Broken Things

Yesterday, in a workshop setting, I was asked to name something that was important to me. I said Broken Things. I'm not sure what I meant by that, but it seemed true so I thought I'd use this newsletter to explore it. I sensed I may have touched on this topic before, and indeed a quick search of previous newsletters shows that six of them contain the word broken.* Clearly a theme.

I took the photograph of the poppy in our wild weed garden a few days ago. Poppies are the most fragile of flowers, wild yet vulnerable, the moths of the plant kingdom. It was raining. The poppy is bowed, soon to die. I am reminded of Tom Dooley—actually Tom Dula. It's a story of broken people, broken relationships, perhaps a broken society, certainly one of poverty, war and disease—not realities one would associate with wholeness. When a society is not holistic, it is more or less broken.

There are many victims of our broken society, people in various states of psychological disrepair, and it is towards those people I am compelled. They are my people, my kin. I am attracted to them, I sometimes fall in love with them, and I write about them, words of compassion and despair, words of hope, sometimes words of loss and lament. There is art to be found in the low places, there is beauty. There are people like Penelope, Giselle and Wolfgang.

Penelope died alone. In a beach house in Hawaii. The beauty of her surroundings matched only by the sordidness of her death. I heard she was found only because the neighbours complained about the smell. She had no friends left to wonder at her absence from their lives, having isolated herself, hidden in her shame and despair, and exhausted the patience of even those that loved her dearly...

Giselle called. It was her early morning after a sleepless night. It was my midnight. Giselle is dying, and as Giselle does everything her death is being played out as dramatic, incomprehensible performance art. She was lacking an audience though, hence the call. Now I am not only a spectator but an actor in her new drama. I thought I quit that job. Amidst stories of trekking across Belgium with forged prescriptions to collect impressive amounts of codeine, morphine and valium, and while somehow miraculously graduating with an MA in film philosophy, or some such esoteric endeavor, Giselle's slow suicide unfolds. It is a drama of devastated childhood, addiction, anorexia and slaughtered friendships—massacres, bloodbaths, holocausts. Giselle standing alone guns blazing atop a great pile of death. Don't fuck with me...

Dropping like flies, these old alcoholics, these people from my past, my early, struggling recovery, my cohorts, my friends. His body failing, his appendages taken by gangrene; diabetes and kidney failure collapsing him from the inside, it was only a matter of time before Wolfgang joined Penelope on the long, redemptive journey to alcoholic heaven. I see him now, his soul slowly spinning upward like an untethered balloon, his hospital bondage finally broken. And I remember with sadness how in gathering up the threads of my own life these past few months, focussing inward, I never found the time to call him...

But broken isn't all bad. The Japanese art of kintsugi celebrates the broken, making the mended thing more beautiful than its original. When I came out of hospital in January 2018 and began my slow process of recovery, a colleague suggested I was human kintsugi. It was a beautiful compliment to receive, a reminder that I was merely fractured, not crushed. Kintsugi is hope crafted from despair.

It was perhaps apt that my exterior was so fractured for a while. After all, my internal life, my mind, my psyche had been cracked in one way or another for a very long time. It's just that most people couldn't see it. A handsome face blinds the eyes that gaze upon it. There's an irony here. For years I felt misaligned, out of integrity. What I spoke and what I felt were not one. In my recovery journey I prayed, for years and years, that my internal and external selves would align, that I would become whole. I wanted to become beautiful inside. Instead I became ugly outside. Prayer answered though. And it was a beginning.

The breaking of things has some noble, and perhaps epoch-changing history too. There's the story of Abraham and the Idol Shop that appears in both Genesis Rabbah (circa 500 CE) and the Qur'an, where Abraham destroys all the idols in the shop, placing the stick in the hands of the one remaining idol, and explaining to his uncle the shop owner that the idol was responsible for the destruction. It is a fable, a teaching tale core to the paradigm shift of that millenium. Jesus allowed his body to be broken in crucifixion that we may wake up new—a shift of consciousness. And then there are events like the storming of the Bastille prison, and the subsequent revolution. Time and again we break down oppressive structures to build something better. Breaking chains is a common metaphor for change and awakening. And I'd suggest we are not truly alive until our hearts have been broken, at least once.

Broken things are important because they surround us, they make us, they represent the possibility of change and renewal. It is the broken things that keep us awake, engaged, and watchful.

* for example, Conflict Revolution and In sickness and in health.

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August News

August was mostly a holiday month, a holiday at home with family visits. Rayna's step-grandparents visited from Hawaii, and my son Ty visited from California. Ty's band Floral were touring the UK and he and his bandmate Nate stayed with us during the tour and then Ty returned at the end for a week. I took my friend Dan to see Floral play in Sheffield, and my friend Ash to see them play in London. Math rock. It's not my world, but a wonderful place to visit. Good to spend time with those we love, those we rarely see. The other highlight of August was a storytelling workshop I facilitated for civil servants in the Department for Exiting the EU. A timely visit, coming the day after the decision to suspend parliament. The participants created Brexit fairy tales. They were quite wonderful, casting light and hope, as good fairy tales are wont to do, on a complex and daunting reality.

So here we are, already beyond the shallow end of September. Autumn approaches, the season of falling apart, the season of broken horse chestnut shells revealing the dark, shiny beauty of virgin conkers and conjuring childhood memories. Enjoy the ever-lengthening nights, and the gift of sleep.

Tobias

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5th September 2019, 11.59 pm