Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

The big philosophical questions that humankind has been struggling with for millennia —  Birth, Death, The Meaning of Life, Love, Infinity — are inextricably woven into our daily lives. We are all born, we all die, we all wonder what, if any, meaning there is to our lives, almost of us want to love and be loved, and we look up at the night sky and ponder the infinite.

Chana Bloch (1940-2017) writes about the Big Questions manifest in the Everyday with great clarity and a deceptive simplicity. (‘Chana’ is the anglicized spelling of the Hebrew name, pronounced with a throat-clearing ‘HAH’ like Chanukah and chutzpah, but the English version is ‘Hannah’)

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Kintsugi means ‘golden joinery’ in Japanese. Dating from the 15th century, it is raising the repair of pottery into Art, traditionally done with urushi lacquer and real powdered gold. The expensive materials, high level of skill and time required has meant that only pieces of great historical, sentimental  or monetary value, have been repaired in this way.

The Joins

            Kintsugi is the art of mending precious pottery with gold.  

What’s between us 
often seems flexible as the webbing 
between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible, but it’s not; 
what’s between us 
is made of clay,

like any cup on the shelf. 
It shatters easily. Repair 
becomes the task.

We glue the wounded edges 
with tentative fingers. 
Scar tissue is visible history,

the cup more precious to us 
because 
we saved it.

In the art of kintsugi, 
a potter repairing a broken cup 
would sprinkle the resin

with powdered gold. 
Sometimes the joins 
are so exquisite

they say the potter 
may have broken the cup 
just so he could mend it.

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As Ernest Hemingway put it:

“The world breaks everyone, then some
become strong at the broken places.”

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