Georg Cantor invented set theory in 1874. At its most generalized, this is a theory that, among other arcane achievements, articulated the mathematical concept of infinity, a problem that had plagued (and still plagues) mankind since the days of Zeno of Elea. The crux of Mr. Cantor’s proof is that there are an infinite number of different sets of numbers, each with infinite members, thereby resolving an age-old paradox with a new one: some infinities are larger than others. The new paradox is self-evident. And maddening. As such, Georg Cantor ultimately lost his grip on the accepted reality plane (arguably both as cause and consequence of his infinite brilliance) and spent his final days in a sanitarium. Infinity may indeed be a riddle only for the divine.
Like the divine, infinity represents perfection: it is the asymptote where all disparate members converge to the same reflection; it is the quantum of ideas that are both true and false; it is the singularity where everything exists as nothing that exists as everything. To understand the infinite is to know perfection, is to know God — is to be God. Obviously, such lineage is not among the set of real human combinations. And yet, human beings pursue the immaculate of the infinite whilst among our finite corporeal resources. We strive for purity in our relationships, our religions, our diets, and even our dog breeds; we prefer a slick base-10 number system, in-phase music chords, and 90-degree angles to our buildings, televisions, and art canvases; we construct a “more perfect Union” in our constitutions and seek the “righteous” governance of God-ordained utopias. And if imperfection stands in our way, we may even murder in the name of our impossible pursuits. Human ambition is seemingly unbound by the cartography of its finite boundaries. This is insanity.
Ironically, a perfect-minded quixotism is acceptable among the self-prescribed set of the sane, whereas the bleaker reality illuminated by pragmatism (and number theory) is ostracized as the fantasy of the insane. And so to risk the vantage of a pragmatist is to risk membership among self-prescribed sets of human beings. Xenophobia, then, transcends as a threat not to what’s different, but to what’s challenging to the imagined perfection of a particular set of human beings: skin color, language, religion, heritage, etc. Shared idealized perfection is what bestows membership among the human species. We are but a set within an infinite set — a process of perfection but never the realization of it. But, as Cantor showed, so is mathematics, the supposed “language of God”. Hence, perfection is an illusion by which its identity is in itself an infinite set of imperfections. This mandates that perfection is only realized by amassing a perfect set of infinite imperfections; or rather, perfection requires imperfection. Any pursuit of perfection is thereby a pseudocardinal alliance: the witness of God collapses the existence of God. We are left with a quantum model of our utopian pursuits where pragmatism and all its imperfect consequences are the only possible solutions towards preserving the purity we seek — a purity that cannot actually be realized. This is where our human ambition — our human identity — should lie.
Take it from me: I am a perfectionist. Ever since I can remember I’ve strived for perfection. Nothing, it seems, has ever been good enough (at least for those things I’ve sunken my passion into, which I admit is a lot of things). I recall that my parents, eager to steward their firstborn towards excellence, challenged me as I began my academic career with a $5 reward for every “A” received. My first parent-teacher conference generated an expensive bill. By third grade the challenge changed to reward every quarter the teacher did not complain about my incessant questions and disruptive tangents. I never made another dollar while in school.
Even before No. 2 pencils scribbled my character arc, I was an infant that strove for something better. I had terrible colic and would cry — scream — when my mother would leave me immobilized in a crib or in the care of a new face. In fact, I would stop breathing, literally turn blue, and rely upon my nascent brainstem to jumpstart my lungs into giving life another try. Now that’s born stubbornness. But this wasn’t separation anxiety from my mother. It was separation anxiety from my ambitions. In the company of my mother I witnessed a moving and changing world; in the company of my crib I was buried alive in a prison of uncoordinated and undeveloped infantile pragmatism. Interestingly, the day I learned to crawl I never had another bout of colic. I was emancipated to actualize my fanciful ambitions. Something better was out there beyond my crib — a utopia of four-legged wooden canyons, colored sandpits of shag carpet, and constellations of 60-watt incandescent stars above. Of course, I didn’t realize this perfect paradise was but a modest home in 1980 Lincoln, Nebraska. When compared among the countless other picket-fenced members of this rather banal set, the utopian mirage evaporates. As they do.
Perhaps the cost of our human consciousness is a maddening glimpse of desires that cannot be actualized. We are shown the prize of purity in our mind with such detail that we surrender all pragmatism, all sanity, and even all morality in its pursuit. We are doped with such addictive mania that we cease to feel the empathetic gouge our pursuits inflict upon our neighbors’ eye, and upon our own. We become victims to the voracious ouroboros of human ambition. And like any intoxicated addict, we are delighted in our madness — numb to pain, numb to reality. Happiness is to stay blind and unbound to the pursuit of our infinite fantasies. Our utopian mirage seems so real, so near, that the only obstacle towards its actualization is the imperfection sobering our gaze. Alas, Cantor's ultimate madness may have been a simple, rational realization of his lonely pragmatic sanity among a world of crazed perfectionists.
In chaos theory we discover that a curved edge is simply an amalgam of embedded curved edges, which in themselves have embedded curves ad infinitum. But there must be a code to crack that resolves the truth, otherwise how would anything ever actually “happen”? Every observation we make instantaneously collapses all unbounded functions into the one we observe. Literally, every moment is a miraculous lottery ticket beating 1-to-infinity odds. What are the chances that every electron in my screen, and every sound wave bouncing through the park, and every glutamate molecule in my brain is precisely such to make this moment exactly as I perceive it? The answer is that it's infinitely small. Yet this moment happened, or collapsed, just as it did. The deterministic code for such impossibilities lies within the initial conditions. If we knew every instantaneous condition for every single particle at a precise moment, then we could predict without error every subsequent consequence (assuming we also knew every law by which every particles will behave). Without such knowledge of the initial conditions we perceive all that happens as chaos. To illustrate this, imagine a floating beach ball on a turbulent ocean. If we knew the momentum and position of every single particle involved — from each molecule of the water, air, and the ball, the heat transfer, the moon’s effect on the ocean, the sun’s effect on the moon and the Earth, Earth’s effect on the moon and sun…and on Jupiter, and Jupiter’s effect on cosmic rays en route to Earth, and a distant star’s effect on whatever supernova produced the cosmic rays a billion years ago, and… — then we could theoretically predict exactly how the beach ball will move at any precise moment on a turbulent ocean. But mathematics and physics quickly snap this omnipotent code back into impossibility. There are infinite initial conditions given that quantum mechanics doesn’t allow us to know both the instantaneous position and momentum of a particle. Nature, it seems, prevents even itself from achieving perfection.
Yet, we look for patterns in the stars to explain our personality and our future, patterns in the ticker tape to make us wealthy, patterns in behaviors to grant us health and safety, and patterns in scripture to grant us blissful immortality. We note for generations the one time such a pattern coincided with an intended result and neglect all the other times there was no result; hence, our dopamine-crazed mind manufactured this as "ritual". Nature calls it coincidence. But like an addict, the dopaminergic ambition is grandiose and it is strong. We surrender the sanity of nature’s imperfection to seek a perfection that even God’s language doesn’t allow. Our obsession is an illusion, perhaps evolved as a weapon to dupe our competition into failing. Regardless, we’ve become victims of our own imagination.
It’s not as though perfection shouldn’t be a motivator, but more that imperfection shouldn’t be avoided as a weakness. As mentioned, mathematics does describe perfection but only within the context of infinite imperfect sets. Are sea cliffs perfect walls? Are mountains perfect cones? Are stars perfect spheres? They may seem perfect from a distance, but like the squiggles of chaos, the closer we examine the more we observe new and complex contours. None of nature’s examples are inherently perfect, yet all hold the potential for beauty. Perhaps it is beauty that is the asymptote of nature’s quixotic imagination; perhaps beauty is where humans are capable of perceiving perfection from the sane distance of imperfection.
She was beauty. She was perfect. She was the asymptote of my impossible ambition. The imagined utopia of our future was set ablaze by my dopaminergic blindness just like any other crazed perfectionist. There could be no flaws, no imperfections hindering the actualization of pure fantasy. But, of course, this was insanity. There was no perfection to be had, no asymptote to actually reach. My clear utopian vision was a mirage ready to vanish at arrival, ready to reveal just another infinite set of imperfections yet to surmount. And so while I was stoking my obsessions with a perfect future, I was numb to the delicacy of an imperfect present. Now, nearly a year later, those are the fleeting moments I miss the most — the very ones I was vying to “correct”: the incompatible movie preferences, the awkward religious conversations, the tug-of-war radio dials, and even the stray, histrionic — if not dangerous — reaction to a skulking insect on the bathroom wall. The real beauty of us, like that of the sea cliffs, or the mountaintops, or the stars, was within our imperfections, not beside them. To end the relationship was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make. But I finally accepted that the only way to embrace the perfection I was (we were) seeking, and to calm the madness I was (we were) becoming was to accept the ultimate imperfection: we had to be apart. She needed unbounded reign to empower her beautiful talents and aspirations — for the first time in her life, and for her and no one else. It was her moment to seize. And mine to surrender. Remaining together would have ended the relationship in as much irony as splitting up was to save the relationship. But in this quantum game of infinite perfection theories, I suppose that’s exactly what one would expect.
So while I do know what I lost in this swap of ironies, I’m not sure I know what I saved. At this point, it’s clear it wasn’t the relationship. Perhaps it was simply the beauty that I’m now able to perceive — of her, of me with her, of what we were, of what we dreamed. Alas, such is the fate of a pragmatist no longer doped by visions of perfection, no longer bound by the insanity of infinite sets and impossible destinations. Therein lies the sanity of true love: boundless imperfections that make everything just a little more perfect_
