The Battle For Perfection

About this poem

In his Collected Works, Volume 10, paragraph 26 (CW 10, para. 26), the eminent Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, meditating on a theme of “Civilization in Transition,” while making his analytical observations and subsequent commentary on the relation of the individual to society, with a particular emphasis on the frailty of humanity in making ethical choices (witness the biblical sin of Adam and Eve), wrote: “Human imperfection is always a discord in the harmony of our ideals. Unfortunately, no one lives in the world as we desire it, but in the world of actuality where good and evil clash and destroy one another, where no creating or building can be done without dirtying our hands.” Similarly, the great bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, some four hundred years earlier, in England of the sixteenth century, had one of his characters, Lady Macbeth, in the play, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1, plagued with a nightmare and, while sleep-walking and muttering, restless in her sleep concerning the stench of the assassination of King Duncan, in which she is heavily implicated, along with her husband, with imaginary blood dripping from her hands and, even more so, now haunted and pricked by a guilty conscience, and desirous of healing, utters these troubled words in desperation: “Out damned spot! Out, I say.” This one-stanza Tanka poem, “The Battle For Perfection,” summarizes both Shakespeare’s and Carl Jung’s commentaries on human imperfections and on human frailty (the “blood on our dirtied hands”) in the eternal struggle to overcome evil with good. more »