Here is a date stamp somebody gave me on book tour last year. It only ran up until |2|0|1|9|, but then I got the idea to razor-blade the middle “|0|1|” out of the year band, leaving the first and last digits. So now I can stamp into the year ’29… How often does one so easily add a decade to an object’s life?
What is it about fixing small things when the big things are broken? What is it about solving tiny problems when faced with problems that seem unsolvable?
It was interesting to come across Dorothea Lange’s 1934 photo of a woman’s mended stockings after reading about the Japanese art of Sashiko, which seems to be having a moment online:
Miho Takeuchi, a traditional sashiko instructor and designer born in Japan and based in the United States, tells me via email that sashiko, which developed in poor communities in Japan’s Edo period, “was born from the necessity of mending and patching garments, beddings and household items. In ancient days, clothing and bedding were made from homespun fabrics woven from native fibrous plants such as wisteria and hemp and necessity demanded that this clothing be recycled for as long as possible.” It was only later, she tells me, that the technique evolved to include the elaborate surface-level designs and intricate patterns popular with visible menders today.
“Whereas mending was once the province of those who could not afford new clothes,” the article notes, “today’s visible mending is the province, primarily, of those who can afford the time and attention it takes to make one’s clothes into a statement.” (See: “The poor can’t afford not to wear nice clothes.”)
Here is another photo by Lange, which seems to be of the same legs, stockings, and shoes, but look closely at both images, and you’ll see different contexts. In the first image, which is cropped closely on the legs coming out of shadows, the shoes are resting on worn wooden planks, and the mends almost look like scars. In the second image, where you can see the rest of her outfit and the smooth floor, the mending on the stockings looks more subtle and elegant.
I did a bunch of digging in Lange’s archives at the Library of Congress, but couldn’t find any more images of these feet. (Lange did a whole series of worn stockings and shoes. It’s interesting to note how much Lange liked photographing legs and feet — her own foot was misshapen by childhood polio and she walked with a limp.) Would love to know more about these images, or if there are any others in the series, if anybody knows.
See also: The story of Lange’s most famous image and 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.
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