Tend

The hand and the mouth

are tender organs
sensitive and receptive
touching, tasting, caressing, kissing.
They are fleshy sites where bodies meet.
Lovely and amazing.

They are, too,

the organs of language—
inscriptive and orative
writing, speaking, composing, articulating,
The anatomy of communication.
Within and without.

Hands and Mouths.

With these parts we attend to each other—
give and receive not only words
but also meaning that is beyond signs and letters.
Sustenance of life:
Food and Love.

This sustenance is also the substance of language.

Language materializes these matters abstractly,
even obscurely. But it approaches an expression.
In this text:
Tenderness of fleshy bread and of palpating breast.

Through hand and mouth,

language— metaphorical nurture and nutrient—
is incorporated into our being, perpetually cycled in our becoming.
From the mouth, from the hand:
Words emanate,
Words are consumed.

Words: made by our body and making our body.

Made by the bodies of others, and making their bodies.
Words shape us as much as we shape them.
Hand and mouth, Mouth and hand.
Organs of caring, that must be used intentionally—
with care as they form the world through word.
Tend
Tender
Tended
Tender
Tenderize
Tendereyes
Tenderize
Tendering
Tending

Tender
Pretender
Pretending
Pretender
Portend
Portended
Portend
Extend
Intend

Tend
Tender
Tended
Tender
Tenderize
Tendereyes
Tenderize
Tendering
Tending

Tender
Contender
Extend
Contender
Intender
Retender
Intender
Tendency
Retenderize

Tend
Tender
Tended
Tender
Tenderize
Tendereyes
Tenderize
Tendering
Tending
But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this difference of meaning? And
to what did it tend? These are delicate questions.
-Samuel Beckett

In fact, I have observed throughout my life that we tend to notice what we

expect to notice.
-Muriel Spark

One property of mental images is that they tend to float around, whether
what is pictured is as light as the gray spray of dandelion seeds or as
weighty as a bottle of blue-black ink. So given to floating are mental
images that it requires some effort to hold them steady on the mental
retina.
-Elaine Scarry

Since imagination and fact are easily contrasted, we tend to draw genre
lessons from this and segregate invented stories (fiction) from real life
narratives (chronicle and autobiography). That’s one convention—ours.
-Susan Sontag

There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for
the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each
other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need
and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your
body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you—a little, lightly,
without trying to seize anything right away.
-Roland Barthes

they were both in the gentle gray world of mild hangover fatigue when
nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like
wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves,
lips to lips, breast to breast.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

one acts to nourish one’s body, to develop it, to build it, or transform it
according to one’s image and desire: one defines one’s alimentary diet to
embellish, to purify, to prepare one’s self to be pleasing; one chooses a
companion’s food to conform his body to our desire for it, to render it
stronger or softer or fatter, tender or well-muscled. By cooking, one
“prepares for oneself” a partner “cooked just right”…
-Luce Girard

“But its no use now,” thought poor Alice, to pretend to be two people!
Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
-Lewis Carroll

A splendid specimen, what is it when it is little and tender so that there

are parts. A center can place and four are no more and two and two are
not middle.
-Gertrude Stein
Mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare, I am standing on language—returning to a familiar attitude.
This bodily position remembers the pressing-ness of past performances, the impression others
have made upon my own body. Bodily members remember what has already become and what is
always (be)coming.

Mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare. My senses are heightened. In this exposed posture, I am
ever-increasingly attentive—explicitly aware. I notice that I am noticing. What I notice is not so
much verbal meaning, but palpable palpations. Of language. Of bodies. Of pasts. Of futures.
Upon language, I find myself remembering these times, these presences.

Through this remembrance what do I tend? What do I portend? Pretend? My intentions are
direct, and directed. They are tender—my stance is moving (and miniature) monument to
passed/(t) and immi/(a)nent printed matter. These matters, works on paper and of them, have
inscribed themselves upon this my form, rewriting over this my flesh.

A sensitive archive. Tactile and touchable. A body bound up like a book. This body (my body) is
bound in that it is compelled, not forced, into this pose: mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare,
standing on (body) language of other bodies of work and working bodies.

This is a posture of reception and representation; recollecting and recreating in gesture—in the
synchronized movement of hand and ink, in the corporeal articulation of speech through mouth
and tongue. Language is received, gathered up, through the soles of my feet. The textual carpet
beneath me is felt: compressed fabric and phenomenologically sensed. This ground is a ground
tended before me, made tender for me. This is a ground that will be tended after my tending and
making tender. Tenderness transmits through synesthesia.

Shapes and sounds tingle through my toes, travelling from their tips to the tip of my tongue. On
my tongue letters have a taste—a buttery, juiciness with a lingering bitterness. Then, the letters
fall like crystalline droplets, from my lips, only to re-absorbed into the density of the ground.
The act of tender reception and acceptance transmogrifies into an act of propagation and
dissemination.

Marks and sounds emerge again from memory seeds of past and perhaps future writings. With
mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare, I make soft sounds of phonemes—echoes of others’
murmurings—I create yielding graphic impressions—signs of others’ recordings.

The tender pose is also one of tending. I am tender. I am attendant. I am carer of all of these
words, all of these sounds, that are presented to me and then I present again.

I am not a servant to the past nor a slave of the future, but present in this moment a re-presenter.
Perhaps also a re-presence—a presence once more.

Through my hands, in my mouth, in my eyes, in these tender fleshy parts, such language passes
from one body to the next (mine to others). With my hands, in my mouth, in my eyes, in these
tender fleshy parts, such language is re-written and re-authors over and over so that the pretense
of origin is forgotten. In my hands, in my mouth, in my eyes, such language also remains,
indelibly writing itself into my self.

Not only tender, not only attendant, not only carer, I am also author, and archive: authoring my
own archive of language bodies with my own language body.

The language body: a (re)membrance of vital expression organically housed as live presence.
The language body is animate—alive—but is it sentient? Does a page of text perceive like skin?
Do letters sense?

I pause, I wait. Mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare. No answer. And then, I begin to notice.
Perhaps it is what I intend to notice, but I notice it nonetheless:

When I listen closely, and letter-sounds ring with phonetic resonances of tenor in my ears, I
sometimes hear whispers back. Perhaps not words, but sounds that have some moving meaning.
Are they sounds of reply, sounds that intend to express affection?

When I sense intently, I can feel language’s soft touch still impressed upon my hands, upon my
lips, felt even now in my soles. This touch lingers when I open my eyes, I close my mouth, I lift
my feet. Is this touch that leaves such a distinctive sense-memory the nurturing touch of succor?

I am standing on language that is at once a grounding carpet, and an animate body itself
animated by other bodies that (re)live in its felt. The touching of my soles upon it, and its soft
touch back, is tender, like a caress. Almost like a caress. How can these graphemes—these
marks—reach out with such feeling?

Is this my imagining, my dream:

lettered fiber presses on skin, lettered skin presses on fiber as if lovers, vulnerable and knowingly
expectant. I forget myself in this tenderness, forget the boundary between. One and one does not
equal two, but almost another one--a near merging of language, body, ground, figure.

In this contact—of word and mouth, text and hand--do we begin to attend each other? Does
language begin to care for me? What responsibility is there between us? What is our ability to
respond?

Even in this tender merging of language bodies, which may be but a deluded reverie, I do not
pretend—or portend— that I have become language, or that language becomes me. I simply
sense that we become together. We tend towards each other.

Still in this familiar attitude of calm attention— mouth open, eyes closed, feet bare, standing on
language—, impressed by the past and pressing into the future, I find myself looking after and
looked after. Seeing and seen. Observing and observed. Caring for and cared for. Here linear
sense dissolves. The beginning becomes the end. The cycle repeats. With no end.

A revolution of the upmost tenderness.