Rubin's Broken Vase
In “Rubin’s Vase,” I told the story of a series of coincidences surrounding my struggle to find the perfect ending to my novel: I By Fire.
Torn between two incompatible endings, and unable to choose one, I fantasized about making it so ambiguous that the reader could flip back and forth between them, almost creating a kind of optical illusion, like Rubin’s Vase. Then, I came across a book about the biblical story of Joseph and discovered the figure of Reuben, Joseph’s brother, who was famously marked by indecision. Finally, I noticed the French label on a piece of double-sided Scotch Tape, which to my surprise - given that I’d been thinking about how to stick two endings together - and saw that was ruban adhésif double-face.
Now, Carl Jung said that a dream should not be interpreted in isolation, but rather as part of a series. He writes:
“An obscure dream, taken in isolation, can hardly ever be interpreted with any certainty. For this reason, I attach very little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. A relative degree of certainty is reached only in the interpretation of a series of dreams, where the later dreams correct the mistake we have made in handling those that went before.”
— C. G. Jung, CW 16, para. 322, “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis”
I wondered if I could interpret my series “Rubins” this way. However, the series first had to complete itself.
On the day I published “Rubin’s Vase,” I’d been reading about the 17/23 Enigma, the apparent phenomenon in which the numbers 17 and 23 appear together in many notable events. That afternoon, in the lunch room at work, one of my colleagues sat across from me with a brown paper bag on the table in front of her. The bag caught my attention because it had a large logo on it:
1/7 Duro: Dubl-Life: 100% Percent Recycled Paper. 60% PCR
At the sight of the “1/7,” the 17/23 Enigma immediately came to mind. And at the sight of the words “Dubl-Life,” the question at the heart of “Rubin’s Vase” - how can I write two endings at the same time? - also came to mind.
What where the odds?
While I ate, my aunt called and told me that my grandmother wasn’t feeling well; she’d gone to pick her up and brought her over to her house. I passed by my aunt’s on my way home to check on Nonna, and when I got there, I noticed a book sitting on the coffee table, which I’d never seen before. The book was called, of all things, Early Rubens - it was about the painting of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Ruben.
What were the odds?
Had my aunt not brought my Nonna over, I never would’ve gone to her house - on the day I published “Rubin’s Vase” - and I never would’ve seen it.
As soon as I got home, I started reading about Rubens. I asked Chat GPT to describe the characteristics unique to Rubens’ early work. Right away, this jumped out at me:
Rubens treated painting as an open, revisable intellectual problem rather than a fixed execution of a preconceived design.
This is a crucial distinction.
Most late‑Renaissance and early Baroque painters worked through:
finished drawings or cartoons,
clear compositional plans,
confident, largely irreversible execution.
Early Rubens, by contrast:
repeatedly changed his mind on the canvas,
revised anatomy, spacing, and narrative emphasis mid‑work,
allowed the painting itself to become a site of thinking rather than transcription.
This is well documented by technical studies of his early canvases.
Rubens repeatedly changed his mind on the canvass.
I repeatedly changed mine on the page.
How could it be that I kept encountering the same idea, the same theme, namely, indecision, in connection with “Rubin”, “Reuben,” “ruban” - and now “Rubens”?
Finally, that month, my book club was reading Better Not Bitter by Yusuf Salaam, one one of the men imprisoned after being wrongfully convicted in the 1989 Central Park Jogger Case. In the book, Salaam marvels at how his fate seemed to echo the fate of the biblical figure of Joseph (or the Quranic figure of Yusuf), as if his name contained a premonition of his destiny.
This blew my mind. It was only when I came across a book about Joseph that I first discovered Reuben, which I connected - via the echo of his name - to Rubin’s Vase.
A few pages later, in a caption beneath a photo of Yusuf and “Kevin together in brotherhood,” Salaam writes:
In this photo, I’m wearing one of the many T-shirts I created and designed myself. I would lay down Scotch tape over a shirt and draw my design with a pencil […] The scotch tape acted as a template, and this became my version of silk-screening.
Are you kidding me?
Double-sided Scotch tape! Ruban adhésif double-face!
Suddenly, it was if Jung’s method of dream interpretation, in which the “later dreams correct the mistakes we have made in handling those that came before,” began to bear fruit. I came to see that the series of coincidences was symbolic of something much deeper than the mere search to find the perfect ending to I By Fire. It had to with my other double-life, so to speak, my true double-life, namely, my life as a writer and my life as, well - everything else.
Integrating writing into my ordinary life is, quite often, a war. These two aspects of myself are in constant battle. In my most difficult moments, this battle becomes a question: which path should I take? Can I write and still be a regular person with a career, family, and meaningful relationships? Do I have to choose one path, or could I have it both ways? For me, the ultimate goal would be to finally integrate these sides of myself into one coherent and balanced life.
Sometimes, when things get really tough, like how after years and years of writing, I still can’t figure out how to write the ending, I sink into a very a particular mood, and I always use the same metaphor to describe it. When I can walk into a room and appear more or less put-together, present myself well, and put on a good face, even though it’s chaos on the inside - I always feel like I’ve duct-taped myself together.
I guess it had to be duct-tape because Scotch tape - even double-sided Scotch tape - wasn’t strong enough.
With tape on my mind, all these random ideas and images began to coalesce. I saw that the structure of Joseph’s story seemed to parallel Jung’s method of letting the later dreams in a series establish a wider context in which to understand the earlier ones. If you looked an individual episode in Joseph’s life on its own, the situation looks bleak. But if you wait for the story to unfold - if you let the series of even complete itself - you’ll see get a glimpse of the whole picture. Eventually, Joseph is called on to interpret Pharoah’s dream - (Ha! Of course!) - which becomes the turning point in his life: Pharoah appoints Joseph as second‑in‑command in Egypt. And the only reason Joseph was in Pharoah’s orbit to begin with was that he was betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery.
This told me that I had to treat my life the way Rubens treated his art: as an “open, revisable intellectual problem.” If I looked at single moment on its own, like my struggle to find the perfect ending, or a rejection from a publisher, or whatever the case may be, things can look quite bleak. But when the full series of events unfolds, these moments can take on an entirely different meaning.
But what does any of this have to do with tape?
When I forced things together myself, like trying to writing two incompatible endings at the same time, it was like trying to put the pieces of a broken vase together with tape. If it was possible for someone put all the pieces together, it certainly wasn’t me. After all, the hand that brought Joseph to the thrown of Egypt was not his own.
I had to give up control and let thing happen on their own time.
And it was as if the way these Rubins appeared - in a series, slowly across time, their full meaning emerging only gradually - echoed the very truth they were trying to express.