Imperfection

By Abigail Thomas






If I were shooting for perfection, I’d never have bought more clay. Luckily I prefer imperfection. It feels more like life. I don’t want to make smooth bodies and muscles that appear where muscles actually are, or tendons, or exactly what you look like when you squat down naked on your haunches. I’m interested in moods. I like catching whoever they are in a moment of becoming or coming undone. Perfection is sort of ho-hum. It is also beyond me. And it is not what the clay requires, at least not of me. What the clay requires of me is obedience. If I keep my eye out for what the clay wants, it allows me to play the rest of the time.



The other day what appeared on the lump of clay I had grabbed was a desperate mouth hanging open, and I stopped, and being careful not to mess with what I’d been given, looked for the rest of him. His head was flung back, his pointy nose sticking into the sky, he is sitting with his legs drawn to his chest and his scrawny arms are around them. Despair personified. But there is a healthy dose of irony about him that makes me laugh. At first this surprised me. Where had it come from? What the clay wants, the clay has ways of getting.



The same is true for writing. I am not interested in writing the perfect sentence, the perfectly thought through essay. I’m not interested in deep thinking or narrative arcs or denouements; I am interested in why this, why now? what’s the root of this new thing I can’t get out of my head. So I set to finding out. Then if I’m lucky, and don’t impose my will on it, or aim for perfection, I might find what I’m looking for without knowing I was looking for it, which is sort of the whole point, don’t you think?



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Abigail Thomas has eight books and a high school education. At the moment, she is 82 years old and loves it.