03/11/2022
I have been following this wise philosopher for some time - profound words
I have been thinking about wounds as striation marks and fault lines that invisibly compose bodies prior to the event of injury. That is, wounds don't come after the fact: the surface might appear smooth, the membrane unpunctured and unperturbed, the skin at rest - but what wholeness occludes is the necessary tensions and troubling experiments in brokenness that keep things alive. We are indebted to this lack of coherence, to this playful gesturing that resists finality. In other words, we are never-not-broken - like the South Asian goddess Akhilandeshwari, whose name is an ode to brokenness. To be embodied is to be in flight. To be embodied is to be beside oneself, perpetually spilling away from resolution.
Thinking this way throws a strange light on the popular and hidden assumptions behind dominant concepts of healing and recovery. The modern tendency seems to be to begin our appraisal of bodies from the starting point of 'wholeness'. Any deviation from this image of normalcy is addressed as something to be fixed - with the prospects of full restoration held as a desirable outcome. But what if we began our stories about how our bodies come to matter - not from the hard portrait of completion, but from the softness of movement? What if we are - like a murmuration of dunlins - a 'drunken wounding' dancing with the sky? What if we are echoes of a great blast of life, shockwaves with no original explosion, drifting with s**cetime in utter defiance of the modern myths of arrival? And what if what we mean by repair is less restitution to a lost original than it is a pairing-with-another-composite-body, a re-pair-ing, a borrowing of limbs and organs and tendons from the others around us in order to navigate the complexities of living and dying?
Perhaps nothing captures this ferocious reimagining of bodies as eddies of dust "counterfeiting immobility" like the Japanese art of kintsugi, an ancient technique that uses lacquer and gold powder to restore broken ceramics and porcelain vessels. I love the art form, mostly because it implicitly refuses to think of repair as restoration to an original image - and it does this by taking pains to acknowledge the presence of the interface, the decorated crack that marks the irretrievably altered vessel. To think about this art as mere restoration is to elide the agency and contributions of the lacquer, the new glial material that marks the once-quantum potencies and embryonic lines living beneath visibility. The first time I observed a kintsugi-repaired piece, I said to myself: "It's still broken; the artist has just mapped this rich encounter of loss, memory, and longing with gold." Kintsugi is the art that reminds us that everything is already broken.
To be re-paired is to be re-coupled-with-an/other in an ever-moving, carnivalesque and alien cavalcade of exchangeable organs and reiterable subjectivities. The monster is not the brutal beast standing in the way of our imperial march in imperviousness; the monster is the irresistible reminder of our molecular debt to this multi-species migritude of all things.
Bayo Akomolafe
