The Cycle of Imperfection
Click to download a PDF sample (password below)
For months I’ve been working—which means mainly procrastinating—on a new book. Instead of me boring you with an essay on its structure, you can download a sample. Initially I titled it A Cycle of Days, reflecting the way that it reflects the changing months and seasons across the years. It’s been quite a slog. I reached the end of June a while ago, a sort of halfway point. July to December will be more challenging, for reasons I won’t bother explaining now. Challenge is more interesting than drudgery but can only be tackled when one is in the mood. The most dispiriting thing is a periodic loss of faith in undertaking such a demanding project. It can take the form “Why am I doing this, anyway? It’s not fun any more.” One tries to soldier on regardless.
There are puritans who’ll say it’s not supposed to be fun, as if any worthwhile endeavour should be sweat and pain, interspersed with despair and giving up. I think I don’t buy that any more. I wrote somewhere that I thought Van Gogh painted because it was the most fun he knew how to have.* It didn’t manage to put it so succinctly the first time round. That’s one good reason for producing the book at all: to give myself a second chance, and write better. I’m still getting value from Brian Spaeth’s words as quoted in my last:
... getting the hang of it, and am actually enjoying it—which is the true test of any endeavor ...That hits the nail on the head. The true test was applied: the endeavour hardly scraped through. I should write adventurously, more daring and loose, as also hinted by Bryan White (not to mention Ghetu over these years, who’s almost gone from youth to middle age in the meantime). The other day I thought of a more alluring title: The Cycle of Imperfection, as a reminder to hang loose. Imperfect Evolution begat imperfect Nature, Nature begat imperfect Man. God is clearly not perfect. It’s not that I’ve become slapdash. To sweat the small stuff is one of my prime imperfections, as is failing to see the big picture, and veering off on the wrong track. Never mind, let me persevere down those wrong tracks and bring back unexpected delights.
As the days, years and decades rush headlong like mountain streams, or meander like snakes across endless plains to that distant Ocean of mystery or nothingness (take your pick) I shall let things be, follow the impulse, apply the true test of endeavour: “Is it fun?”
That’s what The Cycle of Imperfection means to me, and perhaps to some future reader. Let this title take its place in the great parade of titles, between Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, standing in contrast to both—without claiming any status or rank at all. I do it because writing is fun, which is a fun word for “enjoyable”, “enjoyment”—the ultimate challenge for all of us in an imperfect world.†
So if you are interested, click on the graphic above for a PDF sample of the first 29 pages. You’ll need to paste in a password. If I know you, feel free to email and I’ll send it. All feedback welcome. You might wonder if each day, or some days, would be enhanced with titles and not just dates. Brian’s Sun Temple has 42 brilliant chapter headings, starting with the following: The Hieroglyph, The Old City, The Truant, The Ritual, The Sacrament, The Promenade.... They stand like neon signs flashing in the foggy night, drawing you in, delivering their promise....
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* I wrote this on 9th March 2008:
It’s true that Vincent van Gogh shot himself in a field near Auvers, where he was staying with Dr Gachet, and died a few days later. He’s often cited as the archetypal unhappy mad artist, but I think his mental anguish occurred only at the crises of his intermittent condition. Surely painting itself was his joy, a sensual ecstasy which communicates through his colours and brush-strokes. Art and literature aren’t easy. To develop the highest skill requires obsession. The goal is to communicate one’s experience to another. Joy is the only experience worthy of being translated via the painstaking treatment of art. It doesn’t matter what facilitates the obsession. Certain blues-singers honed their art when blindness and poverty had closed other avenues. They say birds sing sweeter in a cage. The young child is endlessly creative, with potential for anything, then life closes off one option after another.† Searching Google to see if anyone has written a book called The Cycle of Imperfection or anything similar, I came across The Gifts of Imperfection, by Brené Brown. Its subtitle is “Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are”, & appears to be written for success-driven high-flyers like herself, who compulsively read and thus help push up “#1 New York Times Bestsellers”. Not to be confused with anything I may publish.
5 Comments:
B.F. Spaeth said...
I came across this quote this morning and felt that it was relevant to your post: "If the title is right, the whole text will hang on it, like a coat on a peg." Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. I'm re-reading his "Memories of the Future".
Thanks, Brian. Let me ask you something. You're better at designing covers than I am, and your images are typically low-resolution, blurry even; while I'm fanatical for photos that yield more and more detail when magnified - especially pictured landscapes you can actually walk in.
This is the question:
Which is better in the circs. at suggesting imperfection, a sharp bright image with faux bad typing as in my proposal, or an image of imperfection with sharp clean lettering? For the latter, I had the idea of a tattered notebook cover with a nice fresh label for incongruous contrast, as an alternative to the above.
I thoroughly enjoyed the sample from The Cycle of Imperfection. Unlinking these reflections from their specific date of production and hanging them on their shared date instead gives at once a 'bird's eye view' of the passage of time even as any one entry may offer a 'worm's eye view' of a single moment, or series of moments. The effect is serene and beautiful and engaged.
Kathleen, your remarks are more timely than you could imagine. In a recurrent bout of destructive criticism, I’d been thinking that it was a wrong format, & something more thematic was called for, despite the hours & days already wasted on that kind of scheme.
Instead, you’ve pulled me back to viewing that sample with a cold critic’s eye, and finding rigmaroles aplenty for the surgeon’s knife to excise.
Bird’s eye and worm’s eye, yes wonderful. And you remind me of a wonderful book I got yesterday from Oxfam, from which I have scanned a diagram about alternative views from David Hockney, who reminds us that perspective drawing was invented in the Renaissance, probably with the aid of the camera obscura.I’ve added it to the bottom of the post.
“the viewer is an immobile point. If the infinite is God, when the viewer moves infinity moves. They will never meet.
in reverse perspective the viewer is now in movement. (They can see both sides of the chair) and infinity is everywhere, including the viewer. Isn’t this better theologically.”
From infinity’s viewpoint, time collapses into the eternal now, with its rhythms of day and night, and the seasons of the year. Are we progressing from imperfection to Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point? Who knows? Time is the extension of imperfection, which keeps it rolling; just as each toddler learns anew the secret of bipedal walking, as the only solution to an imbalance which would otherwise succumb to gravity.
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