More Whole Things

Art, parenthood, and my hard-won antidote to perfectionism

I'm sure many of you have gathered, but I’ve been on a blogging hiatus due to the birth of my daughter. Rory was not a surprise, exactly, but she decided to pop the balloon 11 days earlier than planned. And it is now a full 3 months since I last posted anything.

I suppose it’s appropriate to break that streak with some reflections on parenting. But honestly, those are hard to come by. Bits of myself get thrown away with every diaper, blown off with every tantrum, or else they just fall through those cracks that appear when the night turns brittle around 4 am. It’s hard to gather enough daddy detritus into something that looks like an opinion on the whole thing, other than that I’m doing my damnedest.

Which, I suppose, is an insight by itself: I’ve never expected to be a perfect parent. In fact, I have a very hard time understanding the concept of “perfection” applied to something so messy, subjective, and emergent. I am, as my friend Hannah says, playing host to radically unknown and unexpected new people. My kids are going to be who they’re going to be, and in a big way I’m just kind of along for it.

It's the other stuff that gives me trouble. Every time I create a big gap in this newsletter, for example, perfectionism and the desire to be unique hold me back from starting again. I tend to feel this way with most of my other writing, too, which is why I workshop stories to (sometimes literal) death instead of sending them out into the world.

Why is this? What does it say about me that perfectionism plagues my work, my hobbies, but not the more important vocation of attending to my family?

In trying to answer that question over the last few months, I’ve realized that being a dad really is helping me be a better, more humane writer. It doesn’t even involve becoming less of a perfectionist, either. But it does involve becoming something of a different kind.

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If you’ve never read

Desk Notes by Charles Schifano

I encourage you to do so. Charles has some great thoughts on writing pedagogy, and his passion for language is precise and intense in ways even the best writers rarely achieve.

This is especially visible in his short essay on perfectionism, which goes a step further than saying “stop it”. He describes a common artistic experience: the moment when the difference between expectations and reality throws a wrench in our creativity. We are so enamored with the “pristine perfection of the yet-to-be-enacted idea” that we let its brilliance delay us from the work of making it real.

I personally don't think anyone really bursts forth into the sunlit realm of “good enough” without passing through the crushing weight of perfectionism, or through the strange grief of letting those expectations go. It just comes with the territory of wanting to make art.

But Charles’s really rare take by the end is that perfectionism can be a kind of friend, because it motivates us to get started in the first place:

I happen to enjoy the artist who seeks, for example, a taste of beauty but ends up with something that’s a bit asymmetric, even blemished, as that’s actually when art feels truly human. And perhaps the trick for the working artist is to strive for perfection while knowing that a shortfall is the guarantee. Even if the results don’t measure up to the vision—which they surely won’t—that’s perfectly fine and perfectly human. The alternative is the rather juvenile desire to keep the snow untrampled, to see a pristine field without any footprints, which does, in a way, seem inhuman.

Great art, then, doesn’t happen without being launched by a desire that’s ultimately unfulfillable. Creation is, at its best, a running leap at the impossible, and while it takes joy in what it accomplishes, it’s also—and perhaps joyously still—wounded by the attempt. It is the very gap between our desire for beauty and the “asymmetric, even blemished” results of our striving that makes art sing.¹

I like this perspective. It was my first step in making better friends with my own perfectionism. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to see the work of other creative people and imagine it just kind of bursts from them, a 1:1 model of what’s inside them, like Athena from Zeus’s head. But if all creative endeavors end up fissured from their intentions in this way—and if this is, in fact, part of the point of creative work—then it’s easier for me to see how we’re all in the same boat.

Rather than bemoaning how it holds me back, creative strain becomes something to commiserate about with others. And recognizing this, among other things, gives me a head start on letting go of those unrealistic expectations that keep me from my own work.

…But, this is still an emotionally turbulent place to live; this constant tug-of-war between the aspiration to perfection and the guarantee of falling short. What's more, it doesn't translate well to other areas of life. I could aspire to be a perfect parent while always accepting that I'll finally fail, but that sounds like a torturous loop for my kids, who are most definitely not art projects.

And it’s right about here that my kids start teaching me about perfection’s cousin. We often fail to meet them in our ambitious, often unconscious pursuit of perfection. In fact, the two are often mistaken, equivocated; but they’re not the same. The other is imminently more real than perfection, and yet it somehow feels more vague. Its edges are not sharp, nor crisp; they are something luminous, and therefore ungraspable. And yet, they are achievable.

I'm talking, of course, about Beauty.

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As I’ve mentioned before, we watch the show Bluey religiously in my house. In one stellar episode, 6-year-old Bluey is trying to draw a Father's Day picture and wants it to be “perfect”. What follows is a grand lesson in how the inevitable failure to be “perfect” shouldn't hold us back from putting in effort, especially for things and people we care about. When dad Bandit eventually puts his daughters’ pictures on the fridge and declares them “perfect”, we believe him. But that's partly because, over the 5-minute episode, the word undergoes a kind of redemption.

I’ll say it on any given day, like plenty of other parents: my kids are perfect. My son is bright, rambunctious, over-aware of his own will and power. He’s perfect. My daughter looks like me, she sleeps with her fists pressed into her cheeks, and she can projectile vomit across two pieces of furniture. She’s perfect.

… She’s not perfect. She’s 7 weeks old. Rowan is 2. Physical strength doesn’t peak until age 25, and everything else follows 10-15 years later. Specimens of human excellence they are not. They’re growing and changing and becoming every day, so what am I really trying to say?

When I, or Bandit, or most anyone else say “perfect”, we’re naming something more mysterious than an assemblage of qualities measured against a standard. We’re naming a feeling of rightness, or alignment. A contentment that sneaks up on us. When I say it of my children, I’m grasping for the ways in which Rowan and Rory are, despite being so new to this life, already themselves. And they have made the world more itself, not by increasing its value (whatever that means) but just by embarking on this journey of being authentic people.

“Perfection,” commonly understood as a measure for this improvement, is static. What we're reaching for is dynamic. For that sense of how a “limited totality of parts and elements” yet “shines forth” with something “worthy, lovely, splendid,” just by virtue of being itself.²

This is how the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described “inscape”. It is something more intimate than perfection, because it doesn't describe how a poem measures up against some external standard. It describes how a poem measures up against itself. What it wants to be, as revealed by the very act of crafting it. It is the poem's self-measure—the sense of wholeness, fulfillment, even justice we feel at its completion, all asymmetries and blemishes included. This is what we mean by “Beauty”.

There is no dialectic between perfect intention and imperfect execution here; Hopkins is describing a genuine collaboration between the artist and their tools to create something unexpected and “love-worthy”. Love, not perfection, is the thing Bluey is really after in her drawing, and I think it’s the same with us. Art isn’t about meeting a standard of excellence, though those standards certainly help us shape our intentions and desires. The work, though, is about experiencing the things we make as objects of affection. It’s about owing them the same gentle attention that we owe the rest of life.

This is the insight, much-shaped by my children, that's let me make new progress as a writer. To recognize and cut whole paragraphs that sounded great, but didn’t say what I really meant. To move the remainders around with genuine curiosity rather than frustration. To hold back, refuse to publish, as I sensed that it was becoming what it wanted to be.

It's not perfect, and someone might tell me so; that a 1700 word blog wasn’t worth that kind of effort. But that doesn't bother me as much as it once did. Because as this paragraph comes together, it feels better than perfect. It feels whole.

This year, I'd like to make more whole things. More essays, less polished and more frequently shared. More stories, more frequently risked. None of them will be perfect. But, Lord willing, some of them—many, even—will be beautiful. They'll have inscapes. They will be themselves, in ways I can recognize, shape, and shepherd.

And as I make more whole things, maybe I’ll become a little more whole, too.

1. More good thoughts on this in Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

2. Anne M. Carpenter, Theo-Poetics, 53.