Perfection
Do you know of anything that is perfect? Are you having a perfect day? Ah, yeah, no? Probably not. Let's unravel that right now. The notion of perfection bubbled up this week when I was having a conversation with an engineer who is 3-D printing lenses that my son designed for me to help light clients' art pieces. Since my work is light sculpture, dialing in precise illumination has been a priority for years, and this new addition to the quiver is fabulous. This company is using tools capable of machining to within four millionths of an inch; they have measuring capability to "see" discrepancies down to a millionth of an inch. Pretty much perfect, right? Well, that is not a thing. "Pretty much perfect;" "Really unique;" "almost always" or "almost never" are what my dad explained as "modifying an absolute." And that can't be done, grammatically speaking. Humans say these things constantly and we know what they mean. But, " pretty much perfect" is watering down something that we need to hang on to tightly. Perfection is an absolute.
Operating at nearly absolute zero, the James Webb Space Telescope is a tool approaching perfection and made by the brightest minds in math, physics and engineering. It is parked and cooling a million miles away and preparing to look back to what the physicists like to call First Light, the Cosmic Dawn, when stars ignited, streaming photons into a universe barely 300 million years old. Once fully tuned, we will see light created over 13 billion years ago. To comprehend the "tuning" we are talking about, think of the 18 mirrors that comprise the light collector as being the size of the United States. Each mirror is the size of Texas. Their edge alignment has to be accurate to within an inch and a half. This is nanometer scale, billionths of a meter. As a reminder, a million seconds is a week and a half; a billion is 31 and a half years. Near perfection...
Can you think of anything that is truly perfect? I can. Everything around us has glitches, niggles, pauses, flats in the curve, a missed note, a mumble, a rattly part, squeaks, exceptions to the rule, unexplained outcomes... All things we create have this evidence of our animal being, our flawed, yet beautiful, bodies, our minds and hands. But, MATH. Mathematics has perfection all over the place from Pi to Phi to the Fibonacci sequence to equations defining numerical truths. Boom! But, this is not about that stuff. We didn't create math. We found it. Math is like a polished marble sphere or a cube of machined platinum. It's cool, but distant. I like a tesseract.
The only perfect things are memories. I remember snapdragons in the front yard in Kennington when I was five, little colored mouths you could squeeze open and shut. Walks at dawn by the Thames with my dad, just us, mist, goose poops in the damp grass, the smell of oldness and newness all at once. Music blasting, guitars screaming on a cross-country drive with my brother Andrew, hanging my arm out the window west of Las Vegas into the oven heat of the desert. Tippy top of a sticky tallest tree in the pine yard. Bad coffee on the S. I. ferry with Carl. The green flash in San Diego. These could fill books. Maybe pause here and recall some bright moments of your own. So many. And they shine. Perfectly. If you are reading this right, you are smiling now.
The photographer Galen Rowell used a phrase that has stuck for years -- "the golden sieve of memory." Most people are blessed with minds that retain the goodness of their history and permit the painful parts to filter out and recede. If you are not in this group, consider steps to join the club. The sieve also functions as a burnisher, a selective polisher, to make memories attain a sheen that keeps them sparkling and resonant and easier to find in the files upstairs. If the moment wasn't perfect, the event itself was flawed, your memory of it can be subconsciously rehearsed until the occluded parts are understood. The memory is perfect when the thing itself wasn't. The sieve saves the valuable.
It's hard being a human. Dark and light. Darkness and lightness. But perfection is real and accessible even if you aren't a math weenie. Put adventures in the bank behind your eyes. Sharing those is what this Art thing is about. See? Look at what I know. Look what I see and have seen and share how they shine. I can't make something perfect. But I can show you perfection, if I'm having a good day at the studio and the muse is caffeinated.
The images in this missive are meant to be diverse. A recent personal challenge is expansion of vision, mining old veins for new gems, digging through the visual files, finding the fresh, and making them shine on the wall.
Rock steady, my perfect friends, you know who you are. Take time to share.
Save the Absolutes!
