In Praise of Jigsaw Puzzles
Essay for Somerset House Long Reads, 29 September, 2020
‘Doing a puzzle is a bit like doing yoga exercises…a very welcome relaxation from your daily routine. It is a labour of love, challenge and light relief all in one. Doing puzzles is exciting, with invigorating emotional ups and downs. Piece for piece, as you search, find and search again, your feeling of achievement grows. One person can work on a puzzle – or a whole group. Why don’t you make your next party a puzzle one?’
— Ravensburger®, from the box of puzzle No.157952, ‘Kitten in the Apple Tree’, nd.
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When I embark on a jigsaw puzzle, I am taking on a problem with a single, achievable solution. This is what I want a puzzle to do for me, to be for me. I accept that I live in a world of complexity, nuance, greyscale, a quantum universe in constant flux. But a puzzle is not my life and it is not the world; it’s something static and eventually quite obedient. Jigsaw puzzles provide me a temporary reprieve, an escape. A place of simplicity dressed as complexity. The opposite of life.
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For a solo puzzle venture, one thousand pieces is my sweet spot. It will take time, so I can dip in and out of it, lose myself in it for five minutes or several hours. But I will get there. I will be able to smooth the surface with my palm, feeling the joins across a kitsch picture I like well enough but that I’m not attached to. Then I leave it for a couple of days, no more than that, break the pieces carefully into the box. I do not glue them and frame them to keep them forever. This is not an event, not even a milestone. I never aspired to climb Everest. When the puzzle is complete, I’m ready to return it to the charity shop and move on.
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I almost always buy my jigsaw puzzles second hand. People ask if I worry that there will be pieces missing, but this has only happened to me once and, to be honest, it yielded my life’s most surprisingly tender moment. When I dumped the pieces out to seek out the edges, a little slip of paper came too, cut to the exact shape of the missing piece. This gesture from a stranger answers every question I might ever entertain about humanity’s essential nature. Sure, it’s not a good idea to trust blindly all the time, but people who love puzzles deserve the benefit of the doubt.
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Some of Georges Perec’s observations on jigsaw puzzles in Life: A User’s Manual (1978) strike me as dated, if indeed they were ever apt (real puzzle lovers eschew cardboard puzzles in favour of wooden ones? Seriously?), but most of what he asserts rings true in my experience. We are of a mind on the question of the picture on a puzzle. He writes:
Contrary to a widely and firmly held belief, it does not really matter whether the initial image is easy (or something taken to be easy – a genre scene in the style of Vermeer, for example, or a colour photograph of an Austrian castle) or difficult (a Jackson Pollock, a Pissarro, or the poor paradox of a blank puzzle). It’s not the subject of the picture, or the painter’s technique, which makes a puzzle more or less difficult, but the greater or lesser subtlety of the way it has been cut…
However, my distinction in terms of the image is less about difficulty (I have only ever accessed the machine-cut cardboard puzzles which Perec subordinates to hand-cut wooden ones). It’s about attachment to process. I have a strong preference for puzzles that don’t culminate in an image that I find especially pleasing. I don’t want to be responsible for the completion or not of the Sistine Chapel; give me the stupid basket of kittens any day.
When I was working on my PhD (a protracted and maddening encounter with racism, misogyny, class bias, ableism and the inevitable gaslighting that cements these oppressions into the neoliberal university experience) I moved continuously between my laptop and a jigsaw puzzle. When my frustration with the writing reached a zenith and my mind felt full of static, I’d turn to my puzzle and let my writing brain run in the background. And when I’d had enough of dealing with some intricate dangle of foliage or impossible block of blue, for example, and nothing seemed to fit together, the composition of tricky sentences and the building of arguments seemed like a piece of cake. Back and forth, each problem took its turn as the problem, and both required a similar commitment to just getting it done. Completion, not brilliance, not even beauty, was the goal of each.
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