Following the Artists
Kintsugi and the Cellist of Sarajevo
This week, I was reading Susan Cain’s book, “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole” and was reminded of the story of the “Sarajevo Cellist”, Vedran Smajlovic. Smajlovic, a renowned cellist during the war in Bosnia/Herzegovina who caught the world’s attention by playing Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor" for 22 days in the bombed-out city square where 22 people had died by mortar shell as they waited for food. When asked if he was crazy for playing in an active war zone, he reportedly responded, “Why is no one asking the people dropping bombs if they are crazy?”
What does this act of resistance, this commitment to beauty and goodness in places of horror and evil, do to the human spirit? In Smajlovic’s case, it sparked a movement of musicians playing in bombed-out buildings or streets under attack and taking back life, affirming beauty even in the pained strains of music in a minor key. Music that finally comes to resolution, speaking that resolution into the void of destruction as an act of faith. Another story recounted in Cain’s book is of a BBC reporter during this same war, who asked an older man in a group of refugees stumbling out of the forest if he was Muslim or Croat, to which the man responded, “I am a musician.” This declaration, naming how music, how art was able to transcend the boundaries that were tearing his country apart. Despite rejecting the binaries presented to him the man was still fleeing for his life. There were people who wanted him dead. Still his words impart a sense of hope, a resilience, a fierce declaration of life and beauty in the face of death, destruction and chaos.
“We need to create into, not run away from brokenness.” -Mokoto Fujimura
What does this story of musicians in war-torn Europe have to do with Japanese pottery repair? This call from kintsugi artist and theologian Mokoto Fujimura who encourages us to create into brokenness, trauma, tragedy. Fujimura himself makes a practice of placing his body at sites of tragedy and creating art, doing kintsugi, in those places. He was in New York City and a victim himself of the horrors at ground zero during 9/11 but saw doing kintsugi in that place as a part of his healing journey.
This invitation certainly runs counter to our instincts of self-protection. I am compelled, none the less, by these two artists moving toward the places of pain to declare another reality; not stridently, or arrogantly, but with extreme vulnerability and determination that in some way beauty will prevail.
I know I am treading on thin ice here. There are so many ways that these ideas can and certainly have been misconstrued. What I am struck by and wonder about, is the actions of these two artists.
The world is full of pain, and heart-ache. The world is also full of love and beauty. A discipline of repair that is not just shaped by technique and skill, but is also infused with artistry and courage, that risks the very self in the offering, this is the stuff that can be transformed into something more than the sum of its parts. I wonder what would happen in the places of deep pain in the world if we were to follow the artists into those spaces?
