I listened to the podcast This American Life while walking in the pre-dawn neighborhood solitude this morning. For some reason, I am excited about the segment of the episode that I had a chance to hear. It was entitled All the King’s Horses and featured - yes - Humpty Dumpty. You remember the nursery rhyme?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
The question becomes: can something be broken so badly that nothing can fix it? In the first segment, the narrator recounts the story of a father/son relationship and the impact of an event that occurred during the son’s teenage years. Relationships can be shattered into shards but, like Humpty Dumpty, do they have to sit on the ground in broken pieces and slime? Can things (material, mental, relational, global, local, political, environmental, etc) be so irreparably damaged that the unassembled pieces are all that’s left?
At the conclusion of the episode, David Kestenbaum (the narrator) reveals that there was an earlier version of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, not the same as the one we know. It goes like this:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Four-score men and four-score more
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.
Hmmmm. Different version indeed.
In the podcast segment, the listener can hear how the relationship between the father and the son rearranged itself. In fact, “something is broken” is the theme of many songs, books, movies, myths, personal stories, and more. We human beings shatter things and often immediately consider them unusable, unfixable, gone. But really? Give it some time. Stay curious. See how the thing (whatever it is) reshuffles itself. There can be surprises that startle, confuse, delight, or astonish you.
The world is like that.
PS. I’m curious to see if, after the 2024 elections, the US’s experiment in democracy will prove to be thriving, or beyond repair, or will it rearrange itself somehow 🤷🏻♀️?
Here is a link to this week’s podcast: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/827/all-the-kings-horses
I somehow believe that a resurrection is always possible as long as someone still wants it to happen.
With future advances in biotech we will even be able to bring back the dinosaurs if we so choose. Some things can be restored. But short of perfect mastery of Time itself, entropy rules and we have to accept that the scattered light of today's sea can never be recalled, and the laughter of our small children beholding that sea is snatched away by the winds beyond recall. Make room. Make room. It's a profound topic, Gracie.