IMPERFECTION
writing and clay
If I were shooting for perfection I’d never have bought more clay. Too discouraging! Luckily I prefer imperfection. It feels more like life. I don't want to make smooth bodies and muscles that appear where muscles actually are, or tendons, or exactly what you look like when you squat down naked on your haunches. I’m interested in moods. I like catching whoever they are in a moment of becoming or coming undone. Perfection is sort of ho-hum. It is also beyond me. And it is not what the clay requires, at least not of me. What the clay now requires of me is obedience. If I honor what the clay wants, it allows me to play the rest of the time. This happened after the clay got to know me. Or maybe after I got to know the clay. Now if I want to make a salamander but it has shown me part of Pegasus, it won’t let me make the salamander until I try to make the Pegasus. The clay is the boss, and if it doesn’t get what it wants, I can’t make anything. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be good. So I did my best. Then I made five salamanders.
The other day what appeared on the lump of clay I had grabbed was a desperate mouth hanging open, and I stopped, and being careful not to mess with what I’d been given, looked for the rest of him. His head was flung back, his pointy nose sticking into the sky, he is sitting with his legs drawn to his chest and his scrawny arms are around them. Despair personified. But there is a healthy dose of irony about him that makes me laugh. At first this surprised me. Where had it come from? What the clay wants, the clay has ways of getting.
Speaking of imperfection, the same is true for writing. I am not interested in writing the perfect sentence, the perfectly thought through essay. I’m not interested in deep thinking or narrative arcs or denouements; I am interested in why this, why now? What’s the root of this new thing I can’t get out of my head. So I set to finding out. Then if I’m lucky, I might discover what I’m looking for without knowing I was looking for it, which is sort of the whole point.
For one who doesn’t much care about perfect sentences, you sure have a way with them. Maybe that’s the secret. Like those people who stop looking for love, and suddenly it appears.
Not sure you could ever have enough imperfect clay salamanders. Like dogs. The more the better. xo