Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Kettle (1867–1869). Musée d'Orsay, Paris; public domain.
Tenderness As I wrote in the first post in this series, in a time that feels a ceaseless and relentlessly expanding assault – on compassion, interconnection, and kinship; on facts and science; on founding principles; on common sense – I’ve been turning for sustenance and recalibration to art’s ways of seeing. I’ve turned to works by others who've lived through crises for help in keeping open my own breadth of seeing, feeling, perspective. I’ve turned also, at times, to works offering oasis – glimpses of beauty, comedy, sometimes even distraction – for their balance-keeping reminder that existence’s scope and storehouse are larger than any of its stories or parts. (1) In duress, between times of action, people turn to one another for shared witness, for shared restoration, shared beauty. In the subways of Kyiv now being used as bomb-shelters, students paint and write poems, both shaping and holding their lives. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, I watched a television newscaster speak of feared riots and disorder. Behind him, people spending their nights outside of aftershock-vulnerable buildings sat in the dark with their children, singing. To work for a better future, you need first to survive. Then you need to find some way to get through each day, then the next, without being spiritually and emotionally flattened. Unflattening is one of art’s tasks. Singing changes what might seem unbearable into a weight shared with others. Each voice’s added texture and improvised harmony confirms the promise that every individual brings to communal grief or fear their singular, irreplaceable part. Brings also the promise that new notes, new interpretations, new ways of seeing and feeling can always be found. Multiplication of possibility is intrinsic to art, no matter its subject. It happens in ways specific, low to the ground, idiosyncratic, and humble. It happens in darkness’s singing, when a new voice adds a new pitch. It happens in a twelve-year-old’s online video’s not-quite-logical leaps of story. It happens in oil paint and canvas. Paul Cezanne, decoupling Western still-life painting from single perspective, declared, “With one apple, I will astonish all Paris.” * In the last post, I promised to explore further four qualities in poems that undo fixity and despair, that increase possibility-sense and enlarge a person’s condition of being: tenderness, humility, courage, and resilience. Galway Kinnell called “Tenderness” the secret title of every good poem. Since I first heard him say this, I’ve been running the test of it, and found it holds true. The more difficult a poem’s foreground subject, the more, it seems, it will hold somewhere within it – even if only in one half-hidden brushstroke in a field of darkness and cold – the balancing promise that existence is beloved, is wanted. This tenderness that good poems carry -- whatever their foreground subject -- reminds that the amygdala’s first responses of fear, anger, rejection, the heart’s and mind’s first shout of No!, are needed as information, but not all there is. Responses untempered by larger taking-in are brittle. They break, not forge, larger knowledge, wisdom, connection. The tenderness all good art carries – for me, tenderness suffuses the Cezanne painting above – asks us to enter, to embrace, to not turn against or away from our own lives and the lives of others. For a few first examples of poetry’s tenderness, three haiku: Horsefly, amid the blossoms. Friend sparrow, don’t eat it— Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) Spider, don’t worry— I keep house casually. Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) My epitaph: Wrote poems, Loved persimmons. Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) Each of these haiku holds tenderness. The first two, for beings often ordinarily swatted at. The third, for the poet’s own soon-departing life. Each includes, one might notice, awareness of death. Each cherishes life, chooses continuance for even life’s smallest beings and moments – even the horsefly whose bite on the passing poet’s leg would be painful; even a persimmon’s eating remembered while dying. Persimmons are famously astringent and bitter until fully ripe and ready to fall. This under-the-surface knowledge could be part of what Shiki was thinking of, facing his death, at 34, of tuberculosis. Yet somehow, I doubt it. Persimmons are also, simply and sufficiently, delicious. As being alive is. I think now also of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s only known poem, which holds with equal tenderness and lightness the words of a person saying farewell to his own existence: Little soul, drifting, gentle, my body’s guest and companion, where are you going to live now, naked, shivering, pale, never again to share our old jokes. Hadrian (76-138 CE) (2) * A poem of my own, written thirty years ago, has been coming to mind of late. I cannot help but believe that the current enactment of unfathomable cruelties was made possible only by fanning of fears; by deliberately created divide and partitioned allegiance; by the assertion that some lives are worth more than others. To try to find in oneself a sense of shared fate and affection both unblinded and undividing is hard, even harder in this moment's bludgeoning ethos. Yet this feels to me needed work for division’s ending. Late Prayer Tenderness does not choose its own uses. It goes out to everything equally, circling rabbit and hawk. Look: in the iron bucket, a single nail, a single ruby— all the heavens and hells. They rattle in the heart and make one sound. Jane Hirshfield The Asking: New & Selected Poems (NY: Knopf 2023); used by permission. I include this poem seeking a tenderness that goes beyond side-taking not to excuse those who cause inexcusable pain. I include it because I have wanted, lifelong, to understand my responsibility to what these words written decades ago were trying to find: a larger understanding of suffering’s causes, even when what passes between hawks and rabbits is insolubly fraught. * In thinking these past weeks about tenderness, I’ve been asking friends what rises first to mind when they hear the word. Most speak of the feeling of parents for their children; some of their feelings in caring for an aging parent. One friend, a Buddhist teacher, spoke of softness of heart, and wondered what the difference might be between tenderness and compassion. Another – the conversation took place over a restaurant dinner – answered, “Meat.” Young plants are also described by botanists, gardeners, and farmers as “tender.” The condition of tenderness carries always an element of softness. Tender meat comes from young animals. Tenderized meat has been pounded to break down aging’s strengthened but toughened fibers. (I will leave to the reader what thoughts might be drawn from this, when it comes to the course of our human lives.) Tenderness as a feeling falls into what are called the “complex” emotions, those that hold more than a single dimension at once. Complex emotions are always also relational: they arise in the conversation between our own lives and the lives of others. At the core of emotional tenderness is, first, the awareness that what we feel tender toward is beloved; then also, the urge to protect it. We feel tenderness for what is fragile, perishable, at risk, which we want to survive. Tenderness is evolutionarily useful. Human infants need care and safe-keeping in every moment; our love, but also our tenderness toward them, provide these. Young trees bend under wind or snow and continue to live. In biological tenderness, as in the emotional kind, there is always a vote for life, made with what powers are available to what is new, small, soft, and young— the power of smallness to hide, the power of softness to yield, the power of the young animal to be both adorable and adamant, unthreatening, curious, playful, and not yet entirely predictable or way-set. (3) Tenderness is unselfish. It wants to preserve what is loved for its own sake, not ours. Part of tenderness, too, is the penumbra-awareness of transience. To feel tenderness is to remember that all lives are mortal. * I will add here that tenderness does not preclude action. The parent races to stop a child curious about a buzzing ground-nest. The activist puts lawsuit or body in the path of a line of tanks. The distinction is that tenderness’s preserving actions are taken not out of anger, pride, greed, or self-interest, not out of vulnerability’s denial, not out of retribution. They are taken with, and on behalf of, love. Some decades ago, a concept was added to the list of basic strategies for survival in social animals. To the long-recognized strategies of “fight or flight” was added, as equally indispensable, “tend and befriend.” (I again leave it for readers to ponder the relevance of this for global political practices.) The word “tend” shares its root with “tenderness” (also with “attention,” “intention,” the small boats called “tenders,” and though a stretch here, “legal tender” – money). All come from the Latin verb tendere: “to extend outwards or upwards, to stretch toward or hold out, to offer; to direct toward, to aim toward.” In some foundational sense, whatever we look toward or hold our hands out to enters first the realm of our awareness, then the reach of our actions, and finally, in the largest sense, the embrace of our care. (4) * A poem I’ve had in mind from the beginning of thinking about poems carrying tenderness into times of crisis is Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” Easter, 1916 I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. William Butler Yeats The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (NY: Scribner, 1996); public domain. For any who may be unfamiliar with the title’s reference, the poem mourns those who led a failed uprising in the course of Ireland’s struggle for independence. All but one of those described in the poem were executed by British firing squads. The unnamed woman -- the Polish countess Constance Markievicz -- was allowed to live, for fear of backlash if a woman were executed in that manner. Yeats stood firmly on the side of Irish independence. The poem recalls the dead as independence's martyrs, their lives transformed by their ending. Yet “Easter, 1916” is not a glorifying memorial statue; good poems are never so unmixed. The memorialized sacrifice is named as beauty but also a wrong; the deaths born of unquestioned conviction possibly needless. Midway through, “Easter, 1916” changes, or at least greatly adds to, its subject, as if two large tributory rivers joined into one as it seeks -- as poems do -- to understand more largely. It begins as a poem on the deaths of Yeats's friends, acquaintances, and confederates in the shared hope for independence. It becomes an account of the effects of partisan violence on human lives. Regardless of justice or outcome, violence strips persons of their minutes, hours, arguments, loves, futures, pasts, specificity, fullness. It narrows living persons into a single, abstract generalization. Generalization's naming -- the poem's "terrible beauty" -- subsumes their own. Yet the poem's inherent allegiance to life resists this. Poetry's tenderness insists on names, on lives. The subject-shift comes at the start of the third stanza: Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The rest of that stanza’s lines feel entirely a recitation of tenderness—felt for the living stream, for its horses, riders, courting moor hens. For all that is quick, small, altering, and not-stone. This poem precipitated by violence does not describe violence. It speaks only of what came before and what followed. Between them: stream, tumbling clouds. The tenderness of transience-awareness runs through the stanza: “Minute by minute they change.” “Minute by minute they live.” A horse’s hoof slipping for a single moment is the closest the poem comes to any direct naming of peril, and is quickly followed by “plashing.” Yet that sliding hoof is with me, its physical sensation, whenever I think of this poem. The tenderness of parent for child is in the poem also, offered in place of judgment’s distanced, inhuman weighing as the poem nears its close: Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. Though an element in it, this poem’s role is not the advocacy of a changed map. Nor is it the condemnation of the British, who receive no mention. The poem's task is to toll the costs, to recall and remind that lives, in all their range, singularity, and subjectivity, matter. * Galway Kinnell’s recognition of tenderness's omnipresence is true not only for poems. Look at almost any Renaissance painting, any Indian miniature, any film or novel depicting battleground slaughter. In some low patch or corner, a small bird is there, lifting a ripe, fallen berry from under a bush. The viewer’s eye finds the tucked-in vignette, takes in its offer of respite, its proposition of ongoing life coexistent with death’s blood-soaked ground. In that dust-covered berry and bird is a sustaining reminder: that in some cranny of this world's story, the meaning of red may still be sweetness, not blood. This reminding of unclenched existence, of a world open, exposed, vulnerable, not turned by single-mindedness of purpose entirely to stone, is, for me, one part of the work art does.
1
1After a month’s pause, it feels important to say again what I put also into the opening post of this series – that I also do take some direct action, however small, however seemingly useless, every day I can. Tomorrow is Saturday, June 14th, and I and my newly replaced hip will be, with a friend’s help and a borrowed portable wheelchair, gathering with others in my home town’s central plaza. Visible response matters. Alterations of economics, divided allegiance, and elections’ outcomes are blisteringly needed. I write as I do in this Substack because structural change requires also a changed inhabitance and envisioning of our lives. For this, we need art’s insistencies of invention, imagination’s unfettered multiplicity, a non-barricaded sense of interconnection, the capacities of astonishment, play, and delight.
2 The English versions of these translated poems are my own. An interesting page with multiple translations over time of Hadrian’s poem can be found here: https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2017/03/11/hadrians-deathbed-poem/
3 In our human responses to power, this is true also. Non-violent protests are not undertaken by marching in lock-step. They are varied, particular, inventive, warm-hearted, sung, sometimes funny, and entirely undefended.
4 An honest accounting must add that sometimes what is stretched out and aimed toward its object is the bow, not eyes or hands. “Care” can mean the care of caretaking, but its larger meaning is neutral: what is “cared about” is whatever is felt important enough to be found consequential.