the most beautiful broken of hearts

When I say I am broken, it is a rejoicing declaration. When I sing of despair, it is a song that is addictively sweet to the left-of-center tuned ear – the fractured ear, the tighroper of effort and ease ear, the ear of old sidewalks and sunbaked barn paint, the ear of an angsty hopeful old soul seven, the ear of my ear of my broken of hearts.

Perhaps I indulge heavily and often against the deluge of masked, buttoned-up and loosely lacquered happy. But to indulge is also to work, work very hard. I do. I work very hard and for that, if nothing else, can you forgive me the you-declared drama of my words and feelings? Can you simply dig for your own sweetly tender heart and work yourself? Very hard?

I work to know that the textural light seeping through the spaces between the broken pieces are me, too. To let these fall to the ground and sky would destroy me, but to seal them up would even more quickly. And who can pretend that it would hold very long anyway? The asylums are filled with those who forced shut the cracks or were parented by those wielding the most crushing of stapletapecement.

So I try. Try to remember to set aside that which would seal in and out the magic of the gape in favor of the simple graying twine my grandmother tied her packages with. Just enough, it is, to hold the parts in vicinity to each other lest Pluto receive one, the Grand Canyon another, and so on to the mortal and astral winds. Just enough is the way, I think I am learning. Just enough, the middle of tightness and looseness, as the Vidyadara said then and his students so often since. Just enough to leave space for the brilliant flashes that open up upon themselves for love of the air let in and the music, dear god the music, let out.

If you are my friend, you will let me break and tie, and smile with it, softly if even a smidgen of courage can hold you there in that tension so tangible. The stamping of feet at and the running of miles from crusting broken edges cannot love anything. It cannot love anything. You will not demand the duct tape of our day in order to be with me. My partners use their own grandmother’s twine and they are easy to recognize by their eyes and crests, both a little fallen but sitting aloft nonetheless on either side of sweetly stretched lips ready to sing or already singing. And you will let me love deeply the ooze from your cracks, too. And the cracks. And the everyday shattering of the wishes to love us under an everyday sky held by a most beautiful everyday gaze, the most beautifully broken of hearts.

Visit more photos of Maja Petric’s Cracking, a live art installation.

~ by HeatherArtLife on March 31, 2010.