On Perfection, Weekends, and The Philadelphia Story

For you, Matthew:

I'm going crazy. I'm standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy.

~ Philadelphia Story

Limn the sky with peach pie, the clouds are crushed-melted marbles and strips of grated cheesecloth, pink as cherry blossoms. How can such a mountain be: Rainier, towering twice as high as these others along the way, like arrowheads or a picket fence before the giant house, imposing and towering.

I was thinking about shapes and forms again, this weekend. I had a lot of driving. When contemplating perfection, I keep returning to the idea of perfect art. Can there possibly be a perfect art? You see, if you can objectively state that one song is better than another song, or this artistic piece is better than this one, can you not simply leap to the conclusion that there is, somehow, a perfect piece? There are a couple of counterexamples to this that I've been considering: squares. Is there a perfect square? What size is it? You see, there are a ton of different square-forms, but all squares are simply rectangles with equivalent side lengths on all sides. How long those sides are, as long as they are all equivalent with corners at right angles, is irrelevant. 

Is a similar pattern true of songs? Let's upgrade to rectangles themselves: is there a perfect concept of a rectangle, one rectangle whose lengths are "correct" or "more perfect" than every other rectangle?

So with regards to art, we've stepped up in complexity through an impossible number of layers, several orders of magnitude more complicated. My artistic merit is negligible. I can draw stick figures (maybe), I can't pretend to draw anything that actually looks realistic, or purposely surreal. (I'm sticking to sketching, painting art at the moment - art is too broad a word). 

Just looking at Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci and anyone can see, from the smallest child to the highest authority on art, that Picasso actually knows what he is doing. More, that his work carries an artistic merit, a skill, and is more sophisticated. I would even go so far as to say: "better" than my scrawlings. 

The question is: is there an array of "perfection" and a system of tiers where everything is too nebulous to rank? Or do artistic pieces simply become "perfect enough" after a point? See, we see from a very finite point of view. But in order to receive an answer to any of these questions we can't ask with humanity in mind. We have to ask from an infinite point of view, because the very conceptualization of "perfection" is beyond us. 

So either God sees no differences in artistic merit between mine and Picasso's work, or there is some sort of standard. Is the standard creation itself, before the fall? Was it just "good" or was it perfect? But is each new painting is a rectangle to a trapezoid, a square to a circle? Or can there be a perfect painting?

More sophistry, I suppose.

My parents are making a culinary case for preventing me from returning to Oregon. My mother bought me all the delicious cider, several different types of juice (she knows my weaknesses so well), she made my two favorite dinners on Friday and Sunday (I guess Dad made dinner Sunday), and she bought more chips, salsa, guacamole than I could possibly (is that a challenge?) eat. To say nothing of the eventual Thanksgiving dinner. 

Writing is almost finished. I'm piecing together the final stitches on the last chapters of the novel, drawing them tight and prepping the climactic knot. Weekend was awesome (thanks Matthew). We watched Matthew's favorite movie, which neither I nor his fiance were aware of the existence of (The Philidelphia Story), and it was amazing. Definitely worth a placement on my non-existent list of favorite movie experiences. We drank pumpkin egg nog, wrote in a coffee shop, watched a movie, made food (more realistically, we made a mess), and discussed life, the universe, and everything.

I've driven nearly four-hundred miles, seen a ton of beautiful mountains, and glanced out over the sea. I'm ready for the week, I think.