Kintsugi
I have been broken over and over again in my life. I struggle to believe that I am more than the disgusting, evil person that some in my old religion seem to think me, now that I’ve moved onto another “lifestyle.” I keep trying to put my life back together again, and in some ways, I’ve done a great job of that. In other ways, I remain broken, in pieces scattered around some old part of me that remains to look (and judge) the damage.
This afghan has been a part of me trying to believe that there is beauty in brokenness. Maybe not intention. No one would have purposely set out to have a life like this one. The old “Everything happens for a reason” thing worked for me until it didn’t anymore. I couldn’t see a divine purpose in my daughter’s death. And yes, I know that this means I didn’t notice all the other people around me having tragedies just as and often more profound than mine. I was able to wave away their tragedies with some version of this platitude in my mind (God, I hope I didn’t say it aloud). Until it happened to me, I didn’t really grapple with the real depth of the problem of the goodness of God.
I’ve listened to Anderson Cooper’s podcast “All There Is” and have wept open tears over the blunt, honest stories told there about the reality of grief. It is such a relief to have people speak the real truth, or at least the real truth as it has been to me. I was pressured so often to say something uplifting or inspiring about my daughter’s death, to make my tragedy into some kind of beautiful faithful story. And I tried, until I broke on that trying, broke myself all over again for other people who should have been helping me pick up pieces, not demanding more labor from me. It’s also true that I’ve stopped halfway through a couple of episodes because I can’t keep listening. I don’t think I will ever be able to relisten to any of them, beautiful as they are. So I get it. I get the desire to keep a distance from the horrible pain of other people’s grief.
Stephen Colbert is one of Cooper’s guests, and he talks about the contradiction that is inherent in his life, because the thing he most wishes he could undo is also the thing that turned into the foundation of the life that he has. He argues persuasively that if you love the life you have lived, if you love yourself, than how can you not in some way love the terrible thing that shaped you?
My answer to this is sometimes, God, yes, this is the truth.
And other times it is—I don’t love this life. I don’t love the person I’ve become. I don’t affirm the idea that I am a better person than I might have been if Mercy had not died. Of course, I can never know the full truth of going down another path, but for all I can see, I would have been a worse person in some ways and a better person in others. But most clearly of all, I would have been a more whole person. I would have been an unbroken person. I’m not sure I can explain how much I wish I was not a broken person to people who have not been as badly and repeatedly broken as I have been.
Maybe the divorce would have smashed me into pieces and burned my life down anyway. Maybe I would have written a book that got far too much attention from all the wrong people. Maybe I would have eventually hit something else that would have sunk me into a decades long suicidal depression that only seem to cycle in and out of. Maybe I would have ended up leaving Mormonism anyway. But I don’t think so. I think I would have remained in that life. And even if I don’t think that would have been the right thing to do, I have become an extreme moral relativist and I do believe that I would have been happier. And happiness, even if it doesn’t mean anything about being right or wrong or good or bad, is something that feels good. When you feel bad as often as I do, feeling good seems like not such a terrible thing to want.
So here we come to these two afghans, both of them about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending pottery with precious gold. I worked on the first one for weeks, undoing and redoing it because there was no pattern for how to make such a piece. I could have done a flat piece on bottom and stitched the gold on top. But that wouldn’t have given it the sense of brokenness and unevenness that this piece has. It doesn’t lie precisely flat. There are bulges here and there, even though I tried to smooth them out. But in the end, I left it imperfect because that is part of the meaning of kintsugi, that beauty isn’t about perfection, but about humanity.
The second one I made because I had become obsessed with the idea of different ways to show brokenness. It is perhaps less apt than the first one, a frustrating reality that happens often with art. The more you try, the more you plan, the worse the art becomes. It has to have a kind of spontaneity, a lack of intention, to be truly beautiful. It has to be broken, but it has to be an accidental brokenness, not a planned one.
I used to imagine that one day in the future, my work would be studied in literature classes, that I would one day create the “great Mormon novel.” Now I most fervently hope I am never studied in that way. I don’t particularly want to be associated with Mormonness or with the Mormon hope to be accepted by America, and especially by American institutions of art. I just want to play quietly for a little while each day working my very ordinary job on which very, very rarely someway asks, “are you THE METTE IVIE HARRISON?” and I become afraid that I won’t be forgotten, that something will remain of me after I am gone. If that is so, maybe it will be my visual art instead of my books. There is something to amuse me about that.