Saturday 20 December 2008

Perfection

Continuing on from my last post. Perhaps precious is misleading; if I am lost it's a map which is precious, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a puncture it's the spare wheel etc. But I was thinking more of those fine objects; polished marquetry, precision gears, objects which need careful handling. Today, consumer capitalism loves to mass produce supposedly special objects. Flash egotistic architecture leers at us in almost every street. Polished shiny, crass vulgarity, desperate to be be the real thing. What is the real thing. Integrity? Integrity, which I once defined as; the synthesis of the available dimensions of being in the moment. Precious indeed. Is it that certain objects, certain works point at this?

I suppose that the theistic religions would construct this in terms of man acting out the greatest good, made as they consider him to be in the image of Him. This I think has a ring of egotism. But I've little knowledge of those theologies so maybe they would say no, it is in the emptying of self that the work is made.

I return to my picture of the unknowable unity of reality folded and thus giving rise to forms of which we are composed and thus constructing (not the best word) a view. And it might be that certain types of objects, of forms point at this unity due to their hinting at perfection. A perfection which is ever present but not so much to our liking as when hinted at in those rare objects.

The scratch we perceive in the polished table top perfectly matches the object that made it, but we prefer the perception of the unscratched.

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