Beauty in the Broken
How fractures reveal beauty and can make us "strong in the broken places".
In Autumn by Ali Smith, an attempt at a simile is abandoned halfway through: “The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like — no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.” Language fails us in real time, before our eyes. The spell is unwoven, and in its unweaving something else — something truer and deeper, more mysterious and yet perfectly clear — is revealed: that sometimes reality, the truth of a thing itself, is more important than poetry.
“Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things.” Carlos Fuentes knew this, and Ali Smith knows this, and it is why she wrote the failed simile into her book. In revealing this “mistake”, this failure, this undoing, the spell is cast again and more potently. Something true is discovered in something broken.
There’s a moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which the film breaks. The cinematic illusion is dispelled just for a moment, and any objective critique in a reductively technical sense would have to count it as a failure. Yet it’s one of my favourite moments in a film made up of brilliant moments.
Director Michel Gondry was in the middle of filming a scripted scene with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet when he heard that a circus was parading down a nearby street. Thinking that tumbling clowns and trumpeting elephants would be perfect for his dreamscape vision, Gondry and his actors raced off to witness the spectacle. When they got there, the two leads (in their roles as Joel and Clem) began fooling around as Gondry filmed. At one point, Joel throws his jacket over his head and acts like an elephant, pretending the sleeve is his trunk.
Behind the scenes, Gondry had dragged Winslet/Clem out of the shot and hid her from Carrey/Joel. What we see on-screen is Joel emerging from his jacket and looking around for Clem. Neither the character nor the actor knows what’s going on and, just for a moment, both are lost and confused. Then the actor — not the character — looks directly into the camera, just for a heartbeat, and for that split second we see genuine uncertainty. A unique intimacy emerges between film and viewer in this glance. His uncertainty reaches directly through the screen to reach us in an authentic way.
This brief look into camera is called breaking the fourth wall, and it usually brings the viewer out of the story by reminding us awkwardly that this is a fiction, that what we’ve been feeling has been for something that doesn’t exist. Instead, here, this break in the fourth wall doesn’t undermine the fiction but convinces us more deeply of its truthfulness: it increases our empathy with Joel and his loneliness. Thankfully, the film’s editor had the insight not to cut what a coldly-objective (read: less creative) editor would have cut as a bad take. The result is a small gem in an already special movie.
The city of Guanajuato, Mexico, is surrounded by mountains. The city is an undulating wave of coloured squares and rectangles, because each building is painted in vibrant pink, red, blue, yellow, or green. Among the maze of buildings run callejones, narrow alleys between two buildings that haven’t quite managed to touch. Down one of these passages, I find a red house with a horizontal crack careening jaggedly along one of its walls. The line has been highlighted by yellow paint, applied with a wide brush that has followed this fracture like a finger following a roadmap.
I never discover what the intent is behind this augmentation, but it seems to be something like, Let’s turn this unavoidable disfigurement into a thing of novelty, a creative choice out of something inflicted on our home. I walk this way whenever I’m in the area, just to slow down and trace the break with my eyes, sometimes the tips of my fingers, sometimes standing back and taking in the whole of this fracture, its history, and the contrast between the yellow and the red, what’s broken and what’s not. It’s beautiful in a way no other house, lacking this particular feature, can be.
Something has happened here. This wall knows a secret. This crack is a reminder. This painted line is an acknowledgement, a bow of the head, tip of the hat, glass raised to what the wall knows and the crack reminds us of, and we learn from it. Make beauty from old damage and build better next time.
“The novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel.” To Milan Kundera’s observation I might add that the existential demolition isn’t always self-inflicted. The life might crumble, might be knocked down by tragedy and other external forces, but still the writer sifts through the rubble and finds what is worth using to form something new.
“What is a poet?” Kierkegaard asks. He answers himself:
“A poet is an unhappy man who holds deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.”
This means that when we tell the poet to speak again, the painter to paint once more, the writer to write again, we’re saying, “May new sufferings befall you”. It’s a terrible thing we need, but we do need it. The artists are, in this respect, our finest teachers. They show us what most of us hide, even from ourselves. In witnessing the breaking of others, our learning need not only be first-hand. What I learn from my damage I hope to pass on to others, just as I hope to learn from others in turn. This is what great art, and especially tragedy, offers.
“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway once noted, “and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” The ways in which we can break are as varied and numerous as the ways in which we can mend and strengthen from those breaks. It might be that the repair is physically stronger than that which it repairs. It can be that the injured person knows better how to avoid such damage next time, which is a fix of its own. It’s often that the damaged person learns to cope with such trauma and so is broken a little less, becoming a little more resilient, with every fracture.
“What does not kill me,” as everyone knows, though fewer know that Nietzsche first penned it, “makes me stronger.” As a bald statement of our humanly situation, it’s obviously false. Many things can weaken me, and weakened enough, I might be done in by an accumulation of things that didn’t kill me on their own.
Taken as intended, however, as a pose to strike against victimisation, an affirmation of resilience against the inevitable suffering of existence, the aphorism fairs much better. If it doesn’t kill me, it can break me — but I can become “strong in the broken places”.
There’s more to our quote from Hemingway. Having stated that life breaks most of us, he goes on to write that “those that will not break, [the world] kills”:
“It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
To be unbreakable is not to be strong; it’s what ends you. Architecture built to resist regular earthquakes is constructed with “bend” built in, with the ability to move to accommodate some shake and shift. The structural integrity of a skyscraper is made more durable by having the in-built ability to “bow” several feet in any direction, like a swaying tree, to work with rather than fight against the inevitable wind that will blow it. Buildings made to stand firm, built of solid materials like concrete, are often the first to crack and fall.
Totalitarian systems don’t allow for bend. They insist on being solid enough to hold the world still, rather than move with its trembles and shakes. But the world moves on, life changes, and fractures emerge. Ideologies — political despotisms and religious fundamentalisms — cannot acknowledge these cracks, because they claim to be timeless and non-contextual, so they are the same everywhere and for everyone. Fractures reveal the dissonance that denies uniformity.
Citizens see through the coat of paint over the fractures and point them out to each other, first in private and then publicly. Russian citizens saw the contradictions between Soviet propaganda and the realities of the everyday. They may not have wanted to see them in the beginning; who wants to be the first to spot the flaw in the masterpiece or the rotten fruit in the Edenic garden? But the cracks continue to show.
Others are heard murmuring about these unsightly divisions. A book is published, banned, burned, turns up again and again, is read in private and then in public. The fractures grow and show something behind the surfaces they break. Another way of being can be reached sooner if the citizens take up hammers and fists and strike at the cracks to smash what remains of the wall, the ideology, the unmoving edifice.
The tectonic plates shift today just as they always have, and our world, our continents, our countries, and our lives move with them. About 175 million years ago, the supercontinent we now call Pangea began to break up. The land mass shifted and crumbled, subsiding beneath the oceans here and rising up as new mountains there, and ultimately spread out into the continents we know today, which are still in motion. The plates will continue to fracture and transform the face of the planet.
In 2017, Britain voted to leave the European Union. This tiny fragment of the disassembled Pangea decided to splinter off from a much larger continental grouping. The UK’s decision to break away gave birth to the term “Brexit”, coincidentally a slant rhyme with “Breaks It”.
Not so long after, the UK held a General Election. Many who are near what some would call “my side” on political matters bemoaned the “disgrace” of the election result and the division that the winning party would cause the nation.
The problem with the polarisation we keep hearing about in our politics and culture isn’t that there are two sides opposed to each other, but that a deep fracture between them keeps them from connecting. We have always had and will always have oppositions; what we need is for something that unites them, even if it’s simply the ability to debate. It’s the fracture that keeps them apart that’s so dangerous.
There are dangerous fractures and unsightly fractures, just as there are strengthening and beautifying fractures. The world breaks as it always has. We cannot stop it. Once something breaks, we can waste our time lamenting the loss, or we can try to do something productive with what’s left. Perhaps we can fix the breakage, repair the fracture, or at least limit the damage and prevent the cracks from spreading.
Or perhaps we can make something new with the pieces left over.
Things will continue to break, but we don’t have to be broken.
References:
• Autumn, Ali Smith (2016)
• Diana, Carlos Fuentes (1996)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dir. Michel Gondry (2004)
• The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera (2003)
• Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard (1843)
• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929)
• Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche (1889)
I love this.
I love this.