My Autumn, by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1929. Wikimedia Commons
“I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
How is it that fragments can be useful and valuable to us?
This first quotation is full of meaning and relevance in relation to our understanding of why fragments are important to us all in life. (Quotations, too, are fragments of a whole. They can be small extracts from a book, a poem, or a long speech. They can give us a flavour of the whole work, a taste of it.)
In concentrating on a fragment of a flower, rather than painting the whole, O’Keefe ‘zoomed in’ on the very essence of her subject, moving deep into its heart and thus discovering more of its true form and its intrinsic qualities.
These deeper aspects can be missed when we look at the plant as a whole. Whilst we might lose the totality of the image, we will discover much more, we will find different viewpoints, new perspectives and fresh approaches if we develop more concentrated ways of seeing familiar objects.
We are encouraged by O’Keefe to seek for the soul of the flower, peering deep within its inner profundity. This can almost feel like intrusiveness, for now we are seeing aspects that are usually ‘private,’ hidden from a cursory view.
The artist’s statement can be further explicated by these words…
“These fragments, these shivers of my heart
Are mere lifetimes enclosed in a minute..”Zubair Ahsan
Taking just one moment, one experience, one aspect of our lives can be enlightening, for it can reflect the whole, like a hologram. The principle of the hologram is that, within each of its parts, there is contained the complete entity.
Lunar Olivine Basalt 15555 from Apollo 15 in National Museum of Natural History. 2011. Author Wknight94 talk. Wikimedia Commons
Just one moment can reflect a life; a fragment of lunar rock can give us untold information about the entire moon, one drop of water can reflect the entirety of the seas, one hair on our head can give information about our whole selves. Fragments. Fragments of life that all have stories much bigger than themselves.
- The fragmented self
Woman dissociating and fragmented. Dyversions. 2016. Wikimedia Commons
“I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a whole, whereas I was made of multitude of selves, of fragments.”
Anaïs Nin
The fragmented self is phrase often used to describe those who are unable to ‘get themselves together,’ whose personalities feel broken and ‘fragmentary.’
- Dissociative identity disorder
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, occurs as a result of severe childhood trauma. There is memory loss, uncertain identity and the splitting of the personality into many other identities, or ‘alters.’ It also involves conditions like depression, anxiety, PTSD, detachment and other mental disorders.
Dissociation can occur when a traumatic and very stressful experience feels too much to bear or to manage. In her book All of Me: How I Learned to Live with the Many Personalities Sharing My Body (co-authored with Jeff Hudson), Kim Noble gives a graphic description of her own experiences of DID, revealing that she has about twenty ‘alters,’ other distinct personalities, but each has no memory or awareness of the other. She sees herself as ‘sharing a body’ with the others.
Kim describes her condition as a splitting off, a fragmentation, in order to cope with horrific childhood abuse. Being one integrated personality would be unbearable. She was faced with denial of her experiences by those around her, with her abusers’ case being dismissed by police after sixteen months of investigation.
Denial of traumatic events is a natural way of coping with them, with the child or adult saying to themselves ‘this cannot be happening to me….’ and often mentally detaching from their bodies as a protection and a survival mechanism.
Often people feel shame about their DID, and hide this from others. When working with people with DID, it is important that the therapist recognises and values each of their personalities, rather than advocating repression or denial of these parts of the self.
The therapist will aim to encourage them to communicate with each other, to work together, helping fortify their co-operation with each other, rather than their separateness. This approach can help the client to integrate and develop awareness of their various identities.
- Psychotherapy and feeling broken and fragmented
Psychotherapy is also about repairing, or transforming human brokenness, and helping to put fragments of thought, memory and feeling into perspective. The therapist’s empathic and accepting stance can enable the client to feel more whole, less distressed and self-critical.
“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.”
“Beautiful are those whose brokenness gives birth to transformation and wisdom.”
John Mark Green
“No human being is constituted to know the truth… and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.”
William Osler
“Like the cotton-carder who combs tangled cotton into a long bundle of fibre, you take all my knotted fragments and comb them into light.”
Kamand Kojouri
Broken and healed people, at all stages of personal renewal, can be beautiful. Imagine how dull life would be if we all resembled a prototype of human robotic perfection. The Japanese have a process called kintsukuroi, in which they mend broken pots with gold.
Wine pot with gold lacquer repair. Korea. 1100-50, stoneware, curved and incised under celadon glaze, repaired in Japan. Wikimedia Commons.
“We too can repair our cracks with gold And glow again. Crazed by life, More beautiful than ever before.”
Scott Hastie
The repaired piece is changed by the breaking and the recovery; different, but still beautiful. Maybe it will be more valuable, as there is evidence of a past, of its history. Something precious has been added. There is also a powerful visual indicator of the pot’s innate resilience.
Thus it is with the wounded and broken person; repair and improvement are always possible. Out of bad, sometimes there emerges something good, enhancing, reinforcing. This may take the form of new learning, resilience and courage. People are often inherently stronger than we could possibly imagine. We are born with truly amazing resources and we need to learn to trust and fortify these in ourselves and others, as we learn to cope with our broken selves in a world of fragmentation and brokenness.
“The struggles will become your story, And that’s the beauty of Kintsugi. Your cracks can become the most beautiful part of you.”
Candice Kumai
“North Star: If you give these fragmented parts enough light and air, amazing things happen. You learn that everyone can be on deck and unafraid: your gremlin selves and your holy selves.”
Helen S. Rosenau
- Fragments of memory
William Merritt Chase – A Memory, In the Italian Villa. Gandalf’s Gallery. Flickr
“What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.”
Tim O’Brien
This quotation is reminding us that memories of the past tend to be fragmented, and not in complete and ordered story-form. We tend to remember important moments, pieces of the past, perhaps sensations, smells, glimpses, short snippets of experiences. We recollect scattered details, rather than longer periods of time.
Our memories can be absolutely wonderful or dreadfully painful. They can be sweet and pleasant; they can also be painful and disturbing, or somewhere in between. Memories are not black and white. They represent a full-colour miscellany of our experiences and therefore can produce a mixture of feelings in us.
“The past is like a broken mirror— you don’t remember but fleeting glimpses of it, sparse moments over many years, all combined in that distorted and fragmented picture. Whenever you try to gather the fragments of the past, it hurts your soul, just as shards of broken glass hurt your fingertips while trying to collect them from the ground.”
Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi
- Fragments and creativity
The Snail, 1953 by Henri Matisse
“Great ideas emerge from useless fragments of thoughts.”
Michael Bassey Johnson
The ‘fragments of thoughts’ that we all have can be immensely creative; many writers and artists have a notepad beside their bed, as many such thought-fragments can emerge during the night. These can feel as if they have come straight from the unconscious, disconnected, random, unprocessed, yet they can turn out to be highly meaningful and valuable. Such small pieces of creativity can lead to greater things, to wonderful larger entities like a book or a painting.
These scattered bits of thought are often the beginning of something bigger and significant; great works often start like this, rather than emerging from initial massive notions or grand ideas. It is, therefore important not to lose or dismiss these fragments; by way of example, George de Mestral noticed on a morning walk that burrs stuck to his dog’s fur. Despite being irritated by this, he had a sudden thought that it would be worth examining them under a microscope. This led to the invention of Velcro. His ‘thought-fragment’ certainly led to much greater things.
Burrs in Warren County, Indiana. 2007. Author Huw Williams (Huwmanbeing). Wikimedia Commons
Our lives, made up of many disparate aspects, are a constant struggle to create wholeness, to integrate and balance the different aspects of ourselves and our experiences. Out of the different pieces, the fragments, we aim to create a sense of meaning, of unity, of completeness. We make links, create bonds with others, constantly attempting to reconcile the inner and outer divisions we know exist.
The experience of being human means that our lives are, inevitably, made up of many different and separate aspects, such as work commitments, family life, relationships, stories, past and present events, beliefs, feelings and experiences. We try constantly to bring these disparate parts of ourselves and our lives together into a consistent, connected, meaningful whole. Out of the scattered fragments, we strive creatively for completeness; in different forms, in different ways, this is a lifelong process for us all.
Girl at a Sewing Machine – 1921 – Edward Hopper. Wikimedia Commons
“She holds the fabric, threads running through her fingers, a quiet rhythm of time. Each patch, a piece of her, moments sewn into the seams, stories stitched into the space between.
The jacket grows beneath her hands, a map of warmth and strength, woven by the quiet care of a woman who knows how to make something whole from fragments.”
N’Zuri Za Austin
© Linda Berman