#294: The Broken Bowl
Reclaiming a broken moment
This object was not made to be broken.
It was made to hold delicious food, to contain liquid and be a beautiful but practical part of a friend’s kitchen. It was bought to be a gift, but after carrying it across two city centres, a two-hour-long train journey, and a bus, it fell onto the hard, unforgiving pavement just one street away from the safe and soft carpet of my home. In one careless moment, as I adjusted the handles of the bag I was carrying, this beautiful bowl slipped from my fingers and fell, with a foreboding thunk onto the floor. In that second its identity, its purpose, was altered.
I am now faced with this broken piece of pottery sitting on my dining room table. I bought, carried, and broke it on Friday last week, but it is only today that I am unwrapping it in the daylight and facing the facts of the situation. I knew that, if I had opened it on the Friday evening after arriving home, I would not have been able to put this broken object into perspective. In one mistaken action, I had ruined my mood for the evening, and I was beating myself up for my stupidity. So rather than brooding, I stowed it away until today.
A scene comes to mind as I think over the moment of the fall, and of all the other broken objects from my past mistakes. It is a moment in Alice Through the Looking Glass. It’s not when Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, but the chapter where Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and discovers the broken rattle:
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.”
I sympathise with Tweedledee “trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it”, an attempt to hide his guilt in a typically ridiculous way. It was what I did when I hid my broken bowl under our towel rack, an inconspicuous corner in which I could forget about it. Unlike Tweedledum, I had no Tweedledum to blame, but only my own regretful self. So I felt like the crow, which descends on the brothers bringing darkness and a change of scene for Alice, embodied the dark feelings of inadequacy I was feeling at my silly mistake. An ominous end to a scene concerned with a broken rattle, or a broken bowl.
But like that ridiculous chapter in Alice, and like all things, this passed. It was a moment in my life, of relative insignificance compared to other things. This was not a cheap purchase, that’s true, but it also was not very expensive. Yet I felt the waste of breaking this bowl so soon after purchasing it, and isn’t it amazing how something small like this can consume you? I had bought this object in a fortuitous moment of discovery while wandering a Christmas market. I was browsing, not searching for any gifts for specific people, but then I came upon this bowl, the perfect gift for a particular friend of ours. Now I face the short-lived excitement of this object’s life, and all of the mess of feelings that now reside in this object, an object I now need to find a new purpose for.
I know that I will not throw this bowl away. It would be too much of a waste. Yet I cannot at this moment envisage gifting this object as originally intended. I will attempt to glue it back together, but it will no longer fulfil its purpose, to hold food, without leaking. I will glue this broken object back together, and a new purpose will be found — one not so wonderful as originally planned, perhaps, but a purpose nonetheless.
Katie writes regularly about random objects that she finds in her everyday life. If you’re interested in reading more, check out her blog Object, a collaboration with fellow Medium blogger Eleanor. You can also follow us on Twitter @ ObjectBlog.
