Tenderness
Some thoughts inspired by Rilke and pandemic coarseness
I am reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to A Young Poet. My mind weaves connections between his beautiful language, his focus on the “slight,” the incomprehensible, the fleeting, the sublime; and an article I saw recently about how what we need now is the gentle novel. Although after reading the said article I was less moved to trace potential connections, I still wanted to stay with gentleness, with tenderness. Maybe it related to care, somehow. A being for each other, or a moving towards that felt so personal to me.
What is the place of tenderness in our lives? How often do we live gently?
Dancing used to remind me of such gentleness. The fleeting beauty of moving limbs, potent control of breath. Holding in a potential burst of passion —an eruption that makes rivers of lava, an array of emotions, desires, ideas, sentiments. Hot, liquid earth.
The contrast born out of such explosive embodiment of being and the subtlest flux of motions and stillness connects easily in my head to words like gentleness, tenderness. As soft as a tender touch can be, it seems to hold in all that is not still, nor soft: all the affective strings that vibrate and make a “mad harmony”1 in us, all the rough, the confused, the angry, the scared that reside in us…
Maybe tenderness begins first as a move within —a barely noticeable blow of breath on our burnt skin. Not to silence the chaos inside, but to soothe the ears.
As that tenderness moves down like water (or lava), carving a path in the earth (its forcefulness is not shadowed by how thin or small it is), its motion carries a sense of urgency and purpose. As it also adapts admirably, the water has some place to go. It is ruled by the laws of gravity. I don’t know what kind of law makes tenderness flow out of one into another.
I guess I can keep writing like this, and compose an elegy to tenderness. Meanwhile a song from the musical Jekyll & Hyde rings in my ear: Sympathy, Tenderness.
…
Lately I have been finding it especially hard to maintain my interest in one thing: I kept writing small pieces (to post here), but the next day they would become dull. Something that moved me on a Tuesday would turn into a pale nothing on Wednesday. Upon this continuous loss of investment in one thing (a theme, a question, a style), my overthinking gained more strength. Since it now feels like there is no “outside,” the inside of my mind often turns into quicksand so rapidly. I would remove the cap of my pen and some cruel thoughts would mock my words before they even curl into letters on the page.
Where did my tenderness go? That gentle attention so forceful in its slightness.
If indeed I believed that tenderness started from within, a subtle, deep relationship with one’s self, where was it hiding now? How did my relationship with myself changed? Because it changed drastically, like everybody else living in this time. I remember many moments in these last weeks, maybe months, where I was taken over by hostile, sour thoughts. The way I moved within myself felt unkind, rough. I understood the value of anger (especially to be moved, politically), but this anger felt useless. Either I have been failing to see its potential, or it indeed was unnecessarily strong, unnecessarily present.
I missed my kindness. The tenderness that once overflew from my skin, that marked my breath. Once.
Maybe there is a different tenderness in the nostalgia for tenderness.
Maybe it will come back. The earth does not run out of lava, does it?
A little note to my dear reader:
This newsletter had once promised to be weekly. But lately I am finding it hard to dig out and work with my creativity in general. (Despite my efforts, this pandemic + unemployment is getting to me.) I notice that weekly intervals became a bit impossible to maintain (which is why I blanked last week). But I do want to maintain this. So from now on, I will work to post once every two weeks. And in the meantime I will remember what my good friends reminded me about sharing “unfinished” or “drafty” things: that it can be playful, and sometimes even more interesting than neat pieces of writing. Aside from the tough but beautiful exercise in sharing vulnerabilities and curbing one’s perfectionism, of course.
Thank you for giving me the sense that I am not talking into a void.
With love.
This phrase, “mad harmony,” is used by Clarice Lispector in Água Viva. And yes, I am a bit obsessed with her.