A Tribute to a Sample of Perfection
Tags: Personal Essay, Art, Perfectionism, Figure Skating, Aesthetics

A Tribute to a Sample of Perfection

The subject and inspiration of this piece is Tessa Virtue’s and Scott Moire’s free dance at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang. Swinginghuman Dec 11, 2020·3 min read

Edgar Degas — L’Étoile

Perfection does not exist. Perfection is a mere mental construct of the ideal state an object or event or action can take. It is a concept, which without human imagination has no channel to be conceived. Yet we ceaselessly strive for it, even to the point where, in our attempts to reach it, we end up pushing ourselves away from it. Needless to say, such is not the case for everyone. In fact, the majority of our populace is satisfied with the mundane. But for the few of us who are not, our yearning for perfection can be the cause for an omnipresent feeling of dread. So what do we do? We draw, we paint, we write poetry, music, we learn math, we do philosophy… we attempt in vain to portray this abstract concept that only exists inside our minds, we emphatically try to communicate this personal feeling through art and math and philosophy, but to no avail.

In science, from time to time, by a stroke of luck or genius, an advancement is made, one which brings us closer to the true description of nature, causing a change in paradigm and raising the stakes for anyone who will seek the truth in the future. And by the repetition of this process, we asymptotically approach our goal, that of a perfect description of nature.

I started with the example of science because it is easier to see this iterative process at work, for no one can deny that every major result in science is bringing us closer to what we seek. Yet the same is true in the arts. If one looks at the history of art, one can follow the development towards a portrayal of perfection through structural perfection, followed by a moving away from that, for the sake of perfection in the portrayal of personal experiences, with the rise of impressionism and the movements that followed, with each movement raising the bar of what it means to communicate one’s thoughts and emotions.

The reason I am here today is to bring your attention to what I believe is one of the newer steps towards our quest for aesthetic perfection. We may need to wait to see the effect of it at work, assuming it will have an effect in the first place. Yet I for one am hopeful since in this case, it is as if the concept of perfection, which only exists in Plato’s realm of forms entered the allegorical cave and coalesced with the music to beget the dance in question, a projection of the perfection we crave so. Such embodiments of the ideal for me are unmistakable. How can it not be so when even seeing the same performance for the 20th time, you still feel goosebumps crawling up your skin 5 seconds into the performance, when you see half of it in a blur because of the tears that are uncontrollably flowing out of your eyes, when although you are sitting in front of a screen by yourself, you can’t help but give a standing ovation and shout in delight at the performers.

It is quite possible that all of this is a personal experience of mine that is not shared with many, possibly even none, other than myself. Yet for the sake of my desire that I can be a witness to a major step in the human journey, I hope that this is not the case, I hope that the future generation of performers will take this one as a stepping stone to reach higher and place a piton on the slippery cliff on which we climb.