Be Imperfect and Die

Be imperfect, and die!
Envy not the ancient constellations,
With their stick-figure constancy
fixed in the heavens.
No! Forgive this conception and transcend it.
Be a real constellation:
Burning, ever-moving and glorious
for your never-waiting, your
indifference to the supplication
of that old, inquiring organ
which churns inside you
but would petrify the churning.

Be imperfect, and die!
Envy not the ancient spring,
which pushes life from lifeless darkness
and originates the stream.
No! Use this conception but doubt it.
You do not stand outside causation,
launching balls of substance
To a cold, indifferent Other
that would bounce around by Patterns
and return to reward or punish.
Be a real spring: Take and give! 
And affect your future taking, 
and modify your giving;
But be part of the dance of things!

Swirl, and know that you are swirling!
Burn, and know that you are burning!
Sit awhile to hear your crying:
“Be imperfect, and die!”

It’s fitting to post this poem after the first day of not making good on my goal of posting once per day.

This poem is all about letting go and being a part of the dance of things, the flow of living that evades perfect linguistic or conceptual capture. It’s about resisting the easy narrative, or indeed resisting reification of narratives at all.

It’s also about accepting that you are embedded in a network of causality that is deeply interconnected.

To see how interconnected you are to everyone and everything else, think about all the things that are not happening to you as you read this. If someone interrupts you to ask you a question, you will (most likely) stop to answer. If a spider bites you, you will lose your train of thought. If your phone or computer dies, you will stop reading. Your decision to read this, then, is not only your own: the whole universe has conspired to allow you to read this right now.

This is roughly what I mean when I say that one should be “a real spring.” A spring puts forth water, but it doesn’t create water; it is a gathering point for water and a putting-forth of water into a visible stream. The spring is not an object in the usual sense; it may be more accurately called a “springing” or a “springing-forth.” In just this way, we are a gathering point for the action of the universe, or God, or the Tao, or whatever you wish to call the totality of what is, prior to anything we may say about it. We are a springing-forth of agency.

And yet we as nexus points of the universal “happening” have directed agency due to the auto-regressive manner of our action and self-conception. That is, the action you take at any given time and the totality’s response to that action provide new data that can be incorporated into your conceptual rendering of self and world, which in turn provides the basis for future action. In this way, you “affect your future taking” and “modify your giving.”

But it is only once one has seen this structure that they are really free to exercise that agency. This is the sort of “waking up” that people talk about in spiritual circles: to be part-and-whole simultaneously and to be ever-aware of the feedback loop between concept and action. This is to actively participate in God’s self-creation (or the universe’s ongoing becoming, or however you prefer to call it).

I’m not saying that this is the capital-T “Truth” of how the universe is. Indeed, one should hold these ideas themselves lightly, as doors through which to pass in order to arrive at the direct experience of what I am trying to convey. But try taking these thoughts seriously for a while and see how they affect you. For me they have been valuable in tackling perfectionism.

I plan to write more about my experience with perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination. In fact, I planned to write about it today, but my reflections on the poem took over.

As always, thanks for reading!