Guest Blog Post, Christopher Kuhl: Fractures

The world is fractured. History is fractured. The ecosystem is fractured. Is the universe as we know it fractured? Is there a broken space beyond which there is another universe? Or is it a joke, like the “Fractured Fairytales”? Fractures shape each of us, giving us to do whatever we were meant, and have the desire to do. Yet it is not always what we want or expect.

I criticize the dark, the light; the night, the day; the sun, the moon and the stars. Night seems a betrayal for diurnal people, yet there are people who are nocturnal, by choice of work, or temperament, or a combination: do they take a job because it is a night job, or does the job transform them into a creature of the night?

I am fractured: a Jew, a Christian; introverted, extroverted; an Estonian, an Italian, with a piece missing that would help to heal one of my fractures: conflicted as a Jew by my German blood. I am an ethnic orphan, but embraced by parents who fight and beat each other, and then caress one another with long, broad strokes, and disappear into their room. As a child, I wasn’t sure what went on in there, but if it was the master bedroom, who was the master guiding the marital ship?

I am a glutton; I am a skeleton; I scream and I am silent. I am the first generation in this country, born of a mother, guided by my grandmother, who were the only ones of the family to survive the Holocaust. They were truly displaced persons, not refugees: they were not fleeing for a principle that threatened their lives in their country; they had no country or place to go, no verifiable identity. They, like many DPs, were given new papers: birth certificates, religious identities, names, papers for a tight-fisted, antisemitic president, who thought they were Nazi spies and refused to let them in. Think of the SS St. Louis in 1933, forbidden to land in the United States for fear of the evils these thousand Jews threatened: they were forced to turn back and return to Europe, where many of those on this “luxury cruise” (which is how it was billed, but the passengers didn’t buy it for a minute: they were refugees) ended up in the death camps, the labor camps, dying just like everyone else. Even Anne Frank, put into a camp, was no more heroic than her fellow inmates, screaming, fighting over bread, soup; dying of typhus two weeks before the camp was liberated. Saintly Anne: no less fractured than anybody else, but fractured in circumstances designed specifically to bring such features out in their many ways.

Fractured, I am a man who is a woman who is a man; a woman who is a man who is a woman. LGBTQ! Peaceful, wanting a quiet, loving family life, and the others who persecute them: they are God’s abomination.

Fractured, I am well-educated, but for what matters in my life—writing—I am an autodidact; I am wise, I am a drooling idiot. Disciplined, I am loose, narcissistic: I look to the heavens (if there is such a place; it depends upon your beliefs), but my feet are walking to Sheol. Or is there, in fact, no afterlife, no paradise, purgatory or hell. I’m taking my chances, I know, risking the evil eye, and by the time I know, it’ll be too late: I’ll either be awash in endless liquid fire, or I’ll disappear, soulless: a bit of space dirt.

I am fractured, fractured. I am the hunter and the prey. I am honest and a cheat. And so, in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness, I lie alone, or with a companion whom I may or may not know, and come face to face with myself, in a shattered glass.