Tenderness

Manifesto, decalogue and poetics.

Una adivinación de una catástrofe
un oleaje de olvido después de la ternura
una especie de culpa sin castigo
de furia en paz con su gran Guerra.
Juan Gelman

Tenderness Manifesto

With every passing day I feel that something in me changes, dies, and I blame routine for wearing me down. I think we all carry a parasite under the skin, like in The Matrix, something that lodges in an empty space between the stomach and the heart and slowly devours us, until it makes our face its own, until we abandon what we were, are and will be.

Something in us has to die so we can come close to another. Have you seen how insects break their shells to come out naked, once again, into a world they already knew, but as someone else, having left their old body behind? The only constant in life is dispossession, abandonment; perhaps we have to break everything in order to find something.

And yet I believe there is another way: love. “In love there is nothing true without the irreparable,” wrote Félix Grande, and in his words I found an answer I like: whoever loves takes hold of the irreparable, makes true what is broken, turns, perhaps without meaning to, ruins into songs.

“Each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote Wilde. To me love is a form of death, yes, but not of the other: of oneself, who is perhaps also another. Whoever bets on love as a way of facing the world chooses to take their own life, to strip away who they are in order to grasp the world and make it part of their own soul.

The dictionary defines tenderness as “a feeling towards people, things or situations considered worthy of a pure and gratuitous love or affection, because of their sweetness, weakness or delicacy.” I think of tenderness as something deeper: a wager to reconcile the things of the world at their middle point.

Tenderness is, to me, the love of love itself.

Decalogue of tenderness

Tenderness is behind everything, and only through it can we see the end of all things.
The world we see does not exist the way we believe: it is a manifestation of the tenderness of something, of someone.
Do everything with tenderness; nothing else matters. Only acts made from tenderness can build something in these ruins.
Do not shout, cry; do not kill, die; do not think, create. Always abandon the first impulse and let tenderness take hold of you, look at yourself through its eyes, save yourself from yourself.
Stop running, stroke the ground with your bare soles; go no further, what you are looking for is here. Let your body contemplate the tenderness of the things around you.
The world you know is already over; the apocalypse passed before your eyes without you noticing. Accept the end of your time with tenderness, embrace with tenderness the ruins of everything you knew. Everything has ended, it is inevitable: you are the end of every possible end.
Throw your body into the abyss and await the fall with tenderness, enjoy the air passing over your skin, watch everything you knew fall behind as darkness floods your pupils. You must fall.
Always look others in the eye, build bridges, love, embrace all you can; then let go, always say goodbye to every being with tenderness.
Speak, speak, speak. Let your tongue draw in the air the shapes of the bodies that break you, keep nothing between your teeth, tenderly free yourself of every language you believe belongs to you and let the words that were once yours touch others.
There is nothing to save, nothing to worry about. Take the world in as part of you, forgive, love: you are the tenderness you can give to others.

Poetics

Ten rules for looking, written from the same place as the manifesto. I follow them with the camera and with the pencil.

Look twice. The first time you see what you expected; the second, what was really there.
Shoot little and slowly. Every photograph is a goodbye, and goodbyes are not said in bursts.
Get close enough to be seen. A stolen image is never tender.
Look for those nobody photographs: the trade that is ending, the street after the party, the saint without flowers.
Let the light decide. Your job is to be there when it arrives.
Write with your eyes closed and photograph with them open: it is the same gesture.
Do not retouch the wound. What is broken also fits in the frame.
Learn from film: not everything has to be seen right away.
Give the image back. What you took from someone, return as memory.
Look at each thing as if for the last time. It almost always is.