The Perfect Bind

Consider the source:
She is a person who has never considered herself “normal,” has come to realize that her concept of “normal” is most likely wacko, and currently has the sneaking suspicion that she just might be “it.” She is the type of individual who leads a rather quiet life externally but gets into rather bizarre situations between her two ears. There, she is in continual training for the Baltimore mind races, practices daily, and like other devotees of this reckless sport, often mistakes speed for quality. Many times she has pushed her brain’s motor well over 180 miles per hour, internal instruments indicating that the velocity and and direction were well in conformity with the logic of its own system, then crashed bloodily into reality.

During one of her convalescent periods, she decided to take the advice of some well-meaning friends and try meditation. How hard could it be? The breath goes in, the breath goes out, just focus the awareness on the breath and let your intruding thoughts just float peacefully away like a leaf on a stream. But her leaves carried on their backs brass marching bands, and she surfed after them downstream looking for the big waves to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Then she tried a guided imagery exercise she found on YouTube of some woman leading her through an imaginary journey to consult her inner wisdom figure. She enjoyed it well enough. The path through the pine forest smelled like pine. She saw the appropriate pool of water. She entered the building where the figure lived and met a marvelous woman with a face like a pared-down Polish babushka. The woman even wore a modified Grecian wisdom-giving dress. The YouTube woman told her she could ask the figure’s name. She did.

“I’m your mother,” the answer came.

“The hell you’re not,” she replied.

Consider the source.

Now that that is established, let me slip from under the third person into something a little more comfortable. (It was getting a tad warm in there anyway.)

In the early stages of my recovery from alcoholism, I had a friend, Mac, who became a kind of father-confessor and reality check-point for me. He looked a little like a seventy-year-old, bald, and wiry extra from the town scene in Moby Dick, and sounded like, while he may have been in recovery from alcoholism, he had overdosed on a lethal combination of Rousseau, episodes of The Wild Kingdom, and The Tao of Pooh.

Now, I loved Mac a lot, but I was never really sure of what reality I had checked into. I would go to see him when I was in the middle of an attack of terminal angst, usually triggered by something with the metaphysical significance of why my ’77 Honda had appointed itself as my personal guru for tolerance training or what I was going to eat for dinner. He never gave me answers or concrete explanations. He just talked, and talked…and talked: about how his truck full of capture Calvados kegs got blown up by the Germans in the Normandy Invasion; about the mating habits of various ape species; about how the Monarch Butterflies manage to find those Mexican trees in the fall. Then he would show me pages from Henry Miller’s autobiography.

Much, much later, with me half asleep on the sofa, he finally came out with his advice: “Avoid perfection at all costs.”

Now, I had been waiting three hours for this gem, and I’d heard the story before with less brandy and fewer Germans; this was the third go-round for the apes. “Aw, Mac, come on. What’s the alternative–no one ever aims to be run of the mill. That’s not in our training. We live in a country that’s in search of excellence, where winning is everything (and the only thing), where there exists such an animal that can produce 150% without exploding. What about “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat”; “Any job worth doing is worth doing well”; “No pain, no gain”? What would poor sainted Vince Lombardi say?

That’s just the problem, Mac said, misinformation; we’ve go too much of it. They start out early. You’re still in the cradle and you catch your parents’ expectations like some kind of a virus. This is the way you go to the bathroom—don’t forget to pull your pants down first. This is the way little girls play. This is the way little boys play. Don’t touch yourself; you’ll go blind. Then you go to school and you are good or bad by your A’s or F’s. Then they throw religion at you and give you a big parent in the sky who tells you that if you do like you like to do, you’ll go to your room forever. You get a little older and they tell you that if you work harder than hard, you’ll make it to the top (where ever that is). Then it turns out that if you don’t invest more than full time energy and anxiety in your work, you become a strange kind of abomination–a sinner, a social retrovert, and your own sweet mother’s heartbreak. You don’t make vice-president either. No wonder we drink. What it’s like to be a perfect human being has gotten so tangled up with misinformation that it’s impossible to sort it out.

Maybe Mac had a point: perfectionism is a dubious virtue at best. Those 1940’s movies I saw on TV when I was a kid starring some pre-adolescent girl whose beloved horse has a heart attack from the strain of his winning surge of effort at the finish line I saw from the viewpoint of my own pre-adolescence. The horse DIED. What’s so virtuous about that? Those same screenwriters who canonized the poor horse portray the hard-driving cop, the I-want-it-all superperson and even the artist chasing their vision as scornful of the limits of average humans. They are impatient, highly competitive, deadline preoccupied, time pressured, achievement oriented. Their standards are high above reach or reason…or their peers’. Characters on fire with their own potential are somehow forgivable, even at their worst, because their goals are so lofty. They either go out with a blaze of glory or go out in a blaze, and we, as spectators, love a good fireworks show.

Off the movie set, however, we don’t tend to gloss over the pitfalls of perfectionism. Its darker side is seen in the person whose self-worth is completely measured in terms of success and productivity, the individual who is paralyzed in the face of self-set, impossible goals, the student whose fear freezes her at exam time, the office worker who procrastinates the report until the night before or it is assigned to someone else. Perfection has to be faultless, without error, so the person tied to perfection is always vulnerable to being “found out,” to be found inadequate, is defensive to criticism, super-sensitive to disapproval. Often, “the best defense is offense,” and unreasonable performance standards are projected onto others, returning annoyance and more disapproval to the perfection-sick soul.

Within the past few years there has been a glut of self-help books on the market to help folks to employ cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to alleviate the self-persecutory aspects of perfectionism, but this dichotomous win or lose framework is deeply embedded in the epistemology of our Western civilization. It doesn’t allow for anything in between. One mistake equals total failure. One mistake is ALL mistake because it must follow the logic of its own system: if perfect is not perfect is not perfect is not perfect until your self-talk begins to sound like the demented computer, Hal, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This two pigeon-hole perceptual grid–perfect/imperfect leads to a rather rigid view of the way the world should be. I used to tell the kids I taught that our perceptual grid controls how we see the world. Picture this: you are walking around with a set of those cubby-style mailboxes in front of you. Someone throws an apple or a banana at you and you can experience dessert. If they throw a watermelon, however, you get a smushed mess or nothing. As a morality frame, this is a pretty judgmental (and besides, nobody wants a smushed watermelon living next door or, god forbid, married to your daughter). So everyone is saint or sinner, madonna or whore, democrat or republican (duck), and yourself an ego-maniac with an inferiority complex. This can make you pretty unpopular with yourself and/or other people unless, you can find others with the same perceptual grid as you and form your own religion.

My own Catholic upbringing called this way of thinking scrupulosity (although I don’t remember any of the nuns ever saying one could be too good–they usually didn’t bother you in that direction unless you kept leaving class to go to confession every two hours). Scrupulosity swings two ways. For example, I am old enough to remember when it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays. OK. You’ve gone to the home of a non-Catholic friend (we called them publics) for dinner and your fiend’s mother served you a hot dog. You’ve forgotten it’s Friday and you take a bite. All of a sudden Divine Intervention did its thing: OH MY GOD, IT’S FRIDAY and you’re caught on the crest of a moral dilemma . You can a) spit the bite of hot dog disgustedly onto your plate or at your friend’s dog (while praying hard that your friend’s pet would not become the hot dog of hell); or b) swallow the hot dog, and, since you have already been condemned, finish the bite and run out to the nearest steak house for the biggest prime cut you can find.

The scrupulous self-evaluator will, of course, find it difficult to achieve any goal that requires protracted, daily effort. The runner will be torn between inertia and shin-splints, the dieter between starvation and Godiva deep dives. It takes some major cognitive retraining to even begin to see “progress” over “perfection.”

I don’t know, Mac. Maybe we are too balled up in misinformation to even start to know what real perfection is. I hesitate to throw the concept out completely. I still find it pretty repulsive to “aim for average” and still suffer from PTSD from a graduate school teacher who kept grading my papers B+ (as an incentive to do better, mind you!). And I don’t see anything called The Quest for Mediocrity on the New York Times best seller list. It still seems too simple, vaguely immoral to do as you implied and please yourself and let it go at that. Perhaps part of my problem lies in the word itself–perfect seems to have a set of self-cancelling meanings, an internal equivocation. On the one hand it is “the state of complete excellence, free from any flaw or imperfections of quality; faultless. That meaning plunges into never-never land, where potential is posited by act, where a touchable reality is only a starting point. Yet, perfect also means “having all its parts, all of its essential characteristics; complete. To be a perfect human being, then, is to be flawed and….

Hold it. The third-person writer wishes to interrupt. She feels as if there is an intrusion dangerously into her territory and this is one of her favorite places to spin out. She is fond of fantasizing about what it would be like to live inside a self-relevant construction–to be perfect is not to be perfect is close enough. To be a perfect human being is to have all its parts. Part of being human is having flaws; to be flawed is not to be perfect. To have all its parts, a human has the ability to abstract a perfection it is not. Or is it? (Isn’t this fun?) She wonders if the Hebrews forbade the utterance of the name of God, Yahweh, I am Who am, because of its self-relevance, back and forth in a spinning mystery. If the writer keeps this up, continually rebounding against the sides of meaning, where would it eventually take her? If she were a computer, would she self-destruct? Would she implode into a black hole? She imagines that it would be like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole with no end. Lines of memory remaining where her thoughts touched the walls of reason, mirroring the shape of the double helix….

I’m sorry. I seem to have lost myself for a moment there. She must have jumped me when I wasn’t looking. Well Mac, if you are listening to me from heaven, we seem to have made a fine mess of this essay. Your thesis, to avoid perfection at all costs, is still fighting in me with Sister Mary Rigida, Theory Z, the old afternoon soaps and the Green Bay Packers, a sad and unreasonable state of affairs. I will not blame the reader one bit for dropping out completely. But we can’t say we didn’t warn you. It seems as though “authorities” on this subject are a little more skewed than we thought: a writer whose judgment cannot be trusted, a self-admitted old fool , and a hopelessly confused “I” in between.

Consider the source. Really.