From a Spiral Notebook: Broken Things, and Night

Hi all,

You know when you’ve been kinda going through the motions? When you’re not feeling things as deeply as you usually do? When you realize you haven’t cried, or hoped deeply, for a while? I was feeling that way last month.

So, as I often do, I turned to a book. A book that has changed my life, partly because of when I discovered it (that awkward moment between teenage and adult), and partly because it is a big sprawling full-fantasy epic with elves and gods and an ultimate fight against good and evil, and love and death and betrayal. It’s a book that breaks me open every time I read it in a slightly different way.

(It is actually a trilogy, called The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. If you can stand fantasy [and I know some people can’t] I highly recommend it. If you can’t stand fantasy and need a book to break you open, may I suggest The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery?)

I learn something new each time I read this book, in the metaphorical way that fantasy is so good at. How to fight when the fight seems hopeless. How to break, and put yourself back together. This time I was reminded why it is good to break at all.

A broken thing, for illustrative purposes.

Things that have broken and mended are stronger than they were before breaking. A thing newly-made is rigid, even brittle. It will shatter if dropped on a kitchen floor. Bits will skitter under the cupboards where it’s hard to find them, or into the crack between counter and oven.

It takes a long time for something broken in this way to fix itself, or even to start. It is hard to coax the bits back from where they’ve scattered. Some parts won’t come, stay in the dusty dark alley between counter and oven, baking whenever the oven is on, becoming harder and more brittle every time. The thing that was once whole is never quite whole again.

Once most of the pieces have returned, there begins the careful practice of repair. Tape is used.

The thing will never again be seamless. Some of the parts are slightly lower or higher, the outside no longer smooth. Scar tissue can be felt, lines that can be followed by fingers.

But the tape makes everything more flexible. Now the thing can bend a little when pushed on by an uncareful outside force. It doesn’t shatter as easily.

Any thing that lasts for long will be broken again. But this next time more slowly, feeling the stretch and pull of tape for a moment. It will be easier to get all the pieces back together, because they will be stuck to the tape.

Breaking is a survival technique, and reading this book reminds me of that.

Do you have books that remind you to break, that break you open? I’d love to hear in the comments.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

I wrote this little piece in a workshop a couple years ago. I just finished going through a bunch of old notebooks, and finding little bits like this is one of the joys of that activity.

Stars are holes in Lady Night’s cloak, where moths have eaten. Through the holes we see the day that Lady Night is hiding from us.

Lady Night has had a moth problem for a year or more, now. It started small, just a few of them, but then they got into the flour bin which hadn’t been closed properly the last time it was opened, and Lady Night doesn’t do much baking, so she didn’t notice.

They multiplied. It happened slowly, and Lady Night hardly noticed. Without her realizing it, her world became trammelled in moths. Their little egg sacs, or maybe they were chrysalises, filled the corners between ceiling and wall, and when they grew tired of eating flour, they ate a thousand holes in her work uniform, even in her great night cloak.

And that’s why we have stars.

Thanks be to moths, the tiny workers of light in Lady Night’s closet. Thanks be for their tiny mouth parts, whether microscopic fangs or some kind of proboscises. Thanks be for the happenstance of the flour not being closed properly, and for the bakery down the block from Lady Night’s apartment, which has such good scones, and without which she would have baked more often.

If Lady Night ever notices the damage, she will hire an exterminator and then get her work uniform repaired. The pants, the double-breasted jacket with the epaulets, those would make no difference. But if she gets her night cloak patched, our sky will go dark.

May she never notice.

These day lilies have nothing to do with night or breaking, but they're lovely. My dad planted them so I think of him when they come out.

NOTES

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• And thanks, as always, for reading.

Yours,
Kelsey Andrews