A few days ago, this mug broke in my hands. I don’t know why it broke. I pulled the mug from the cabinet, was about to place it on the counter, and without reason, the handle fell off. Since then I’ve been debating whether to throw it away or fix it. The things we own eventually break: air conditioners, cars, appliances, water heaters, toys. At some point, we debate the cost of repair vs. the trash can. Ours is a culture of planned obsolesce. Everything must break at some point. And when something breaks, a feeling of despair or misfortune may overtake us even if that thing is replaceable. That metaphoric shout of “noooooo!” may resonate in our heads as the broken object sits lifeless and its utility is transformed into worthlessness. Another question, though, for me beyond this melodramatic approach to a basic household item whose purpose is to hold liquid is this: Why do I care if one mug broke? I have others. I can buy a new mug. Why am I spending so much time thinking about one broken mug? Why we should care about anything is a legitimate question. I’m asking that question while the mug sits still, broken, next to my sink, and I remain indecisive about its future. Why do I care? I don’t know.
I don’t know where I got this mug from. Maybe a craft fair. Maybe as a gift. I just know it’s broken. How many coffees have I drank from this mug? When I awake in the morning, the kettle goes on the stove, the coffee grinds, the French press is filled, I pull a mug from the cabinet. Thousands of times I must have pulled this mug from the cabinet. Thousands of times I must have drank coffee from it. I cannot pull it from the cabinet again unless I take the time to figure out how to fix it. I cannot pull it from the cabinet again unless I care about fixing it. Maybe I don’t care about fixing it. I don’t know.
I don’t care about much. Is apathy a characteristic of being broken? Anthony Bourdain once told Men’s Journal that he struggled to resist apathy.
I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.
Many broken people want to avoid life. Watch TV. Lay in bed. They find other activities to prevent apathy from taking over: travel, eating, drinking. The most difficult obstacles broken people may face come from the banal, the daily interactions that make up life. I don’t care about many of the things that make up daily, banal, personal and professional conversations: politics, weather, phatic conversation, celebrity talk. Yet, out of all the banal and ordinary things in the world to care about, I want to know how to get over this broken mug. I feel something about this mug that I cannot explain. I Googled for an answer and one Lifehack site recommended, when dealing with something broken, that I:
1. Remember to accept and to anticipate change (I am sorry to see you go, mug)
2. Remember to embrace my power of choice (buy a new mug?)
3. Remember to ask for help (do you have any super glue?)
4. Remember to be hopeful about my future (I have other mugs)
5. Remember that life is a mystery (why the fuck did the handle fall off?)
Broken kitchen items tend not to be the focus of self-help or recovery publications intent on fixing us mentally, physically, or emotionally. These books promise thousands of people who feel broken in one way or another that whatever ails or causes difficulties/challenges for us, a book can fix it. Getting divorced? Read a book. Having a baby, read a book. Can’t manage your money? Read a book. Break a mug? Well….there is probably a book for that too. When my kids were younger and experiencing a variety of activities I preferred they not engage in at their pre-school, one could find on my bookshelf titles as Teeth are Not For Biting or Hands are Not for Hitting, purchased as efforts to change behavior or fix broken toddler habits. What would a kids’ book about a broken mug be called? Maybe Why The Fuck Did The Handle Fall Off? I also have zero evidence that any book changed my kids’ behavior, and that means such a mug book would, as well, be useless. The handle would still be broken no matter what book I read.
Why does a handle fall off for no reason? Why do things break? What is the ordinary something we often try to avoid? Wear and tear. Force. Mistakes. Wrong usage. Lack of care or concern. Bad luck. Fate. All around us, things break. Sects break away from main religious lines. Countries break apart. Rules are broken. People break. Hearts break. Think of some of the greatest breakups of all time: The Beatles, whoever is dating Pete Davidson, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Enron. I don’t know if my broken mug raises questions about relationship breakups, but it’s difficult to not acknowledge the linguistic connection and to allow that connection to dominate my thoughts even if there does not exist any causality between love and what I drink coffee out of. Did my mug break up with me? I don’t know. Maybe.
I realize that some things cannot be fixed. I realize that some humans cannot be fixed. My mug may be one of those things. I may be one of those humans. For some time, I’ve told others: I’m broken. Like my mug, I feel broken, too. My reasons for being broken are more complex than a worn out handle that suddenly fell off of a mug without reason. Humans, of course, break differently than mugs do. We need more than super glue to be fixed, if, that is, we can even be fixed. Areas of study — in medicine or in psychotherapy — work to figure out how to fix broken humans. Humans have figured out how to open up bodies and repair the bodies’ broken parts; they can replace decayed teeth; they can substitute artificial limbs for those that are no more; they can repair failing hearts. Often with psychotherapy,, the focus is trauma and recovery. Something in our past or present was so traumatic, we are told or we tell ourselves, that we broke. We see a therapist to learn how to heal and be less broken. Therapists are stand-ins for super glue.
In The Noonday Demon, an in-depth look at depression, Andrew Solomon writes about his own brokenness as not being in response to anything traumatic or life changing, but being powerfully debilitating nonetheless:
It was when life was finally in order and all the excuses s for despair had been used up that depression came slinking in on its little cat feet and spoiled everything and I felt acutely that there was no excuse for it under the circumstances.
Banality broke Solomon. Daily life. That is an unnerving thought as it is not a traumatic event that broke him but simply the act of living. After all, we are all alive. Was Charlie Brown broken? He was depressed. His five cents therapy sessions did little, it seems, to alleviate his depression or heal him. But was he broken? He goes to school. He has a dog. He has friends. He appears to wear the same shirt every day. He has a fairly banal life. Charlie Brown, I think, is very broken. But his brokenness, as well, doesn’t seem to stem from any trauma. His brokenness is banal. Everyday. It’s all around him. It is, I would speculate without any evidence, the most common kind of brokenness around us. This type of brokenness, I speculate without any evidence, is the kind we think we can easily fix (like the handle of a mug), but often we cannot. Not even with therapy. How do you heal the everyday? I don’t know.
Could therapy have saved Anthony Bourdain from suicide? I think about that moment in Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain writes about his own brokenness (from drugs): “I could no longer bear even to pick up the phone… I was in hiding, in a deep, dark hole.” Most of the speculation regarding Bourdain’s suicide focuses on his supposed broken nature. Was he broken over scorned love? Was he broken over professional dissatisfaction? Was he always broken; he, travelling the world, just appeared to us, the spectators in front of our televisions, complete. How do you really know if someone is complete? They laugh. They smile. They go about their everyday experiences: work, play, rest, eating, drinking, shitting. But they are not complete, even as they travel from country to country. In the Argentina episode of No Reservations, Bourdain goes to therapy. Towards the end of the episode, the therapist asks Bourdain: “What brought you here?” He responds, “I’d like to be happy. I’d like to be happier.. . I’d like to be able to look out the window and say ‘Life is good.’” “And you don’t?” she asks him. “No,” he responds.”
Life, we know, is not always good even if it appears it is. The rich. The privileged. The everyday people who seem fine. Have they ever had to heal? Many Facebook groups I belong to advise members to “heal themselves.” This phrase is repeated with almost every post someone makes about a problem in his or her life. How do you heal yourself? Isn’t that the job of therapy? Charlie Brown couldn’t heal himself. Neither, it seems, could Anthony Bourdain.
In episode three of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, Cooper is in his late mother’s apartment and notices a saved calendar stuck on the date of his brother’s suicide: 1988 when his 23 year old brother jumped out of the window. Time, for Cooper and one assumes his mother who saved the calendar, is broken. This was Roland Barthes’ main point regarding his concept of the punctum: broken time. An image, Barthes explained, reflects what no longer is, not what is. I can imagine Cooper looking at that calendar and at the window his brother jumped out of and thinking about broken time. All around him, I think, everything previously may have appeared good. But now that same time, the time that is no more, is broken, stuck on one date of pain. What is represented in one’s thoughts at such a moment of reflection (staring at a stuck calendar) is what was and what no longer is. Death is the prime factor, but one could imagine other losses or miscues which the image in front of one — a saved calendar, a photograph, a text, an email — no longer represents. Every thought or memory, it would seem, is a punctum like moment of broken time. We think: This image I carry with me is representational. But it’s not. The image is of what no longer is. And of what is now broken.
A great deal of Cooper’s podcast and interviews with those who have grieved loss revolves around things. The shirts his late father once wore. The saved calendar from his brother’s suicide. His late mother’s possessions still within her apartment. Things, still intact, capture our brokenness even as their place within time is lost (they are no longer useful to whoever owned them). Someone once wore this. Someone once used this. Someone is no longer here. All that remains is stuff. But with me, I have a broken mug I owned, not a complete mug someone dear to me once owned. My mug can, and I don’t want it to, remind me of myself and various moments of broken time spread across 53 years of life. Should I, therefore, save the pieces and fix the mug? About eight months before he died, my father overhead my mother and me discussing possessions in their home and what to do with them. The thought of anybody taking his possessions — no longer used tables in the basement, old tools, forgotten clothes — sent him into a range. He was physically broken — diabetes, triple bypass, strokes, cancer. But always, to me, he was emotionally broken. Depressed. Unhappy. Dissatisfied. At that moment, he worried over those no longer used things. Maybe his things reminded him of himself.
When I use Medium or Facebook or Instagram to publicly sketch out ideas I want to more fully develop within the book being written right now, I feel a bit like a broken record. I have to repeat the same ideas over and over in order to better understand their place, if there even is one, within the larger narrative I try to compose. I write to understand. I have to keep writing about being broken, for instance, to fully understand how I am writing about it and how I am coming to better understand what being broken conveys. Brokenness, then, is rhetorical. It expresses meaning. Sometimes when I play guitar alone or within ear range of my kids who don’t want to hear me play guitar, I play The Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace.”
Going to leave this broke-down palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll, roll, roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll
This sounds like a song about longing. Maybe he’s (the narrator) the brokedown palace. Maybe he is really at a physical place called brokedown palace. Maybe a brokedown palace is a place that cannot be fixed. We get down on our hands and on our knees, and we roll, roll, roll. We roll away. We roll toward. We roll around inside feeling bits and pieces of all that brokenness, those shards that don’t heal even if we listen to someone we don’t know on the Internet say: you need to heal yourself. So many broken pieces. Poor, Charlie Brown and Anthony Bourdain living in brokedown palaces. All of their broken pieces. Poor me.
Or maybe I have no idea what this song is about, and I really don’t care either.
