So is her stutter a handicap or just another feature of her speech? I myself believe the second. In fact I would go so far as to say that her stutter makes her speech more beautiful to me; such that even if it magically could be evaporated away (like a puddle on the street to which the birds come to drink) I'm not sure I would want it gone. I count it as a feature of her humanity, a part of what about her is dear to me.
I'm impatient with the notion that "nothing is perfect." Of course there are things that are perfect--precisely because real perfection includes the faults and imperfections. It encompasses them. It gathers their tribute too in the waves of its river. Consider how a freckle or mole can unfold an already beautiful face into yet another dimension of beauty. Or consider how Sinatra, as his voice took on the features of age, and the cigarette smoke and alcohol aged it as well, learned to put those "faults" to expressive use, so that with just a bit of vocal gravel or a slight hesitation of response in moving between registers he imbued this song or that with a sense of vulnerability or of sad experience or of been-around-the-block canniness. Or consider the arches and flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral: a symbiosis of ascension, stone in flight. Yet at a structural level especially the buttresses are nothing more than a response to the problem of the distribution of load! They take the limitations of material and weight and literally leverage them to add a fuller force of beauty to the whole.
Of all the maddening ambitions of the heart, excellence and the quest for it, has to be one of the hardest to negotiate. Out of a fear of falling short, we may refuse to take risks. Or out of an expectation for young achievement, parents may remain cold and aloof to the needs of their children. So therapists are probably right to inveigh against perfectionism. Yet it's also true, that a good share of what we most enjoy and deeply value in the world could not have been created without a yearning for perfection, or without the sacrifices involved in translating that yearning into hard bright pieces of reality.
And here I'm not alluding just to art. I mean, as well, the well-framed door to an eighteenth century farmhouse, or an Airbus model that has flown umpteen times without the hint of a crash. I mean marriages that last. I mean lifelong mutual admiration cultivated between father and son. I mean nature reserves where native ecosystems have been lovingly restored. I mean public architecture made truly useful and enjoyable for the public. All these, too, are products of the drive for excellence and quality. They happen only out of the yearning to get things really, really right.
William Butler Yeats wrote a poem, called "The Choice," that deals with the question of balancing work and life. It's probably over-quoted, but since any opportunity to quote that majestic voice is worth it to me:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work....
It's one or the other, according to the poem. You either enjoy your life and live it to the fullest--and never quite measure up in your work; or you commit yourself to your work alone and allow your life to be a bit of a mess or a bore. Now choose.
Some of us really do seem to go all one way or the other. On the worker bee side, I think of Beethoven and Auden, both of whom, especially in their work-spurts, lived in astonishing domestic disorder--pig sties of entropy really--their only focus in life in those days of concentration being the ordering of marks on a page. Or, when I think of life lived for life's sake, I think of Thoreau, tramper of the New England woodlands. Eater of beans and bread. Builder of a one-man cabin. A great writer, also but one who probably could have been content not to write. Certainly he never cared for wage-work. Having, apparently, an extraordinary capacity for ecstatic immersion and careful observation, the man's daily craving was at bottom just to take part in the spectacle of life.
Does our existence really have to amount to a tragic either-or? Might not life and work at least on occasion prove mutually-interactive, mutually-productive? I am sure we would all like to answer yes, and yet the're no question about it but that many of us have experienced the dilemma Yeats sketches; that is, we have had to choose and know the pain involved in doing so. Consider a marriage in which both partners have high professional ambitions. The one receives a promotion contingent on a move, while the other feels that in order to succeed he must stay where he is. I have seen this situation end in divorce. Or I am thinking now of a friend who recently spoke of how frustrating she found it that all the effort and care she put into recycling as well as not wasting food and keeping the thermostat low, etc. was all dwarfed to a sense of silly negation by her annual trips to Europe and all the carbon that her flights and general travel consume. Yet she feels that on a professional level such trips are essential. In both these cases perhaps we could say perfection of the life is also being sacrificed for perfection of the work.
On the other side of things I often think of Wallace Stevens who toward the end of his life wrote these rueful lines, in which he mourns how the comfortable perfection of his life has gotten in the way of perfection of his true vocation, poetry:
I of course have had a happy and well-kept life. But I have not even begun to touch the spheres within spheres that might have been possible if, instead of devoting the principal amount of my time to making a living, I had devoted it to thought and poetry. Certainly it is as true as it ever was that whatever means most to one should receive all of one's time and that has not been true in my case.
So what to do? Sometimes of course there is no way through but to muddle. Nothing to do but accept that life contains paradoxes and contradictions. Or perhaps wait until the desire for perfection in one category really overcomes desire for perfection in the other. Sometimes too circumstance can solve the problem for us, so that the life and the work really can be made to complement and reinforce one another; or just do. To return to Yeats, in one of his poems, called Among School Children, he manages to create an almost perfect work of art out of a visit he made (as a senator of the Irish Free State) to a school for young girls. Nothing could be more prosaic source material--a school inspection!--and yet Yeats's mind knew a promising theme when it saw one, and it took this straw of circumstance and spun it straight into the verbal gold of meditation. Surely for Yeats, the creation of that poem had to have felt like a triumph of unity of life and work.
Or to take a personal example: "Nine Volt Nomad" serves a forum of life-work unity for me. Here, like an open air glass blower at a renaissance fair, I can publicly fuse my love for the cosmic economy, to my love of language and art. Here my art of writing can meet my art of living.
Finally too, I think of the famous scene in Anna Karenina in which Levin, a nobleman, works side by side with the peasants on his own estate, scything at the harvest. Levin, a profoundly self-conscious person hampered in every way by doubts and misgivings, uncertain of his goals, and a skeptic in matters of religion, nevertheless finds in the rhythms of scything a kind of redemptive muse guiding him to this:
Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those moments his row was...smooth and well-cut...
I am told that those who stutter, when they sing, usually find themselves entirely free of their impediment. And I think this is something we're all after: the work-song-moment that frees and unifies our being. The harvest perspective that binds our work and lives in one.
HB
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