Perfectionism

Two words which immediately sprang to mind at that heading were "ego" and "excess".  Once combine the two into a project with "ambition" and you're on the road to "unrealistic addiction".

I've heard quite a few people over the years actually say to me, "Well I'm a perfectionist," as if that were a good thing. I'm saying now it's an anti-human thing.

This ties in with the thesis of JD who can be found over at Sackerson's ... the thesis about the overwhelming importance of numbers in the universe, e.g. the Fibonacci, but I'm saying, in a mediaeval way, that the pursuit of perfection, taken to extremes, is the devil's work.

It turns the "perfectionist" into someone quite unpleasant to live with, work with and I'll go further ... it's a mental disorder. And it comes into hypergamy, which can be summed up in that old joke about a woman's life partner: "It's like computers ... if she'd waited just a bit longer, she could have had a better model.

And that is summed up in Chas and Dave's megahit of the time:

In Russia, my darling heart was a "perfectionist", which quite made me wonder why she bothered with me by the way ... we used to take a gft on any significant visit to someone, for dinner perhaps, or for an occasion, and there was one particular occasion I forget but I certainly remember the gift ... it was a hat box she was making herself.

Just a quick word about that ... in Russia, there was an old tradition of putting yourself into gifts, taking along something worthy which has much of you about it. There is a nouveau habit too which is to go into a shop and buy something off the shelf. It may be machine perfect but it's not human ... and human is our thang, it was hers too, thus the fanatical obsession with fine detail ... think the gift was for her elderly grandmother, so I quite agreed we had to make it a good one.

Plus I neglected to mention she really was very, very good at it, very deft finger and brain coordination, sense of colour and texture ... but not late evening with both having to work the next day.  Let's just say there was hysteria.

It was insane.

I've seen similar with music ... there is such a thing as "approaching perfection" in many genres and one example is a song demanding a voice like that of Plant R, Joplin J, Stewart R, Armstrong L ... hardly concert voices but perfect for their role and song.  To me, fine classical music is very much that, my ear is super-critical and annoyed at even the slightest cough in the audience picked up on the mic.

Same goes when comparing the Alchemy version of Sultans of Swing with something like She's a Mystery to Me.  The classical buff will note that neither are particularly musical High Art and yet on the softer Orbison number, the drummer smashing the drums when the entire feel of the song is soft ... well, it's gauche, lacking in sensitivity.

So I understand Becker and Fagan but I also understand that once you go down that "perfectionism" path, particularly when the original premise is flawed (silk purse, sow's ear) ... that is one thorny and rocky path ahead.

Now transfer that truism to a marriage.  Who was it who asked why it had to "go anywhere"?  It's not a conveyance!  (Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, 1961)

So here's what happens when you do try to make a silk purse from a sow's ear and in the process, become WEF globo-psycho perfectionist, where the human is not good enough for you and nature is far too untidy ... it galls the perfectionist soul.  The satanist soul.