I have been thinking a lot lately about perfection. It sounds misplaced to even utter the word in 2020, I know, but bear with me on this.
Last week, I listened to the most beautiful essay by Sam Anderson, read aloud, about cracks in the ankles of Michelangelo's David statue. Written four years ago, it was recently recorded for a podcast and feels apt for reflection in 2020.
It turns out that this, one of the most celebrated sculptures, a shining emblem of the Renaissance, some describe as an ideal human form, is slowly being destroyed. I audibly gasped when I first heard. The area between David’s feet and legs is literally filled with dozens of nearly invisible hairline cracks. The design of the statue is slightly off-balance, which places extra pressure on the narrowest part: his ankles. While seemingly perfect in shape, it is an imperfect design. This human-like flaw, made worse by ages of daily movement all around, has brought the statue inching closer to self-destruction.
Art, like life, is sacred but never really shielded from the elements.
According to Anderson, while David has since been moved indoors, he was located outside for more than 300 years at a slight lean. People think the lean was the result of a storm in 1511 or, more likely, the ground shifting over time. It might not sound like much, but his ankles have been supporting six tons of marble for hundreds of years.
Anderson writes: “We are conditioned to believe that art is safe, beyond the reach of the grimy world. We don’t hang the Mona Lisa next to an archery range. We put her in a fortress: walls, checkpoints, lasers, guards, bulletproof glass. There are scholars, textbooks, posters — a whole collective mythology suggesting that the work will live forever. But safety is largely an illusion, and permanence a fiction. Empires hemorrhage wealth, bombs fall on cities, religious radicals decimate ancient temples. Destruction happens in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of speeds — and it will happen, and no amount of reverence will stop it.
"Few humans on earth know this melancholy truth better than the citizens of Florence. They are born into a profound intimacy with decay.”
These words, narrated by the eloquent Italian, Edoardo Ballerini, struck me to my core. Try as we might, we cannot expect perfection from the closest thing to it in carrara-marble form, grace and elegance in the flesh, painstakingly etched out of a 25,000 pound block of raw stone. If Michaelangelo’s masterpiece was far from perfect, the lesson is worth repeating, like a mantra. We cannot expect perfection from ourselves. We should not expect perfection from our children, from our families, from our country, our city or our communities either. But all is clearly not lost.
This is a reminder to myself as much as anyone reading. Perfection is not attainable. Don’t get discouraged when things are not perfect. Instead, find small causes where you can best contribute your time and talents.
Localism teaches that in our own community, there’s a lot we can do. We can pick up litter, advocate for causes, start petitions, serve on committees, raise funds for charities, pursue passions and blend our day jobs with causes we care deeply about. These things have real and lasting impacts. You can vote. Run for a school board; serve meals to families in need or assemble donated desks for children to use while remote learning; push for more bicycle lanes or promote public transit improvements; volunteer for litter pickups along the Kern River or downtown; phone bank for a candidate you care about; work on your craft and create more art to inspire those around you.
When I feel helpless about world events, it is best to put my hands to work. The odds were stacked against Michelangelo, stuck with an oddly shaped and brittle hunk of carrara. He got to work and chiseled away, little by little, forming a most magnificent image of an underdog character in battle with a giant. However imperfect the design, I adore David even more now, with the knowledge that he is so flawed, seemingly human. His shape is his weakness and his strength.
As Italians are pushing for installation of an antiseismic base to protect David from the inevitable tectonic disturbance caused by an earthquake, we can do our part to mitigate the stress that endangers the future of our own city and heal the political polarization in our country through collective local action. We can’t just wave a wand and fix the cracks in our communities, just like restorers can’t remove the flaws that geoscientists revealed in David’s ankles, but there’s a lot we can do to work for a stronger, more secure future.
