Last week we held a Contributors Gathering for Unpsychology Issue 10, and several people joined the four of us Unpsychology co-editors ( Steve Thorp, Lesley Maclean, Patrick Carpenter and myself) for an hour or so of edge-filled pondering and conversation.
At one point the conversation turned to the edges that are created when something breaks, turning something that was whole into shards of sharp edgy pieces. One contributor then referred to her own recent experience of breakdown — a situation in which life’s stresses and strains had caused the cohesion of her life to come apart and shatter into a state of personal crisis. She described it as fragmentation.
It made me think about the way that people’s personal edges — the tricky, difficult aspects of their personalities and words and actions — bump up against others, leaving painful scratches. Where do these edges in people come from? Could it be from the ways in which they have been broken, fragmented and tested by life? When we receive a scratch from an interaction with someone, would it help to contextualise where the sharp edge may have come from?
At one point Patrick shared a memento from his sink: an ordinary porcelain dinner plate which had been broken and mended with cement glue. Only by looking closely could one see the thin veins of cracks in the plate. We were reminded of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are mended with a gold lacquer, resulting in beautiful pieces of pottery threaded throughout with lines of gold.
We also spoke about using broken pieces of pottery in constellations of beautiful mosaics. I remember that years ago a friend of mine led an art project at my daughter’s primary school, whereby all the children brought broken crockery from home, to decorate the images they had designed for the playground walls. With what delighted glee did the children (carefully supervised for safety) smash things with a hammer, creating hundreds of tiny colourful pieces to use in the mosaics.
We tend to honour the mended and the whole, but that process of breakage is important in and of itself. Tripping and dropping, slipping and cracking, fracturing, smashing — these are all part of being alive and juggling with our fragility, humanity, mortality. We are perfect in our imperfections, whole in our brokenness. These times when things break apart and cause disruption, when we drop them and they shatter, or we find ourselves under the hammer of life’s demands and pressures — these are the precious times. “These are the days you’ll remember….” If you haven’t heard this lovely song by 10,000 Maniacs, by all means give it a listen:
And here I am reminded by a recent conversation I had with a fellow Unpsychologist here in Edinburgh, a physicist and cultural theorist by trade. She mentioned David Bohm and was delighted that I knew the reference to his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Don’t get me wrong: the discussion around physics in this work is lost upon me. But I do understand and appreciate the discernment in the following passage:
“As has been seen, fragmentation originates in essence in the fixing of the insights forming our overall self-world view, which follows on our generally mechanical, routinised and habitual modes of thought about these matters. Because the primary reality goes beyond anything that can be contained in such fixed forms of measure, these insights must eventually cease to be adequate, and will thus give rise to various forms of unclarity or confusion. However, when the whole field of measure is open to original and creative insight, without any fixed limits or barriers, then our overall world views will cease to be rigid, and the whole field of measure will come into harmony, as fragmentation within it comes to an end. But original and creative insight within the whole field of measure is the action of the immeasurable. For when such insight occurs, the source cannot be within ideas already contained in the field of measure but rather has to be in the immeasurable, which contains the essential formative cause of all that happens in the field of measure. The measurable and the immeasurable are then in harmony and indeed one sees that they are but different ways of considering the one and undivided whole.
When such harmony prevails, man can then not only have insight into the meaning of wholeness but, what is much more significant, he can realise the truth of this insight in every phase and aspect of his life.”
Which is to say — the broken and the mended and the fragmented and the whole are all just different perspectives, taken from different points and at different times and through different lenses of understanding. Our lives and their myriad edges are embedded within this infinite and fascinating complexity.
And is it so complex, or is it really rather simple? We can turn the broken into beauty, if we only choose to perceive it.
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