I love documentaries. You can invite me to the film everyone’s talking about, the one with the character squeezed into multicoloured spandex who inexplicably has superhuman powers and who, if you want to follow what’s going on, requires you to have seen the five previous films, a series with fifteen seasons and some fifty comics. I’ll always prefer watching penguins bring their partner a stone for the nest. Although, while we’re at it, it turns out they don’t always go down to the beach to find the prettiest one: sometimes they steal it from the neighbour’s nest. Which is to say, they’re a good deal more like us than Disney would care to admit.
I don’t say this because I think I’m more cultured than anyone. It simply calms me, it hooks me, and I suspect don Alfonso Castellanos had something to do with it, with his Colombian TV show whose title promised “I know who knows what you don’t know”, explaining why a match lights or how an ant carries several times its own weight, joined by guests of dubious provenance whose white expert’s coat was clearly borrowed, because it wasn’t their size.
Not long ago I watched a video I couldn’t call a documentary; I honestly wouldn’t know what to call it. It just showed a Japanese craftsman mending a porcelain cup with the care you’d expect for an ancient, priceless piece. It wasn’t one. As far as I could tell, it was an ordinary cup, the kind someone loves for sentimental rather than appraised value, and its owner decided it was worth not only mending but paying a master to do kintsugi: the art of joining what’s broken and painting the join in gold instead of hiding it.
The cup had a chip in the rim, right where your lips go, and a thin crack running from there almost to the base. The first thing the craftsman did threw me: instead of closing the chip, he made it bigger. He filed the edges, opened up the crack, prepared the wound before treating it. You’d think the whole point of a good repair is that it doesn’t show, that the crack vanishes the way stubborn wrinkles vanish in the adverts for that famous rosehip oil. Not at all. He made it more visible.
Then came the materials, prepared with the calm and precision of a neurosurgeon, as if someone’s life depended on that cup. I don’t know how long it took. Or rather, I do: it took as long as it had to.
Something stayed with me. In the video you could see fine threads tucked inside the crack that looked like gold. I’m no expert, but I found it hard to believe that gold, which is soft, could hold anything together. So I looked it up, and it turns out my suspicion was well founded. What holds a piece of kintsugi together isn’t the gold. It’s urushi, a lacquer made from tree sap which, while it’s still fresh, contains the same substance as poison ivy: it can burn the skin of whoever works with it. The gold comes last, as a powder, on top of everything, once the hard part is done.
In other words, what shines comes last. What holds it together can’t be seen, and it burns.
I imagine you know what’s coming now, because these cups tend to come with instructions. That our scars make us more beautiful, that we should wear our wounds with pride, that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Add a sunset, a pretty font and a quote attributed to an Eastern philosopher who never said it, and there you go: ten thousand shares before lunch.
Very nice, and very brave. But some wounds never heal. Others heal, and we’d rather forget them. And others leave after-effects, the kind that, as we say back home, change the way you walk, literally and figuratively. I know mine are there, and most of the time I treat them the way you treat an acquaintance you don’t want to greet: I walk past, without looking them in the eye, as if they didn’t matter.
Although, come to think of it, what’s most uncomfortable about the cup isn’t the gold. It’s that it could be fixed. A chip and a crack, yes, but everything else was still in place: its shape was known, and so was where it had to be returned to. The craftsman knew what to do, the owner knew what he wanted, and the cup only had to wait.
Not everything that breaks is so lucky. Some things don’t crack along one side; they end up scattered, like a jigsaw without the picture on the box, where you no longer know which piece goes with which, or whether they even belong to the same puzzle. There are people who are told they’re admired, loved, appreciated, and who quietly run one of those logic sums you learn and never use: that’s true if and only if they don’t know me well enough.
How do you mend something that doesn’t even have a shape? What on earth do you put the gold dust on?
I don’t have an answer. What I do know is that I wouldn’t put gold on mine. I wouldn’t hire the craftsman, and I wouldn’t frame my wounds to look at every morning from the bed. But I wouldn’t take them out of the structure that holds me up today either, because there they are, even if they don’t shine: in certain decisions, in the people I move towards and the ones I avoid, in what I say and in what I’ve learnt to keep quiet. Doing what urushi does: holding things together where no one can see, and burning a little when you touch it.
I looked at the finished cup again. The gold was lovely, I’ll give it that. But the longer I looked, the less the golden lines interested me and the more I wondered about its owner. What he thought when he got it back. Whether he’ll put it in a cabinet, show it to visitors, or simply take it home, wash it and put it back with the others, to use again for the most ordinary breakfasts.
And one more thing, because the crack started right at the rim, where your lips go.
I wonder whether, next time he drinks from it, he’ll drink over the gold.
Or whether, out of sheer habit, he’ll keep looking for the side that never broke.