Kintsugi and the art of making repair visible

I have seen The Star War. No spoilers from me (not that I believe in them), but you should read up on Kintsugi before you go see it. (If you have seen it, here’s the part of the movie I’m talking about.)

Kintsugi (“golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

Kintsugi is connected to the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi.

“Wabi-sabi” writes Leonard Koren in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, “is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”

Things wabi-sabi “may exhibit the effects of accident, like a broken bowl glued back together again.”

The thing I love the most about Kintsugi is the visible trace of healing and repair — the idea of highlighted, glowing scars.

Often when I am driving around town I will see a car with some sort of exterior damage — a dented bumper, a broken headlight, a torn and dangling side-view mirror — and often after I notice this damage, the car will make some sort of illogical move on the driver’s part that, if I weren’t paying close attention to it, would’ve resulted in my car inflicting the same exact damage to the car.

After these encounters, I’m grateful that the driver didn’t have the visible damage repaired. The damage acted as a warning sign: BEWARE. Not that all these drivers were responsible for their damage, but it is obvious that many of these dented bumpers are a sign of some kind of a blind spot.

I fantasize now about a world in which all body work is carried out with Kintsugi methods.

Humans have scars, too, of course, but the really important scars are often internal and invisible to the naked eye. You can’t tell right away whose soul has just suffered a fender bender. How much easier life would be sometimes if we could see each other’s scars right away, know each other’s blind spots and weaknesses…

If only there were a Kintsugi of the soul!

PS. After I wrote this post, I remembered Kottke’s observation that my wife had kintsugi’d our couch cushions.

A draft of JFK’s remarks at Amherst College, 1963

Well, here is a coincidence: after I blogged about the Richard Serra quote on coming to a Y in the road in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do and how it reminded me of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” I read further into the book and came across John F. Kennedy’s speech on the role of the artist in American life. He gave it in 1963 at Amherst College for the groundbreaking of a library named in honor of… Robert Frost. Not only that, but Koren notes that Kennedy quoted “The Road Not Taken” in his remarks:

All this requires the best of all of us. And therefore, I am proud to come to this College whose graduates have recognized this obligation and to say to those who are now

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I hope that road will not be the less traveled by, and I hope your commitment to the great public interest in the years to come will be worthy of your long inheritance since your beginning.

And so, it seems, Kennedy, a big Frost fan (Frost supported him in the race against Nixon and spoke at his inauguration), sort of got the poem wrong, too, or at least just quoted the famous bit.

No matter. The rest of Kennedy speech is worth reading:

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world….

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

Read the rest here, or listen to it, below: