the perfection of a blank page.

There’s something about staring at a blank page that induces euphoria in me. It is already perfect; why should I change it by engraving little black characters and symbols on it? Only then does it become imperfect.

All poetry, all art, is an attempt to re-organize our imperfections into a more perfect form. That is why it’s often more beautiful than reality.

But if we left all canvases colorless, all pages blank, removed all objects from view of the lens of a camera — if actors were naked and voiceless, if they sat still in a dark room… Perfection.

It is the need to impose ourselves upon perfection, to fashion ourselves and our creations under immaculate lighting, that speaks mostly to our dislike of our own imperfection than it does of the love of perfection itself.

Even when the aesthetic aims to be grotesque, or distorted, or imperfect, it is an attempt to escape the very thing it’s trying to create.

The curation of imperfection is still a form of chasing the perfection ideal.

It is an attempt to shape that which is raw and crude into a more polished form. It is an unconcealed submission to limitation — an admission to that which is impossible to overcome, yet organizing it anyway. Why?

Dadaism was the closest thing we had as a representation of reality, but even that failed. Even that became something. The moment a label is ascribed to an idea is the moment the idea dies.

The only aesthetic reality is reality itself, the things which are created with no intention of organization, things which we discard and disregard every day.

If you were to empty a trash can right now onto the concrete, its contents would be the only art which accomplishes true imperfection as an aesthetic.

The used condoms on the side of the road. The empty shopping malls. The cigarette butts in an ashtray…

Even if we look at this blank page concept from a metaphysical perspective, the same rings true.

The mind of a child, for example, raised in a healthy environment, is always more at peace than the mind of their adult counterpart.

There is less psychological weight. Less psychic material to bog them down. Therefore, it is more perfect.

It is only once the child is told that he must form an identity — must choose a way to present himself— that his mind begins to form spots, adapting to its flawed environment.

Meditation. Mindfulness. Presence. These things teach us to empty the brain of its contents. To become like a blank canvas.

Why then do we strive to learn more — to fill the mind with more?

Why do we possess the desire to etch ourselves into unadulterated spaces?

Why do we attempt to change what is already perfect in accordance with nature?

Because, for reasons I do not yet understand, the only thing more euphoric than a blank page is a page that bears your own mark.

Maybe, it is an attempt to integrate ourselves with nature and its perfection.

A spiritual problem tackled with material tools.

Yet, those very materials, or art, is what help us cope with and begin to understand our spiritual problem — our fragmentation from nature.

If the artist’s unconscious driver is to purify himself, to make himself less imperfect through the engagement of his craft — to integrate himself, then we can learn everything about him by studying his art.

What he projects, in reality, is what he lacks — what he is trying to reconcile within himself.

He is therefore an empty vessel. He is both perfect and imperfect.