When I set forth on my trip to Washington, D.C., the media had focused their attention on the Vermeer Exhibit at the National Gallery. Few people knew about the Winslow Homer Exhibit simultaneously presented by the National Gallery. With only 21 paintings, Vermeer was the superstar with top billing and inter-national coverage. For most of the morning I was enthralled by the Dutch painter who reminds us of the beautiful in the daily-ness of life. I spent a brief time with Homer because I knew the exhibit would be on view in Boston in early 1996.

A stone’s throw from the White House is the Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Ave. On my way back to Georgetown, I decided to drop in since I’d never been inside this museum, but my real motive was respite from the sleet and snow that had turned December 12 into a gray, wintry day. The gallery on the first floor housed “Rick Dillingham: A Retrospective Exhibit.” I knew nothing about this artist and practically nothing about his art of pottery-making. Beautiful pottery of gloves, cones, cylinders, disks, and gas cans caught my eye. Molded and glazed to perfection, they glowed with intriguing geometric, abstract designs and variegated colors of burnished gold, and silver and ebony. Never an aficionado of pottery, I was both enchanted and baffled by this art form which was remarkably different. Dillingham is an artist of brinkmanship: He deliberately shatters his bisque-fired pot into pieces, paints each shard, a miniature canvas unto itself, and reconstructs the pot for refirement, allowing the mend marks to be visible. The reassembled pottery represents a new, transformed beauty that boldly declares its previous brokenness. In fact, its brokenness renders Dillingham’s creations more beautiful and unique. This is minimalism turned upside down, illustrating not so much that less is more but that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

The idea of taking what was broken, what man would consider useless, and transforming it into something more lovely haunted me on my return plane trip to Boston. The poet Edward A. Robinson says that most things break, including people. We all break down at some point in our lives either by physical or psychic illness. This is a fact of life. But great things can emerge from such breakage. I think of the poet Theodore Roethke who suffered a nervous breakdown but on recovery said, “That wasn’t a breakdown but a breakup!” because he emerged a saner and more whole man, perhaps a great poet. Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus after an illness and a spiritual crisis. John of the Cross wrote his greatest poetry while in prison, as the monks of his order tried to break his spirit. The poet Francis Thompson, broken by addiction to opium, emerged from his dark night to compose his luminous spiritual autobiography, “The Hound of Heaven.” T.S. Eliot emerged from his brokenness chronicled in “The Wasteland” to write his spiritual masterpiece of faith, the “Four Quartets.” C. S. Lewis left behind his atheism and loneliness to write “Surprised by Joy.” Dorothy Day out of her brokenness converted to Catholicism and founded the Catholic Worker movement and later wrote “The Long Loneliness.”

Dillingham’s pottery is an exhortation not to give up, not to despair. His small, unheralded exhibit reminded me of things I had forgotten, things I needed to remember, in my teaching.

My students and I were studying Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Lear in his egotism commands his three daughters to inform him how much each of them loves him. He reserves the largest and richest portion of his domain for his favorite daughter, Cordelia. When her time comes to express her love, she says, “Nothing, my lord.” Lear rejoins, “Nothing will come of nothing.” (1.1.6) When I inform my students that this line is the heart of the play, they look at me perplexed. And now after viewing Dillingham’s art, I believe I have a deeper understanding of how blind Lear is to say “Nothing will come of nothing.” Stripped of ego, power, soldiers, friends, kingdom, Lear is reduced to a zero. At zero point, King Lear breaks into being a whole man capable of compassion as he shifts his self-mesmerized gaze onto others. For the first time he empathizes with the suffering of his fellow men and women:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mays’t shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4. 35-43)

The naked, the homeless, the hungry, to these Lear had never given thought. And never would have had he not been broken: Himself naked, homeless, and hungry. Broken by misfortune, a king finally becomes a whole person.

...I can point out to my students that King Lear is broken by selfishness and a lack of self-knowledge. “He hath ever but slenderly known himself,” says one of his daughters. Together my students and I see that Lear creates most of his problems by his own brokenness, which he fails to acknowledge. The humility of self-knowledge could have prevented much pain and suffering. But suffering is the kiln through which we all must eventually pass. Malcolm Muggeridge said he never learned much about life or himself when things (time) went his way, only through suffering did he learn life’s most valuable lessons...

My favorite parable is the Prodigal Son which I see in different fashion now; it illustrates the theme of brokenness transformed into beauty. The younger son takes his inheritance, squandering it in a life of dissipation until he is a homeless and broken man. When he is feeding the pigs, he realizes that his life is shattered. He decides to return home. His father sees him from a distance and runs to him. No questions asked. Forgiveness given unconditionally. In fact, his father orders his servants to clothe him in the finest robe, to adorn his hand with a ring and to shod his feet in sandals and to kill the fatted calf for a feast to celebrate the return of his lost son. The father transforms his broken son by the beauty of acceptance and forgiveness symbolized by the new, fine clothes, rings and feast. What is lost is found again, what is broken is whole again...

Dillingham’s pottery. King Lear. The Prodigal Son. All of us in our brokenness. The potential always of being broken into beauty. Little did I know on that wintry December day that broken pots could be so eloquent!

© Robert Waldron who is on the faculty of Boston Latin School where he has taught English Literature for the past 27 years. This article first appeared in Feb. 16 ‘96 issue of THE PILOT . Reprinted with permission.