty and ugliness, together, side by side. The best and worst qualities reside inside the Heart of every Human Being. It is the Human thing we all live with. As William Blake (another fabulously complicated creator), once posited, Human Beings are the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
Great artists show us Human complexity. They show us the deep contradictions of what it means to be Human. They show us how the "best art," comes out of deep, in the bone, imperfection. "Perfection" is creating work that speaks to us in the throes of our very Human, many-splendored imperfection. That's the way Humans do it.
