Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing pottery by filling the cracks with gold. It tells you that damage represents opportunity and that a broken thing can become a thing of life-enhancing wonder. Which is, as it happens, what I learnt when I used a combination of screwdrivers, YouTube and eBay to replace the faulty motor on my Dyson.
I have always been the person in my family who fixes watchstraps and tweezers the loops back together on broken necklaces, but this was a new frontier. Since then I have replaced hard drives, bedsprings and integral parts of doors. I have discovered that plumbing, for the most part, is incredibly logical and easy, with the minor exception of that time I broke our house’s entire water system and had to call an actual plumber. Whose eyes, in retrospect, may have rolled.
My kids have a favourite song called Dumb Ways to Die and there is a line in it about “doing your own electrical work”, which I have taken to heart and which is, I expect, the only reason that our many ageing and unsatisfactory light switches and plug sockets remain unbothered and, very possibly, that I remain able to write this column.
When it comes to devices, though, I have run amok with huge success. Yes, I can change your phone screen. Probably. A few years ago the camera on my Samsung broke and I took the whole thing apart and inserted a new one. A phone camera. True, there was that time I melted an Android tablet by blasting for too long at the glue with a hairdryer. But we live and learn.
Hang on, you might be thinking. That’s not kintsugi. That’s just repair. Yet the point of kintsugi is that the whole concept of repair – returning something to precisely its former state – is a delusion. There will always be signs of intervention and they may represent enormous value, worth and pride. So why hide them? The trick, instead, is to think of repair as an act of creation. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it yourself. When your handbag or your watch cost a grand, there is no moral imperative to get out the superglue. Do, though, get out your Plato. In the Parmenides, he ponders the Ship of Theseus, which has been at sea for so long that all its timbers, one by one, rot away and are replaced. By the end, is it the same ship at all?
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Or, if you like your philosophy to be more Only Fools and Horses, ponder the equally famous conundrum of the broom that Trigger believes he has had for 20 years. “This old broom’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time,” he says. “So how,” Sid retorts, “can it be the same bloody broom?” If it is not the same broom, though, it is a new one – which means Trigger has built a broom. And which, going backwards, means I have built a smartphone. Not bad for an arts graduate, eh?
Even before repair, a crack or a tear is a change in the paradigm of your world. “Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg said, because damage offers you a glimpse of things unseen.
It was Adam Smith who formalised the idea of the division of labour, a concept that had been floating around since Socrates. He illustrated it with pins. “One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head,” and so on. With the idea being that you get a whole lot more pins made this way – as a production line, as a factory – than you would if each worker had to do entire pins by themselves. This is clearly true, although it has always bothered me that the eventual upshot of this sort of thing is clearly that everybody’s clothes will end up getting made by robots in distant factories, which may ultimately mean that nobody needs pins anyway.
The human cost of this, as Karl Marx noted, is alienation. For the godfather of communism, his point is unexpectedly individualistic. Yes, you might make more stuff as a cog in the wheel, but it is no fun being a cog. Worse, it makes you lost. As a worker in a factory, not only are you alienated from society and living the life of a machine, you’re even alienated from the actual stuff you’re making. Or, to put that another way, you work in a pin factory and you don’t even know how to make a pin. Your world is not your own.
In your house, right now, you’re wearing clothes you don’t know how to make, perhaps sitting on a chair made with wood from a forest you’ve never heard of, holding a phone with innards you have never seen. You live in a house full of stories. Your toaster, even, is a story. And, until you break it, it is a story you will never know.
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Whereas a piece of electrical tape holding the back of your phone together, a fresh strap on an inherited watch, a new hinge on your living room door that doesn’t quite match the other one, the formerly creaky step in your house into which, long after everybody else has forgotten, you will always remember that you once hammered a nail. They’re the broken heart that you mended, over time, with friends and wine and cold hard walks in the morning: your own kintsugi, your creation, your validation, your mark on the world.
Try to see the gold. Just maybe skip the plumbing.
