Where Does Tenderness Come From?
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Maybe it comes from the sad part of joy...a side of joy which knows
that each moment, however beautiful or poignant, passes away,

or maybe it comes from the poignancy itself, as a sign that there
is something more than the clashing of senseless compulsions.

something both divine and ordinary, and very beautiful.

It is the business of philosophical theology to provide a rational understanding of the rise of civilization, and of the tenderness of mere life itself, in a world which superficially is founded upon the clashings of senseless compulsion. I am not disguising my belief that in this task, theology has largely failed. The notion of the absolute despot has stood in the way. The doctrine of Grace has been de­graded, and the doctrines of the Atonement are mostly crude. The defect of the liberal theology of the last two hundred years is chat it has confined itself to the suggestion of minor, vapid reasons why people should continue to go to church in the traditional fashion.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

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Marina Tsvetaeva 1892–1941

Where does such tenderness come from?
​BY MARINA TSVETAEVA *

Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger--
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.

The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.

But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.

1916

​*  Gratitude  to The Poetry Foundation for sharing this poem.  The poem is translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine.  You will enjoy the translator's notes.

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​The sadness part of utter joy

And he is so right... poets are made in childhood, in the mouth-feel of language as it blends with human emotion and touch, the roughness of wool and crack of wood being split, voice of the adult closely cuddled, reading aloud. That relation with language that isn't about letters or words on a page but alive. Plus, for me, the felt tragedy, even as a small child, that each moment was passing, could not be held onto, that sadness part of the times of utter joy. Sometimes I think poems are an attempt, not to hold onto those moments, but to be elegies of them, to give them their own objective immortality, the feeling of them, brought "outside" of the limited "inside" of the poet. 

-- Christina Hutchins, personal correspondence

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​The motion of an immense tenderness

​Poets are not born in a country. Poets are born in childhood. What, then, is Russian about Marina Tsvetaeva? 

Tsvetaeva understood audial and linguistic work that play such an enormous role in folk song. Folk song is for the most part a litany, joyful or grieving. There is an element of lamentation, an element of tongue-twister and pun, there are echoes of spell, incantation, even exorcism in a folk song—there is a pure play of sounds—it is always partly hysterical, near the fall into tears or laughter, and partly zaum.* 
              
—Vladimir Khodasevich

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​Always partly hysterical, near the fall into tears and laughter

​"Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) & trumpeter Maurice Andre (1933-2012) create of suffering an intimate beauty. Enough to make me glad to be alive. This is 9 minutes long. Close your eyes or look out at wind in a tree or open a night window to the scent of the first of this autumn, or of passing cars, your neighbors' supper, or the near ocean. If you have only 2.5 minutes, take refreshment from the first movement. Only let yourself surrender into the slow, temporal motion of an immense tenderness.You might be made glad, too, some hidden grotto longing for this." 

-- Christina Hutchins, Facebook Post, 9/23/2014

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​With a tender care that nothing be lost

​The image -- and it is but an image -- the image under which the operative growth of God's nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

-- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality