‘Go to your broken heart,’ by Jack Hirschman.
And ‘if you don’t have one’, Hirschman urges us, go ‘get one.’ But how to get a broken heart. How to let yourself know when you’re hurting and how to meet that broken heart.
‘Be sincere’ Hirschman reckons and more besides.
To go to my broken heart, I need stillness away from the noise and hullabaloo of other people. Extraverted by nature, I still need to shear off time to be alone and still.
A stillness I find mostly in the quiet dark of night, cocooned safely in my bed when thoughts can tumble freely into my mind, or in other moments when I allow myself to sit before the blank screen of my computer before putting down words.
My broken heart. Memories:
Scene one: Seven years old lying in bed alone, my sister asleep and my mother has promised to bring me a final cup of tea as she poured several for her house guests that evening. Aunts and Uncles. I waited and waited. Still, she did not come. It did not do to get out of bed to remind her and cop my father’s rage, so I lay there and waited. Till sleep softened my pain.
Scene 2: Seated on a bench at the East Camberwell railways station three years later, still with a younger sister, waiting for our mother to return on the train after work on a Saturday. No longer willing to stay at home alone with our drunken father, even in the presence of other older siblings who were terrified as well but some better equipped to escape, though not our elder sister, whose fortune was dictated by birth order. Next inline after our mother for his abuse.
Train after train pulled into the station. And like the trains you see in movies, the person sought after does not alight and the waiting continues.
I have long adopted an approach when I’m caught in a situation of needing to wait, I will do something else to while away the agonies of the uncertainty. When will they arrive? Will they arrive? Will the hoped for event happen or will the worst come to bear?
How to visualise a broken heart:
As Catholics we were introduced early. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, red and encircled, with a wreath of thorns round its widest point and crucifix in its cleavage.
Considered ornamental by some. I can imagine it cast in silver and draped around some girl’s neck on a fine chain. The broken heart, again the heart shape children learn, regardless of religion, with an arrow struck from Cupid with his bow. It’s meant to suggest a person hopelessly in love. Hopeless because love, like a broken heart ,can enchain you against your will for longer than might be comfortable.
Another word for broken heart of grief, that thing with feathers, according to Emily Dickinson or others who try to emulate her words. Sorrow, the dark night of the soul, the broken heartedness of unrequited love, the loss of your beloved.
During the mysterious phase of life called childhood, it’s hard to grasp the complexity of our broken hearts. To even know what it means when we are sad and hurting. Our bodies tell us, but our minds cannot always offer words to share the experience with trusted others who might help us carry the load, especially when the hurt is caused by others. Witness my mother’s failure to bring me that late night cup of tea.
These wounds pile up. They enter the storehouse of your memory. Sealed off. Then the danger they might sneak out years later when other griefs emerge to piggyback on the first.
They pile one on top of the other when something tiny can trigger us. We might wonder why and if we have the chance to explore the brokenness of our heats with a helpful therapist who listens, is curious and tries to understand us better, then we might go further in unpicking the overload.
The overdetermined overload of our experience which narrows into a knee jerk response even when something tiny upsets us. That is, if we can’t find better ways of coping with our broken hearts, other than stockpiling our griefs and grievances to the point the cruel hoard of our memory cannot hold together anymore and spills out onto helpless others. In our misguided rage, it swallows us up in unresolved grief.
So, as Jack Hirschman writes,
Go to your broken heart
and if you think you don’t have one find one.
To get one be sincere.
Learn sincerity of intent by letting life enter,
because you’re helpless really to do otherwise,
even as you try escaping….
“How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not ‘the thing with feathers.’ The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.” ― Woody Allen, Without Feathers. Sorry, never been able to take that Dickinson quote seriously since.
Broken hearts. One of those lazy expressions lazier still poets use that drive me mad. We need to come up with better metaphors. I wrote a poem yesterday. A girl I knew from school died in her sleep a few days ago. And my only concrete memory of her was flicking her bra strap. She was the first girl in our class to need to wear a bra and we boys, the day it appeared, behaved appallingly. She, on the other hand, responded as an adult—albeit a young adult—might to being tormented by a horde of childish boys. Not that any of that went in the poem. But the lesson learned did even though it was some years later I’d grown an empathy gland or whatever bit of us governs our humanity.
Was I broken hearted to learn of her death? No. I’ve not seen her in fifty years. But something in me ached.