It's amazing to me in this passage how closely this desire aligns with the Christian view of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. There's something deep down in all of us, including non-believers, that understands that this world is damaged and in need of redemption, and we do what we do out of a desire for that redemption. In this passage, Howard shows that this desire drives everything we do, from politics to healthcare to law, and even to the creation of stories.
The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think, the search for perfection. Now you can give this perfection a hundred names--truth, beauty, goodness, wholeness, bliss, repose, order, form, the eternal, and so on, depending on what you want to stress at the moment. There's no word in human language that will name it adequately. Let's call it perfection here. We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It is what stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire. We find sooner or later all the data of our experience will be faulted--our bodies, our minds, our wills, our relationships, our landscapes, our states, our institutions, our programs.
Politics, medicine, ecology, and [law] are our efforts to repair the damage. Most of what we do, starting with brushing our teeth in the morning, would be seen by the angels as a waste of time, since they don't know what it is to be almost wholly occupied with shoring things up. When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy we feel between ourselves and perfection. We want tranquility and we find tumult. We want permanence and we find decay. We want order and we find havoc. We want health and we find sickness. We want strength and we find weakness. We want beauty and we find horror.
But neither can we settle for this state of affairs. We are driven by who knows what--maybe it's the Holy Ghost--to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, to transcend it. We write about our experience, and we sing about it, and we reenact it because we think that somehow if we can stand off from it and get a look at it, we can get ahold of it once more. We signal our awareness of perfection by making something approximating perfection out of our experience--something true, beautiful, good, and incorruptible.
