Everything is already broken

That was a line from a facebook post about kintsugi that I saw earlier today, and it is also the best explanation of wabisabi and kintsugi and life that I can imagine.

How I found that post is itself an interesting story about broken things.

It was shared by a friend, that I have never met, or spoken to on the phone, or, indeed, even been inside the same country at the same time with, that I know of.

We met in a small online forum based on unusual philosophy and philosophers, primarily Christopher S. Hyatt and Robert Anton Wilson. That forum was one of the most reliable and important places to me for a large percentage of my adult life, but over the past few years, we stopped making any effort to gain new members. and, slowly, the long term members all became less and less involved. We were all getting older, and busier with other things, and, well, entropy wins every battle eventually. And the forum got closed.

A few of us are friends on facebook. I’ve literally never met any of them, but a few of them have met at some point, I believe.

I will almost certainly never meet any of them.

We have all helped each other at some point with problems and difficulties that we had in our lives. Sometimes by offering solutions to problems, frequently just by offering support.

And while that is not perfect, it is certainly beautiful.

Here is the post. I hope that it helps you, dear reader, in some similar way as it did me.

I have been thinking about wounds as striation marks and fault lines that invisibly compose bodies prior to the event of injury. That is, wounds don’t come after the fact: the surface might appear smooth, the membrane unpunctured and unperturbed, the skin at rest – but what wholeness occludes is the necessary tensions and troubling experiments in brokenness that keep things alive. We are indebted to this lack of coherence, to this playful gesturing that resists finality. In other words, we are never-not-broken – like the South Asian goddess Akhilandeshwari, whose name is an ode to brokenness. To be embodied is to be in flight. To be embodied is to be beside oneself, perpetually spilling away from resolution.

Thinking this way throws a strange light on the popular and hidden assumptions behind dominant concepts of healing and recovery. The modern tendency seems to be to begin our appraisal of bodies from the starting point of ‘wholeness’. Any deviation from this image of normalcy is addressed as something to be fixed – with the prospects of full restoration held as a desirable outcome. But what if we began our stories about how our bodies come to matter – not from the hard portrait of completion, but from the softness of movement? What if we are – like a murmuration of dunlins – a ‘drunken wounding’ dancing with the sky? What if we are echoes of a great blast of life, shockwaves with no original explosion, drifting with spacetime in utter defiance of the modern myths of arrival? And what if what we mean by repair is less restitution to a lost original than it is a pairing-with-another-composite-body, a re-pair-ing, a borrowing of limbs and organs and tendons from the others around us in order to navigate the complexities of living and dying?

Perhaps nothing captures this ferocious reimagining of bodies as eddies of dust “counterfeiting immobility” like the Japanese art of kintsugi, an ancient technique that uses lacquer and gold powder to restore broken ceramics and porcelain vessels. I love the art form, mostly because it implicitly refuses to think of repair as restoration to an original image – and it does this by taking pains to acknowledge the presence of the interface, the decorated crack that marks the irretrievably altered vessel. To think about this art as mere restoration is to elide the agency and contributions of the lacquer, the new glial material that marks the once-quantum potencies and embryonic lines living beneath visibility. The first time I observed a kintsugi-repaired piece, I said to myself: “It’s still broken; the artist has just mapped this rich encounter of loss, memory, and longing with gold.” Kintsugi is the art that reminds us that everything is already broken.

To be re-paired is to be re-coupled-with-an/other in an ever-moving, carnivalesque and alien cavalcade of exchangeable organs and reiterable subjectivities. The monster is not the brutal beast standing in the way of our imperial march in imperviousness; the monster is the irresistible reminder of our molecular debt to this multi-species migritude of all things.

Bayo Akomolafe