Repairing in Gold

金継ぎ

There is a scene in an old Zhang Yimou movie when a traveling potter arrives one day in the heroine's village. Asking whether anyone has something in need of repair, he is tasked to mend a broken ceramic bowl. Even though it would cost less just to buy a new one-- and hey money was tight-- still in those days people knew that tending memories and taking care of things was a beautiful virtue（美徳).

And so he skillfully repairs the bowl.

There is a terrible nihilism in mass production, mass consumerism, and mass tourism. A kind of extreme carelessness. I am old enough to remember when people used to repair broken things, when plastic wasn’t everywhere (even in our clothing and food), when people didn’t travel overseas every year.

Having a heart to take care of things (物を大切にする心) and the earth is related to concepts of divinity and to a natural piety. One of my friends in Japan is really adept at repairing ceramics using gold lacquer (called kintsugi), and the repairs he lovingly labors over add to the interest or fascination of the the ceramic pieces themselves.

If you think about it, once upon a time ceramic vessels were not just things for storing water or for putting food and flowers in, but they were places where people could place their dreams and shared imaginings. Vessels were used for safekeeping memories and jars were things for storing your metaphors. In some places gigantic jars were temporary places to put the bodies of the dead. Certain jars and bowls had characters and destinies like any Greek hero. They had charisma.

I recently stumbled on this gorgeous bilingual book about Kintsugi.

In Japanese the title says The beauty and heart of kintsugi 金継ぎの美と心—in English that is rendered as The Spirituality of Kintsugi. The author of the book (and it is a gorgeous book!) Hiroki Kiyokawa says that he has no one to pass down his skills to. No one is interested in becoming a craftsman anymore. But his art depends on a web of craftsmen—from the person who taps the lacquer trees to the bamboo brush makers in Kyoto.

Nihonga painter Allen West in his incredible memoir, They Hang Me in Tokyo: A Barbarian Artist’s Life-Changing Journey to Master Nihonga, the Traditional Art of Japan also talks at length about the intricate web of craftspeople who make his work possible—and with their disappearance so too does his own art.

I think it is true that if technology aims to make things easier more convenient and efficient; craftsmanship--in contrast-- generates embodied skills, discernment and care; all things which used to be very central to the way people lived their lives. This still can be found in Japan where 職人文化 (craftsperson culture) is alive and where people continue perhaps to value quality. But according to Kiyokawa, it is fading there as well.

The existentialist--like the Confucian or daoist-- prioritizes embodied know-how, and this is predicated on a worldview that does not emphasize a mind-body divide so that-- (as the brilliant Wang Yangming suggested) to know is to do and to do to is to know. This is what philosopher Hubert Dreyfus called embodied know-how. Dreyfus is bringing forth Heidegger's old concept--borrowed from the Greeks-- of Poiesis, which itself harkens back to a world where sophia means both wisdom and skill and where poetry was thought to be a form of craft or a practiced skill which not only warms the heart but sheds a special radiance on the subjects it celebrates (Bowra)

My friend Steven posted on facebook, I wonder who will repair the stuff we have now, if they will repair it, and how they will do it.

I really think, sadly, the stuff we have today is not meant for repair--it is 使い捨てる (totally disposable). And, in the end, this is what Dreyfus--following Heidegger-- has been concerned with--as he frets that in the end, we begin to treat even our own selves as resources to be used and consumed, instead of being grounded in those things that really matter.

Hope is the soul's disposition to transcend the here and now and look toward a horizon of meaning that is greater than this world. "As a faith, it makes it possible to act amid absolute despair —Byung-Chul Han The Spirit of Hope.