Tenderness toward existence

A free post about ink, dancing, embodiment, exposure, poetry and Portaloos®.

On the absolute whiteness of pages

a poem writes itself out: its title – the dream 

of all poems and the text of all loves – ‘Tenderness toward

Existence.’

~ Galway Kinnell, ‘The Book of Nightmares’

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Hello, I’m BACK! I took a break from writing Witness Marks in January while I worked on another set of rewrites for my novel, which (please god) will be out next year. It was difficult, intense work, and I still don’t know whether I’ve done enough, though I can say that there are passages and characters in there that I am bone-deep proud of.

As I began to prepare the manuscript for my editor I felt my internal pressure start to change, as though at the approach of a weather front. Small wonder: the germ of this book pre-dated the pandemic, so it represents a long, complicated life stage, as books often do. I got drunk that night, on purpose, and took myself back to my clubbing days: I turned the lights off, chose some music and turned it up loud, switched on my little disco light and danced – and after a while I cried too, and you know what? It was all right. I felt like shit the next day, but that didn’t matter. I’d let some big feelings move through me and away.

When you live alone, that can be hard: contact with other people changes your emotional tenor (for good or ill) and without that grit, that friction, it’s easy to get stuck inside a low or trapped by an anxious cloud. But music can help, if you know the tunes that will take you where you need to go and back out the other side – and if you remember, too, what it took me far too long to learn: that emotions are embodied experiences and need to be met via the body somehow, whether that’s dancing or HIIT, punching a pillow, crying, singing, having sex, being held, cold-water swimming or going for a long run.

During my little break I’ve been thinking a lot about this newsletter. Don’t worry, I’m not going to write a post about how to write Substack posts – there’s far too much of that about as it is. But I do want to say that I’m not entirely sure right now what the format or the frequency of Witness Marks will be this year, or what the best relationship is between the free and the paid part – especially as subscriber fatigue does seem to be setting in across the platform (I understand – I feel it too). I’m going to try and work it out on the fly, and I hope you’ll stick with me while I do. That’s why I’ve decided to make this post free: so I can properly explain myself to as many of you as possible.

See, here’s the thing: writing my daily instalments from Smugglers End over Christmas (all originally un-paywalled but now archived, for subscribers) really brought it home to me that I do all my best work for free (like the Stubborn Light podcast) or without any firm expectation of remuneration (like the Encounter app). Thank god for agents, or I’d probably be destitute! I know it sounds incredibly precious, but the fact remains: putting myself in too direct a relationship to money can feel like pressure, and pressure doesn’t tend to lead to my best work.

However, having Substack payments turned off for the last few weeks has made things a little PINCHED. So I need to work out how to tread a line between offering paying supporters value for money and feeling free enough that writing here is a joy – while also keeping in mind the fact that if I’m particularly proud of something I’ve written, I won’t want to put it where only a small percentage of readers will see it: I’ll want to release it more widely and let it make its way out into the world.

If you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions to help me balance these competing urges I’d love it if you popped them in a comment at the end of this post.

‘In the artist of all kinds, one can detect an inherent dilemma…the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found’ ~ Donald Winnicott

There’s another aspect to all this, and its about hiding and showing. Some of the best-loved newsletters on here offer deeply satisfying glimpses into other people’s lives – and certainly, some of the keenest responses I get online are when I reveal something personal. But like many writers, I don’t have a settled relationship with self-revelation, or, in fact, with book events and signings, being filmed, photographed or (god help me) recognised at the cheese counter in my local shop.

If I’m honest, I don’t even have a stable relationship with my own reflection, and catching sight of myself in a mirror generally feels like a surprise – oh yes, I remember you. Sometimes when someone approaches me in the street – even someone I know – I have to call myself back into my body, to remind myself that I am actually visible to other people and not just a sort of thinking cloud. And this, it turns out, isn’t everyone’s experience of being embodied, let alone public-facing. Who knew?!

Since I stopped working in an office and moved out of busy, crowded London the ‘need not to be found’ that Winnicott identified has become even stronger, even as – and probably partly because – I invited people in lockdown all over the country and beyond to put in their earbuds and come for a gentle walk with me every Monday lunchtime. All of which is to say that I don’t currently know how much of my life to reveal online any more, given that someone might well ask me about something I’ve written here while (for example) I’m deeply hungover, unwashed, and queueing on my own at a festival for some reeking Portaloos™¹.

For lots of us – not everyone! – writing is one part ‘Look at me!’ and an equal part ‘Oh god, would everyone please stop staring’. I sometimes think, heretically, that Winnicott got it wrong and that all the words are in fact a kind of deflection, something I want people to look at instead of me. I wonder if I’ll ever manage to make peace with having to be public-facing. If you’ve walked this road and found a way to do it, let me know.

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Anyway, I did actually open this edition of Witness Marks with something personal: a photo of one of my tattoos. It’s the only one that features any text, and it’s in my handwriting. It’s also the most recent: I had it made a couple of years ago.

I wish I could say that I wrote my dissertation on Galway Kinnell and the anti-war movement in twentieth-century American poetry, or on ecstatic imagery in Whitman, Kinnell and Ginsberg, but the truth is I came across those lines quoted in some essay online which I can’t even remember now because those 27 words caused a small, irrevocable detonation in my heart and mind and soul.

It happens that way sometimes, with poetry. Or at least, it does to me.

I tracked down a copy of Kinnell’s long poem-cycle The Book of Nightmares, but I’ll be honest: as a whole it didn’t move me the way those four lines did, and still do. How terribly gauche, then, to have a fragment of an already orphaned quote written on my skin, forever – oh, believe me, I know! Like a sixteen-year-old discovering Plath, bowled over by feeling but lacking the context necessary for genuine understanding.

However, I don’t give a shit about that.

Tenderness is a wonderful word here, just perfect. Kinnell could have chosen ‘love for’, or ‘concern for’ or ‘care for’ or any number of things. But tenderness contains its own vulnerability, as well as that of its object. As I seek to connect with the fragile other, I am tender: I hurt, I am bruised. That is because love is inherently painful when it is offered towards anything mortal, anything that will one day bruise and spoil. The lover and the loved both require tender care.

Toward: the relationship Kinnell is describing is a kind of offering, a gift held out with no expectation of reward. ‘For’ would have altered the dynamic completely, suggesting a kind of envelopment or possession: a gift that is ‘for’ someone first belongs to the subject, and then to the object. But ‘Tenderness toward’ – that seems to me entirely different, a yearning pity that may never alter the fate of that which it is directed towards, because – and here’s where we come up against the pity of it – it cannot.

Existence: everything that is: the world, ourselves, and all our follies; everything we have created, and everything we’ve spoiled. Tenderness toward it is difficult for most of us to hold on to for long, given how fucked-up and polarised everything feels right now, but I think every one of us recognises it and has felt it, even if only briefly: when newly in love, perhaps, or at the birth of a child, or deep in grief. I know I have, and I know I want to be reminded of it. I think it’s an expression of the very best of us, and it offers us, too, a personal lifeline – maybe even a way through this mess.

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The Encounter app is available to download, as most of you probably know, and not only has it not fallen over but you’ve been signing up and using it in your droves! Look at the lovely video Peter Rogers made for us, above. Fancy, no?

If you’re in Britain or Ireland you can get Encounter on to your phone here, for free:

Apple UK | Apple Ireland | Android

The official press launch will be in April, at about the time of chiffchaffs’ return, and we’re hoping for lots of media coverage then. If you’ve signed up to the Encounter newsletter (or are a shareholder) you’ll receive more information via email soon; and if you work in the media and can feature the app somewhere, please do get in touch.

Can you imagine how it feels, though, after such a long, tough road with so many steep learning mountains, to read reviews like these? It feels like we’ve managed to achieve exactly what I set out to, two years ago. And there’s so much more to come!

“I’ve only been using this app for a few weeks, but already it’s having a significant impact on my experience of the world around me, and my general wellbeing. I’m finding myself going on walks every day where before I kept finding excuses not to, and spending more time on them because I’m that much more engaged” ~ ElHeriz, App Store

“Have been so excited to see this app and it is everything I wanted! A great place to record everything I notice, and encourage getting outside more regularly and actually paying attention. Very simple to add an entry, additional info about what to look out for is useful without being overwhelming and the look of the app is gorgeous.” ~ Hazel Wadeson, Google Play Store

And now I need your help. Keeping the app online costs money: we have to pay for the platform it lives on, for the maps people use to locate their journal entries, for the API that adds the weather and moon phase to the metadata; we have to pay to store people’s photos and journal entries, for the text search facility that sits behind the species tags, to make necessary improvements and upgrades, and for a whole load of other incredibly dull things, too (for what it’s worth, I’m not paying myself anything, and have no plans to).

So Encounter is looking for a sponsor: a lovely, friendly company who can partner with us for a year. They would help us with our running costs so we can keep finding and taking on new users, and in return they will appear on our website, on the About screen of the app, and in our launch material, come April. This company would be doing a really, really good thing for people and planet, and we’d be able to shine a bright light back on them, too. And the numbers we’re looking for really aren’t huge.

Could it be the company you work for? What about your partner’s employer, or that of one of your kids? Please do have a think and drop me a line with any ideas, leads, contacts or proposals via the button below.

You could provide the connection that helps keep Encounter going, so we can do more of what we’re good at: connecting people to nature, and quietly changing lives.

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Five o’clock: it’s getting dark beyond my window, and I can hear the village sparrows squabbling as they go to bed. I need to nip out while the light lasts to gather some kindling and set it to dry in the chimney for tomorrow, and then it’ll be time to light the fire. But before I sign off, I’d like to tell you something extraordinary about the humble snowdrops that may be in flower in your garden, local park, churchyard, woodland or on the verges: a favourite of mine since childhood, not least for the way they cheer up my birthday month.

Unlike me, snowdrops have no problem with self-revelation; nor do they concern themselves with the feeling of being exposed: their tough little shoots can pierce through ice and snow, and they produce their own antifreeze, allowing them to recover from the harshest frost. But did you know how they reproduce? Snowdrops flower at a time of year when pollinators may or may not be on the wing, so, over the passing centuries, they’ve learned to strategise. Mostly, the bulbs simply produce more bulbs (known as offsets), underground: that’s why many snowdrops are clones, and it’s why you can end up with vast, almost unbroken carpets of them. But if a bee does come along in search of pollen and fertilises a snowdrop, a cool thing happens: the flower produces a seed with a highly calorific appendage called an elastiome, and the stem then collapses, landing the seed and elastiome on the surface of the soil. Now, these elastiomes are basically like Big Macs for ants: fatty, fragrant and irresistible. They cannot get enough of them. Foraging ants carry them off to their nests like tiny Deliveroo workers , and while those in the nest munch on the delicious elastiome, the seed is discarded – and effectively planted. A new snowdrop clump is born, and genetic diversity is maintained.

Anyone who isn’t a little bit wonder-struck by that is, frankly, dead inside. Just think of it: all that complexity and industry and drama quietly going on while you walk the dog, or take the kids to school, or eat Tesco Value crisps in front of the telly. Truly, the world’s more full of wonder than we can understand.

Thank you all for reading. More soon!

1. At almost every magazine I’ve freelanced at (which is a LOT) we’d occasionally receive legal letters from the Portaloo® company complaining that we’d used the word to mean any portable toilet and reminding us that it should be capped up and accompanied by the registered trademark symbol. It is staggering to me to think of the millions of billable hours their lawyers must have spent checking PAPER COPIES of Time Out, Mixmag, Stuff, the Superdrug magazine, all the broadsheets and tabloids, presumably, the lifestyle and travel glossies, and god only knows what else.

You might also be amused to learn that at Mixmag we also got occasional legal letters from a French man claiming to own the copyright on the yellow smiley symbol and attempting to fine us for infringement. We filed them carefully in the bin.