FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Sunday, May 8, 2016

THE LAYMAN’S GUIDE TO PERFECTION

THE LAYMAN’S GUIDE TO PERFECTION

Each time I revisit the theme of perfection I am humbled and awed by the simple beauty of my humanity. Knowing and accepting that neither I nor any other man will ever be perfect is the critical milestone beyond which we become truly free to appreciate who and what we are. One might conclude that resolving our human limitations is the only way we can equip ourselves to deftly manage them. Denial on the other hand is a lugubrious portal to pointless, unnecessary frustration and disappointment. I not believe mankind is intended to punish itself simply because men were created imperfect. I think life is not about perfection or imperfection at all, it is about how we can make the best out of what God has given us.  Regardless of the brevity of our mortal self-consciousness it is the only reference point we have so all the more important that we learn to love and value ourselves as organisms defined by the physical limitations of what we know of creation. This is no argument for or against the existence of what some men believe to be a “perfect”God it is an affirmation of what men are… we are imperfect… we are not gods, we are neither equal or similar to God, he is who he is and we are whom we are…

I am certain that God has his own struggles to quell, perfection is certain to be kept busy beside imperfection. One might conclude it to be impossible for perfection and imperfection to coexist, that it is a relative scale rather than an absolute value. It may not be the simple balancing act we envisage especially when managed on the scale of all existence… I think God is not what we think he is as certainly as I know he is continually amazed at how his creative masterpieces which include men have evolved in ways he had never imagined. God is both artist and critic, men are artifices and votaries...

The first man who said humans should aspire to be perfect and godlike singlehandedly engineered the most tenacious pathology to follow man along his brief evolution. Poetic yes but fundamentally flawed this classic folly falls within the realm of impossible things such as the fountain of youth and the elixir of life. It contradicts and belies a healthy, reasonable comprehension and expectation of man’s capabilities. The idea that man could be perfect is so intoxicating that we might momentarily detach ourselves from reason to fantasize it. But we are not and will never be perfect nor shall we be gods. Perfection is an elusive and deviously beguiling  concept ironically manufactured by man as a state he can aspire to but never attain. Who in their right senses would do something like that? The answer is that it was a tragically bad idea that seemed “perfect” at the time. The challenge is how to undo it’s “bad magic”. No greater recipe for catastrophic disillusionment and depression can possibly exist it is a toxic setup for failure! Perfection is a poetic, intangible quality man has attempted to define without possessing any ability to possess or comprehend it. Perfection easily falls into the wastebasket beside similarly incredulous concepts that perpetrate a fixed, conveniently divine, stratification of existence set within a primitive cache of options that range from good to bad; from bad to ugly without any logical, empirical substantiation. It is clear that nobody has ever taken time to carefully think it out! Perfection is the microwave-caviar of the human experience! The philosopher in me questions whether perfection is not only mankind’s opposite but also his nemesis. Perfection, truly seamless, magnificent and unblemished perfection would be the absolute antithesis of mankind the reverse of the tragic, mortal and volatile environment that encompasses and inundates him. Man hovers between the nadir of genetic barbarity and some ethereal point that is ever drawing close, (but nobody knows how close), to perfection so yes, he falls just short of perfect but that does mean he is not amazing. Humanity is a brilliant artifice of nature a handsome organism brilliant but easily misguided. But in man’s eyes being created imperfect by a perfect god is a powerful engine for his boundless ego. He lusts for that which he feels has been deliberately denied him. His flaw is not being able to admit when he is wrong and then follow up with a reasonable solution to achieve a reasonable level of happiness. Men are now so ego invested in clinging to the fantasy of perfection they are blinded to the obvious reality that they are not and will never be perfect. Mankind’s bombardiering of reason has been and will continue to be the source of his corporeal and spiritual  unhappiness.

If we look at perfection as an equation with man at one side and God on the other we can instantly resolve the inequality. The equation cannot possibly balance. So we must more clearly define or redefine perfection. The dilemma is that we do not know what perfection is because we have never actually experienced it. If we believe God to be the standard of measurement this problem is easily solved or should be. God would be the ideal at one end of the pendulum swing and man would be at the other extreme of the radius. But does the pendulum come to rest? In the frictionless void of space it would not oscillate the same as on an Astral body bound to celestial gravity, it would rotate 360 degrees infinitely. Do we really need to pontificate between theoretical astrophysical models in order to comprehend what appears to have always been crystal clear? Perhaps we need to such complex grandiosities to unravel ourselves from millennia of “imperfect” brainwashing. So let us play with the model of perfection defining it in one instance as an irreversible difference between divinity and mortality. Then let us redefine perfection as it relates to each “thing” under the umbrella of creation. We might coin this as “relative-perfection” but using this model we quickly run into an insurmountable dilemma when we take into consideration that nothing operates perfectly in the universe we know except, (we think), god. So the farther we digress from the paradigm of divine perfection, in the direction of its inherently unbalanced opposite, “mortal-imperfection” the greater becomes the margin of error. This makes us wonder if the traditionally rarefied model of perfection can or should be applied to men at all. I tell you now it may not! Perfection was never breathed into man at creation so it has never been lost and therefore we cannot lament the loss of something we never possessed. We lament what we fear to be gods oversight, deliberate design or punishment. How and why would a perfect god punish what he created as imperfect for being imperfect? That is the equation that does not balance. Our anger expressed as guilt for an unjustified loss of perfection can neither restore nor heal those conditions. No mythical, romanticized pining for a lost Eden can substitute the hard truth that we are what we are. Even if Eden had once existed our reality would still leave us being just what we are, mortals who will be born, live and die imperfect in an imperfect world.

ANTITHETICAL REALITY

At the earliest point of reference the concept of antithetical reality cancels our ability to understand phenomenon which could be structured according to rules nonexistent in our own parallax of reality. Theories on alternate, opposite, divergent, realities are all grandly mythical by default. Until they can be incontrovertibly proved we must question their validity. This does not mean that divinity and supernality are not possible it only means that from our imperfect vantage they would be invisible, undetectable, unfathomable… Can the “perfect” dust that settles at the feet of a perfect being also settle upon us or would the immortal and incorruptible quality of its essence cancel us out as matter does antimatter? Does Einstein’s glimpse of relativity suggest that perfection is a point beyond light speed where “tachyonic-perfection” devoid of mass and timeliness would allow diametrically opposed particles to fuse into one reality? While this theory sounds like a compelling opportunity to escape the condition of our mortal imperfection it leaves one to wonder what existence would be like without all the imperfect “stuff” that defines our world. What is thought without “stuff” albeit imperfect stuff for men to contemplate? At the end of the day being happy with the ”stuff” all around us is the closest we may ever competently approach an understanding of anything of the dust which comprises our world. Mankind must thoughtfully extricate himself from the mythic mire of fantasy he has swallowed for most of the existence he remembers evolving away from habit with a refocused sense of practical realness. It a’int gonna be nearly as fancy as the implausible cosmological “stuff” we must ultimately recycle and discard but it could enable us to appreciate the simple, fundamental nature of everything we perceive as part of our world, a place we already know to be patently imperfect!
In the modern world men are no longer mistaken for gods. Our satirical culture roasts popular deities of the moment with a psychologically dethroning critique reducing them to pitiable, imperfect monsters  reminding them that socioeconomic privilege is a borrowed blessing. The gilt crowns artificially exalting them above other men have been refashioned to suit their likeness from the plundered booty of previously deposed nobles into corporate icons tattooed onto their very souls and operantly-brainwashed into the pliant minds of farmed consumers who are the common classes. Yesterday and in the moment we breathe these symbolic standards are still bereft of realness, they are decorative misconceptions designed only to market a structure intended to enforce an artificial hierarchy of power.  The power they wield is extracted from our minds. But only until such time as we change our minds or turn our minds off from the incessant channels of command and stimulus-response! Today as every day we are all mortals, brothers of the same blood swatches of the same cloth. We are all of us mortals doomed to die and amidst us ever more stars fall from the illumed, nimbused skies of popular culture as nature recycles itself again and again. Death the equalizer of all men proclaims our fateful imperfection.

Privilege and it’s sense of entitlement have been duly tempered by the glorious and inglorious revolutions of the past two hundred years bringing us all that much closer at least in theory. Wresting the mindfuck of divine right from the politically privileged got mankind the first real pay raise it had had in 100,000 years.  The void created after divine-mortality had been ousted was a sobering episode still playing itself out. In the absence of false human gods was opened a wary but driven sense of precipitousness in the spirit of those regimes which had been bullied  into existence by wresting away the freedoms of modern men. It is hardly a perfect world my friend when billions are still born into the same abject poverty wherein they die.  Not that enriched enslavement would be a more palatable option. Within the global vastitude of our consciousness we see the eternal struggle between mankind’s ambitions and his capabilities.
How do we measure the difference between mankind’s ambitions and his capabilities? This appears to be the dilemma defined and driven by mankind’s inexorable thirst for perfection. In ancient times we personified this passion through the manufacture of God’s. In modern times our lust for divine supernality causes us to personify our last for perfection through celebrity but has this not always been so?
Whether men are enamored of their unbridled lusts for the trappings of the gods or whether they seek a more abstract and conceptually vacant approach via divine antithetical reality all these theories are the same in their intent to serve as a layman’s guide to perfection.

Written By: BIGDADDY BLUES

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