Introduction
In August 2019, in a workshop setting, I was asked to name something that was important to me. I said Broken Things. I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, but it seemed true. Reflecting on it over the next day or two I explored it in my newsletter for that month, reproduced below, more or less as written1.
Chancing upon it this morning I saw the relevance to what is happening today in the world of politics. The new Trump administration is tearing down the system, breaking structures we have come to know and depend upon, undermining the status quo, taking a wrecking ball to the existing world order. The response, in all corners of the world, is either fear and panic or joy and celebration, depending on one’s political affiliation. I don’t share in these emotions, choosing not to take sides, nor to laud or to vilify any player, or group, but still, I remain intensely curious. The so-called democratic system in which we dwell is in great need of change; of that I have no doubt. Whether I like the changes or not (and I have mixed feelings on almost all of them) I don’t see this as destruction, but rather as a form of deconstruction.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a difficult word to pin down. Roughly speaking it means to dismantle (an object, text or idea) in order to reveal what is inherently described, and perhaps hidden from sight. Deconstruction is not demolition, as the process is done with care and thoughtfulness, and with the express purpose of creating something new, something perhaps closer to the essence strived at by the original. The word is most commonly used in literary criticism, re/building, and more recently by individuals within faith communities confronting the creeds and dogma they have been raised on, in a quest for a greater truth.
In our current situation Trump & co are breaking down ageing, petrified, often toxic, often secretive and almost always corrupt systems, with the purpose—we hope!—of creating something new. But even if the present US administration only achieves the breaking down part, I suggest the world will be better off than we are now. We’ll have the proverbial ashes from which the phoenix can arise.
The 2019 Newsletter
"Hang down your head Tom Dooley; Hang down your head and cry.
Hang down your head Tom Dooley; Poor boy you're bound to die."
— Appalachian murder ballad, 1868 2
The poppy featured here was photographed in our wild weed garden a few days ago. Poppies are the most fragile of flowers, wild yet vulnerable, the moths of the plant kingdom. It was raining. The poppy is bowed, soon to die. I am reminded of Tom Dooley—actually Tom Dula3. It's a story of broken people, broken relationships, perhaps a broken society, certainly one of poverty, war and disease—not realities one would associate with wholeness. When a society is not holistic, it is more or less broken.
There are many victims of our broken society, people in various states of psychological disrepair, and it is towards those people I am compelled. They are my people, my kin. I am attracted to them, I sometimes fall in love with them, and I write about them, words of compassion and despair, words of hope, sometimes words of loss and lament. There is art to be found in the low places, there is beauty. There are people like Penelope, Giselle and Wolfgang.
// Penelope died alone. In a beach house in Hawaii. The beauty of her surroundings matched only by the sordidness of her death. I heard she was found only because the neighbours complained about the smell. She had no friends left to wonder at her absence from their lives, having isolated herself, hidden in her shame and despair, and exhausted the patience of even those that loved her dearly...
// Giselle called. It was her early morning after a sleepless night. It was my midnight. Giselle is dying, and as Giselle does everything her death is being played out as dramatic, incomprehensible performance art. She was lacking an audience though, hence the call. Now I am not only a spectator but an actor in her new drama. I thought I quit that job. Amidst stories of trekking across Belgium with forged prescriptions to collect impressive amounts of codeine, morphine and valium, and while somehow miraculously graduating with an MA in film philosophy, or some such esoteric endeavor, Giselle's slow suicide unfolds. It is a drama of devastated childhood, addiction, anorexia and slaughtered friendships—massacres, bloodbaths, holocausts. Giselle standing alone guns blazing atop a great pile of death. Don't fuck with me...
// Dropping like flies, these old alcoholics, these people from my past, my early, struggling recovery, my cohorts, my friends. His body failing, his appendages taken by gangrene; diabetes and kidney failure collapsing him from the inside, it was only a matter of time before Wolfgang joined Penelope on the long, redemptive journey to alcoholic heaven. I see him now, his soul slowly spinning upward like an untethered balloon, his hospital bondage finally broken. And I remember with sadness how in gathering up the threads of my own life these past few months, focussing inward, I never found the time to call him...
Hope crafted from despair
But broken isn't all bad. The Japanese art of kintsugi celebrates the broken, making the mended thing more beautiful than its original. When I came out of hospital in January 2018, my face so damaged, to begin my slow process of recovery, a colleague suggested I was human kintsugi. It was a beautiful compliment to receive, a reminder that I was merely fractured, not crushed. Kintsugi is hope crafted from despair.
It was perhaps apt that my exterior was so fractured for a while. After all, my internal life, my mind, my psyche had been cracked in one way or another for a very long time. It's just that most people couldn't see it. A handsome face blinds the eyes that gaze upon it. There's an irony here. For years I felt misaligned, out of integrity. What I spoke and what I felt were not one. In my recovery journey I prayed, for years and years, that my internal and external selves would align, that I would become whole. I wanted to become beautiful inside. Instead I became ugly outside. Prayer answered though. And it was a beginning.
The breaking of things has some noble, and perhaps epoch-changing history too. There's the story of Abraham and the Idol Shop that appears in both Genesis Rabbah (circa 500 CE) and the Qur'an, where Abraham destroys all the idols in the shop, placing the stick in the hands of the one remaining idol, and explaining to his uncle the shop owner that the idol was responsible for the destruction. It is a fable, a teaching tale core to the paradigm shift of that millennium. Jesus allowed his body to be broken in crucifixion that we may wake up new—a shift of consciousness. And then there are events like the storming of the Bastille prison, and the subsequent revolution. Time and again we break down oppressive structures to build something better. Breaking chains is a common metaphor for change and awakening. And I'd suggest we are not truly alive until our hearts have been broken, at least once.
Broken things are important because they surround us, they make us, they represent the possibility of change and renewal. It is the broken things that keep us awake, engaged, and watchful.
I justify its republication as I only had a couple of hundred readers at that time. This substack now has around 1,800.
Possibly written by a North Carolina poet named named Thomas Land, the song was based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster. The most famous version of this song was recorded in 1958 by the Kingston Trio. Listen here.
The story of Tom Dula can be read on North Carolina Ghosts.
How spotlessly you manage not to take sides, not even with yourself. And how genuinely you uncover the beauty and importance of broken things - and of being broken. As so often, I find your writing deeply inspiring. Thank you very much, Tobias.
Beautifully thoughtful writing as always Toby. Thank you for sharing