Life and the Ideal.

I am just a poor boy,
Though my story's seldom told.
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles,

Such are promises.

All lies and jest.

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

~ Paul Simon’s The Boxer.

They fly in, the beautiful people. They fly in, they flare, then fade to ghosts. So, three questions:

Who is to blame?

Is the action of killing a form of suicide?

Which is the more desolate, the haunter or the haunted?

This isn’t quite as cryptic as it looks. It’s just an angle on a side of the human condition to which the idealist must succumb occasionally, or at least eventually. It’s about looking for the line between reality and delusion.

The search for the ideal is not the same as the search for perfection. Perfection is a dead thing. Perfection is a cold marble statue, beautiful but lifeless. Perfection is a painted quality, visible only as a superficial impression. Perfection is delusion.

The ideal, on the other hand, is about the reality of optimum balance. The ideal not only permits flaws, it requires them. It’s just that they have to be the right kind of flaws, since the wrong kind kill the ideal and make of it a ghost. This is why the ideal does not have to aspire to life as Pygmalion’s statue did; the ideal is life.

So how can anyone look for life without seeking the ideal? And yet they do, which I suppose is why so much of what passes for life is so grey to me.

One of these days I expect I’ll lighten up again.