The Image of Our Hearts
Heartbreak is, in a way, a misnomer. If the heart was truly broken, we wouldn’t feel a thing. But the experience of heartbreak is defined by an unbearable pain, which is really an ultimate aliveness, and a deep intimacy with our body. It’s not only working - but working hard.
When we are heartbroken, we are utterly undone by the world’s perceived indifference and injustice. Time commands us to forget eternity (because to love is to imagine eternity) as it goes on undisturbed.
We use the language of destruction to describe a broken heart in testament to its violence. A broken heart is thought to be like a collapsed building, something to be rebuilt and repaired; even though we will then live on with a misshapen and porous centre. The raw materials of our hearts cannot be replaced. All rebuilds bear the spirit of their history.
But Mary Oliver offers us another way to see it. When our hearts break, they don’t crumble and fall apart, they “break open and never close again, to the rest of the world.” Love, then, would become something closer to what Erich Fromm imagined it to be. For Fromm, to love someone is to love the humanity within them: “If a person loves only one person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love.”
By having our hearts opened to the world we grow into our humanity. A love so singular and unrelenting can derail our attention from all the things worthy of it, and all the people who are craving and calling for it as the source of their redemption.
In keeping with the analogy, we talk about an individual having a key to another’s heart. As if the heart is like a house, locked up until that one person arrives, miraculously, and finally comes home to you, to where they belong. When they find us, they help us to find ourselves. They find us.
To take Mary Oliver’s idea seriously draws an entirely different image of our hearts. A heart is like a crystal rock. It’s not hollow and fragile. It is dense and armoured. When it breaks, it doesn’t shatter and become useless. It cracks open to reveal what it was all along, to reveal what we had been hiding from ourselves and the world.
In other words, it isn’t love that helps us find ourselves, but heartbreak.
Heartbreak as Revelation
There is, perhaps, no real life without heartbreak. An unbroken heart solidifies illusions and upholds an unreal world with imaginary people and unreasonable, inhuman expectations. After all, when it all goes so disastrously wrong, how much of our agony is disbelief?
Life begins with heartbreak. We cannot care for something without risking ourselves. And the world disappears at the point where caring ends. Heartbreak is the price of living wholeheartedly. Pain is the only route towards joy and ourselves. And “grief is the price we pay for love” and it is a price we will always be willing to pay, no matter what we claim whilst mourning.
By extension, brokenness is a precondition for wholeness. Especially in a world that replaces instinct and intuition with personality and purpose. Hearts are made to break. To let the lies and false impressions, which constitute their solidity, crumble. And, in the process, to uncover their strength.
The world looks different after heartbreak. But the reward for suffering is consciousness. And if you let it, sadness, in all its ironic cruelty, will offer experiences of joy and wholeness that were previously unavailable and unimaginable. Pain gives you a place in this world and amongst its people. And, in another irony, tragedy reveals itself to be the richest source of beauty.
Only broken hearts can know love. Not just because they were willing to risk themselves, but also because they are capable of loving enough to be broken.
If life is an education in love then heartbreak is just a lesson. The necessary pain of revelation, self-understanding and wisdom. Hearts that have been broken are much more reliable and sincere.
Hearts are Born Broken
Love is self fulfilling. In the sense that love fulfils us. It overcomes our separation and self-alienation. We call our partners our “other half” because they are and have always been a part of ourselves. So that when love finds us, we find ourselves too because we have, in a way, returned to ourselves.
This image is a gift from ancient wisdom. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes initiates his friends into the secrets of love and its power. He retells the myth that there were originally three sexes: hermaphrodite, male, and female. Each human being was a rounded whole, with four legs and four arms. They were able to reproduce independently. But these humans were too powerful and arrogant. They constituted a threat to the Gods. Zeus decided that the humans needed to be bisected. We were left with half a body and half a heart. From then on, reproduction had to happen through the means of sexual intercourse. But, more fundamentally, from then on every human would seek out someone who would restore their former wholeness.
This suggests something slightly different about heartbreak. That is, that we are all already heartbroken. We are born with broken hearts. What results is a life of yearning and reaching out for love. That is our condition.
How can something already broken break again? Firstly, there is no limit to how much things can break. Cliffs become grains of sand. Secondly, it is not broken in the way we would typically imagine it. The heart is solid and functional. It’s just missing half of itself. This is the journey our hearts take as they recover from loss. After a while they solidify again, but they’re no longer whole.
But I think this is a misguided question. In a conversation with a therapist, I confessed that I didn’t want to feel sadness because I was afraid that it would break me. She told me that, “people who are afraid of breaking and falling apart are usually already broken.” This is a psychoanalytic idea that “the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.” Abandonment, rejection of our true selves and so on. Perhaps, this is also true of our hearts. The heart’s need for someone else reveals its brokenness. A heart that fears heartbreak has already been broken.
This brokenness manifests itself in the heart’s quiet and troubling questions, that are whispered to us as it becomes more exposed and vulnerable. In Chip Dodd’s book, The Voice of the Heart, he lists questions that our hearts continually asks us: What’s the point? Is there more? Will I ever be loved? How much longer can I do this? He writes that:
The truth is that, as he goes on to say: “Answers are not always easily found and are rarely painless when we learn them.”1
When our hearts are broken by pursuits and relationships, that ache is not new. It is a pain that had been sitting there all along because we had refused to answer it when it asked us who we were and if we were sure. If our hearts cannot be silenced, we must speak with them.
To love another, my friend told me, is to protect their heart as if it were your own. But she didn’t go far enough. Their heart is your heart. Only love can save us.