On mending broken things

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. 

Between the two my life flows.” 

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

TEABOWL (chawan), 15th century, Tokoname ware (yobitsugi-repairs with 18th century porcelain)



Yesterday I went to a meditation and discussion session on mindfulness and no self, at the Abbotsford Convent. Over lunch at a lovely café there, I found myself discussing Japanese aesthetics with a Christian minister while sipping on genmaicha (green tea with roasted brown rice), served in pale green porcelain cups.

One of the aesthetic concepts my new friend introduced me to was Kintsugi, which literally means “golden joinery.”  It relates to the practice of mending breaks in pottery or porcelain by filling them with gold – or to be more accurate, with adhesive resin mixed with gold dust. In this way something broken can become more beautiful, through the process of mending, than it was to start with. Perfection, or looking “as good as new” is not the most valuable possibility, from this perspective.

Later, thanks to a fascinating essay written by Christy Bartlett to accompany an exhibition of Japanese mended ceramics, I discovered a suggestive connection between this approach to the repair of broken objects, and the teaching of no self that we were attempting to practice and understand in our meditation and discussion at the Convent.

Bartlett explains that in the context of traditional tea ceremonies in Japan, mended objects are seen as a physical embodiment of the spirit of mushin, or “no mind.” This state is associated with fully existing within the moment, non-attachment, equanimity amid changing conditions, and relinquishing the impulse to impose one’s will on the world.

Accidental fractures set in motion acts of repair that accept given circumstances and work within them to lead to an ultimately more profound appearance. The only willfulness in the process is the effort to assist with the rebirth of something whose existence has been threatened, something that has held value for others.

 

In this practice there is the wisdom of accepting change, and seeing that there is no permanent self to cling to, whether we are talking about a pot or a person. But there is also the compassion that senses the value in a broken bowl, or a life in crisis, and is willing to take the care necessary to carry it forward into a new form. The two apparently (or logically) contradictory impulses of wisdom and love are not in tension here. As Nisargadatta suggests, life flows between them.

This meeting of acceptance and care in turn evokes another Japanese concept, that of mono no aware, literally “the pathos of things.” It connotes a compassionate sensitivity to ephemera, an empathy towards, or even identification with transient things. This sense of connection springs from an appreciation of temporality, an awareness that just like fragile and well-used ceramics, we are all vulnerable to the gradual or sudden, but in case eventually inevitable, break up of the body.

This thought brings to mind my father, who is currently recuperating from a double knee replacement, happily a very successful “breakage” and repair of these well-used parts of his body.

Bartlett emphasizes that the impact of a carefully mended teacup or bowl (or kneecap, for that matter) is not just visual, but emotional. Historically significant mended items are often accompanied by lines of poetry, which enhance the object’s mute ability to evoke a simultaneous sense of rupture and continuity, fragility and resilience, life before the breakage and life after.

Often the tone of these verses is wistful, reflecting the fact that in Japan, mended ceramics are traditionally used only in the last two weeks of October, the waning days of autumn, known as the season of nagori. But sometimes the tone is humorous, emphasizing the transformative power of the imagination.

This is the case in a story told about a Korean Ido-style teabowl owned by a Japanese military leader of the sixteenth century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He had received this treasured object from an older leader, Tsutsui Junkei. One day, a page in Hideyoshi’s retinue dropped the precious bowl and it broke into five pieces. Everyone froze, fearing for the boy, since Hideyoshi was known for his fierce temper.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Then a guest (showing remarkable mindfulness) improvised a gracious comic poem, taking as his inspiration a famous verse about the passing of time as measured by a mark on a well curb. In the original poem the mark records the height of a boy, who has since grown up. In the improvisation, the well curb becomes a metaphor for the broken cup:

Tsutsui’s well curb

Became split into five

Alas for that well-deep bowl

All of the blame –

It seems to have been mine.

The poet’s words made everyone laugh appreciatively, and restored Hideyoshi to good spirits. Soon enough, the teabowl was also restored and given the name Tsutsui Zutsu (meaning well-curb). It continued to be used and cherished in Hideyoshi’s family for generations, occasionally returning to five pieces only to be mended again. Centuries later, the bowl and its five famous cracks are still in existence today.

Stories like this don’t just affirm the value of mending things that are broken; they also change our perspective on brokenness. They suggest that the value of gold-filled cracks might lie less in the gold, than in the unconventional beauty and interest of the cracks themselves.

After we finished lunch, and the minister left, I noticed a tiny, yellow and white flower that must have drifted down during our conversation, now floating in my unfinished cup of tea.

Amour

In a yoga class this week, I asked my teacher about how to perform a movement which involves “sucking in” the abdomen without letting the chest rise (uddiyana bhanda, for the yogis). Should I think of this movement as pulling the abdominal muscles upwards within the body, or straight back toward the spine? He replied that I shouldn’t think about it at all. He warned against trying to understand everything through analyzing it (he’s read some of this blog and picked up that this might be my habitual way of doing things).

Instead, he advised me simply to watch how he does it and try to emulate his example. Eventually, I will “get it” and it will be clear when this happens. He used the image of a candle bursting into flame due to its proximity to another lit candle to describe this process of learning. He asked if I was happy with this answer. I said yes, but even I could hear that I didn’t sound overjoyed. Being told to stop thinking didn’t really thrill me.

However, the idea that some kinds of knowledge, possibly the most important ones, cannot be acquired by intellectual analysis or even by cultivating artistic skill, came up again when I went to see Michael Haneke’s latest film, Amour.

The central topic of Amour is how we deal with the deteriorating health and eventual death of aging loved ones. The film touches on issues raised by the availability of medical care (in privileged Western countries) that can keep people alive long beyond the point where they would have died without it, but can also mean that the quality of life in the last months may be very low, and caring for the not-yet-dying is a very demanding, even heart-breaking task. Is it love that leads us to keep people alive as long as possible, or is it a combination of confusion and selfish attachment? Or is human love so mixed up with these less desirable qualities that the judgments implied in this way of framing the problem are unhelpful?

Haneke’s film tells the story of an elderly married couple (the actors who play them, Emmannuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, are both in their 80s). Anne has been a successful piano teacher. In the course of the film, she suffer a stroke, undergoes unsuccessful surgery which leaves her half-paralysed, and then suffers a second, more serious stroke. Georges, her stoic and affectionate husband, honours Anne’s wish to remain at home after the surgery, and heroically takes on the challenge of caring for her as she becomes increasingly incapacitated, both physically and mentally.

Apart from one scene at the beginning (an audience shot which provides us with a rough mirror image of ourselves as viewers – implying that we are involved in this story), the whole film is shot in the apartment where Georges and Anne live. This enclosed space, with its empty entrance hall and doors leading to a nest of different rooms, powerfully evokes the claustrophobic, subdued intensity of the emotional situation that unfolds as Anne’s condition deteriorates. Although Georges is devotedly determined to carry out Anne’s wish not to be institutionalized at the end of her life, when she expresses the more final wish to be released from her increasingly painful situation by dying, he reacts violently.

Michael Haneke

Georges’ confusion in the face of Anne’s desire to die and the great difficulty he shows in accepting the grief of her loss are sympathetically portrayed, and are balanced by the moving tenderness he shows towards his wife. Haneke does not lead us to judge Georges harshly, but nor does he spare us a sense of horror at the fear, helplessness and violence that surface in the lives of this cultured and contented couple as the inevitability of death approaches, like bones breaking through soft skin.

The empty entrance hall of the apartment in this film reminded me of the empty upper room in the apartment of another Georges and Anne in Haneke’s earlier film, Hidden. In both films, the empty, central space can be read as a metaphor for the absence of god, or of any clear source of spiritual or moral wisdom in a society that is wealthy in so many other ways: not just materially, but also in terms of artistic culture and scientific knowledge.

In this film, it might also be taken to signify the absence of robust resources of love and connection to draw upon when facing death and grief. A sense of emotional brittleness is particularly palpable in the scenes between Georges and his daughter, who attempts, but largely fails, to make any meaningful connection with her parents during her mother’s decline.

Isabelle Hupert and Jean-Louis Tringigant in Amour

Science can tell us how to keep people alive longer, and give us tools to do so. Artistic culture provides a rich language for expressing the subtleties of human experience (music and paintings are an important part of this film). But it seems that neither science nor art can tell us when to accept the end of life, or how to do so with kindness. These powerful forms of knowledge and expression cannot substitute for love.

If science and art are not enough, how then can we learn to love? In the film, Georges’ encounters with a pigeon who flies in and out of the apartment a couple of times seems to symbolize an intuitive, if tentative, process of learning about loving in the form of catching, holding, and letting go.

Clearly, this isn’t a process of intellectual analysis.

I’d go so far as to say that Haneke’s film suggests that love might be learnt simply by carefully observing, and waiting for it to pass on like a flame, when the moment is ripe, from those who already know how.

But who are the ones who already know how to love? The optimism of this film, at least compared to Haneke’s earlier work, lies in the suggestion that, in spite of all the disconnected and overly intellectualised aspects of modern Western culture, the ones who already know at least something of how to love might include types as common as pigeons – in other words, us.

Tapas and anger

A disclaimer: the title may have lead you to think that tango philosophy has finally succumbed to one of the dominant strands in mainstream Australian culture and become a food blog. But no! Whilst I can see a connection between anger and tiny, overpriced plates of food, if you’re looking for a discourse on jamón and tortilla, you will need to go elsewhere. The kind of tapas you’ll find discussed here is fiery, but it has very little to do with pimientos de Padrón.

Zhander Remete

The inspiration for this post in fact came from a public talk by Zhander Remete, the founder of Shadow Yoga, a graceful and challenging form which I've recently discovered thanks to Peter Ujvári, who teaches it at City Yoga in Melbourne.

A lot of what Remete had to say went over my head, but one point made me sit up. He said that yoga began as a way of dealing with anger.

At the end of the talk I asked him to expand on this point. He explained that the core practices of yoga create a kind of fire, tapas. He used the breath as an example: focusing on and controlling the breath creates friction, which generates heat. He said this fire burns away anger.

I’d heard this word, tapas, before, in Buddhist contexts. One of my favourite monks (now a layman) used to be called Tapassi, which means ascetic, or one who has tapas, the purifying ‘heat’ of meditative practice. Heat is in scare quotes here, because as Richard Freeman, another yoga teacher puts it, tapas “is not necessarily a physical heat; it is a metaphorical burning, an awakening to what is really happening within the mind or the perceptions. When people first experience tapas, there is often a sense of discomfort, a desire to squirm away from the situation because it is so authentic; it is as if the border of life is being eaten away by fire” (The Mirror of Yoga). (Ok, so maybe there is some connection with chillies here…)

Remete’s remarks about anger make me wonder: if tapas burns anger away, does this also mean it needs it to get going? Is anger a fuel for spiritual ‘fire’?

American psychologist Simon Laham calls anger “the positive negative emotion.” If emotions are categorized as either “approach” or “avoidance,” anger is best described as an “approach” emotion: it leads us to engage with the environment, and focus on rewards and incentives. There’s evidence that the same areas of the brain (the left anterior regions of the cortex) are active when you’re angry and when you’re experiencing unambiguously positive approach states. This makes sense, in that anger usually arises because a positive goal has been frustrated. The anger doesn’t negate that goal – it ups the ante, motivating us to keep trying to get what we want, even if the cost is high. As Laham puts it, anger “is both a gauge of our progress toward a goal and a force that makes us persist in the face of obstacles” (The Science of Sin, 118).

Simon Laham

Laham’s analysis suggests that anger is basically frustrated desire, which only becomes stronger (and less reasonable) for having been thwarted. It occurs to me that spiritual discipline – or any kind of discipline – also centrally involves frustrating desire, or controlling it until it subsides. So anger – or something closely related to it - is likely to be a core part of spiritual practice. Maybe this is what Freeman is talking about when he describes the uncomfortable, but authentic feeling of having the border of life eaten away by fire. It’s the experience of feeling anger without expressing it outwardly. You are experiencing an “approach” emotion without trying to get anything. Maybe the result is that you get closer to yourself.

Let’s consider this process more carefully. You start off with an ordinary desire – to attain something. You might want to get into full lotus position, say (all right, some people may be thinking this is not a ‘ordinary’ desire, but just substitute your own example – Laham talks about people wanting to get coke cans out of an automatic dispensing machines that are not working). Now suppose you can’t get into full-lotus, no matter how you try. You get angry. But instead of having a tantrum of one kind or another (or shaking the dispensing machine until it tips over and injures you, possibly fatally – apparently this is a real problem), you discipline yourself to focus on your breathing, from whatever uncomfortable position you’ve managed. What happens?

If Remete is right, your anger gets burnt up. Does this mean that the original desire to get into full lotus just dies away? Or does it get transformed? We could say that initially, at least some of your energy gets redirected toward the goal of staying focused on your breath and whatever is happening within the mind. At this point, there is a battle between competing desires. If your zeal or diligence (what is called in the pali Buddhist texts ‘appamāda’) for practice is strong, and this desire wins the battle, then both anger and the specific desire that gave rise to it give way, or are converted, to a much more subtle form of desire – concentration. You are no longer thinking about any particular achievement or goal and how to get it, you are just focused on the activity of observation (of the breath, or simply the movements of the mind). You may become absorbed to the point where there is barely any discernible difference between intention and activity. Just the occasional distraction and conscious effort to keep concentrating appear like tendrils of smoke still rising from the fire in which anger has been consumed.

This way of looking at anger confirms Laham’s point that this emotion typically causes us to focus even more tightly on goals and incentives: suddenly we feel we must get into this and no other yoga pose, or that nothing can satisfy us but a coke from the machine that has eaten our money. If the intensity of anger remains focused on a trivial, specific goal, it can lead us to take actions that are out of all proportion to the worth of the target. We may wreck our back for the sake of a pose we may never be able to do, or die for a can of coke. If, on the other hand, the persistence typical of anger can be channeled into an activity that is without any specific goal, but is rather attentive and responsive to experience in an open-ended way, then this “approach” emotion might be a key to enlightenment.

Why existentialist philosophers have affairs

A couple of blogposts ago, I wrote a piece about existentialist philosophy in the wake of a romantic disappointment. It provoked a range of responses that got me thinking.

Wild women of Melbourne

Quite a few friends felt my pain and responded with expressions of solidarity and support, extending in one case to an offer to organize a possie to ride at dawn… :). These people didn’t seem fully convinced by my philosophical attempts to levitate above the rocky terrain of sexual relations on which I had been wounded (well, seriously scratched), and were touchingly ready to fight back on my behalf, on the ground.

At this earthy level, my friend Ben pointed out that I wasn’t really doing justice to existentialism either: any real French or existentialist philosopher would be having an affair by now. At the time, I didn’t have an answer to that one (so I replied to him obscurely, in French).

Another friend, Galia, took on my philosophical argument directly and questioned the value of the existentialist approach to responsibility. In this situation, she thought it had led me to blame myself for something (another person’s omission) that was clearly not my responsibility, and pointed out that this kind of thing is much more common than you might think. It’s not a problem that’s limited to readers of Sartre.

In these individualistic, consumerist, self-improving and politically apathetic times, there are much greater forces than French philosophy encouraging us to take personal responsibility for things that lie beyond our powers, at least as individuals. Systematic injustice and economic instability are reinforced by the idea that the appropriate response to such experiences is to do some work on ourselves. We are encouraged to see ourselves as the cause of the problem instead of recognizing that what we’re going through is not a unique or isolated experience, but has structural causes that will never be addressed by self-help therapies. The result is that we fail to take collective responsibility for the problems of our society, focusing our attention ever more anxiously and narcissistically upon ourselves.

Usually Galia and I find ourselves in agreement on this topic (which is a theme of Rabbi Michael Lerner's work). I am also concerned about the dominance of the concept of personal responsibility in our culture, and its tendency to drive other, more social and shared forms of responsibility from the dance-floor.

How then could I be so easily seduced by the invitation to tango with existentialist ideas, given that existentialism represents an extreme attempt to take personal responsibility for things that are beyond individual control (ie the whole world)?

The short answer is that it made me feel better. While I was feeling angry with the man who misled me – while I was thinking of him, in the conventional way, as fully responsible and blameworthy for his actions – I felt terrible. If he was a villain, then I was a fool. 

As soon as I started imagining myself as totally responsible for the whole situation, my mood shifted. In one philosophical swoop, I had transformed the man I was having difficulties with into a character in a dream, and myself into the all-powerful dreamer. No anger or blame was required, because there was only one person left in this universe: me. Cogito, ergo sum. I think therefore I am alone. (Descartes left off that last word in the Latin, but it’s implied, when you think about it…) Nice and quiet.

But even then, I did have a niggling doubt about this strategy. Wasn’t it problematic to refuse responsibility to another person in this way – to take away his agency and see him as just a piece of brute facticity, with no meaning beyond the one I chose to bestow upon him, without even asking him for his perspective? This might have made me feel that I was comfortably in control again, but wasn’t this feeling based on an illusion – an illusion that as Galia had pointed out, was closely related to the debilitating one that makes people feel better about socially-caused suffering because they imagine that it’s all about them, and they can overcome it by working on their personalities?

These doubts were reinforced when I did a take-home exam on the psychology of personality and got to the question about pessimistic attribution. This is a fancy expression for one fixed way to respond to events that knock you around. If you are a pessimist, you will assume that the cause of any unhappy event is something internal, that is, intrinsically to do with you. It’s also stable over time, difficult to change, and explains lots of the things that go wrong for you, not just the present problem. In a nutshell, the problem is (always already) you.

An optimist, on the other hand, will assume (regardless of the problem) that the cause is external, fleeting and specific to the situation. Optimists are just as deluded as pessimists, but they tend to get through life much more easily.

Neither are likely to succeed in changing the world for the better, however, because neither of them are willing to investigate cause and effect, or learn to distinguish between the things I cause and should take responsibility for, and what is caused by others, or by a larger group of which I am a small part.

Here’s where we get to my theory on why existentialist philosophers, or at least Sartre, had so many affairs.

Sartre in trouble, after one of his affairs

I think Sartre was a pessimist. That’s why when he turned his attention to responsibility, he came up with a theory that made it global, unrelenting, and entirely internal (completely "mine"). While he was writing about existentialist responsibility, he was also living through the Second World War. He refers to the war as an example of something an existentialist can and must take responsibility for. I think this is his way of protecting himself from the horror and sense of helplessness of this time in Europe, by turning it all into a dream he is willfully dreaming.

Who could blame him? As a therapy for pessimists, it’s not such a bad strategy – it does make you feel better. It seems to transcend ordinary pessimism by pushing it to a hyperbolic extreme. But if the therapy stops here, relief comes at a high price – that of isolation. Other people become mere chimeras in your dream. You can have affairs with images like these, but you can't share meaning or responsibility with them, so it’s unlikely that an existentialist affair will last long.

Does this negative view of the effect of existentialism on interpersonal relations mean that my love affair with existentialism is over already? I'm not so sure. You can't reject someone just for being a pessimist. And I'm optimistic enough to think there might be more to this philosophy than I've given it credit for so far...