“S” is for “She Who Watches”

(originally published January 24, 2023 on Substack)

In a luminous  On Being interview with Krista Tippett this past June, poet Ocean Vuong spoke about how, as a first-generation American growing up in his Vietnamese family, he learned about love.

The body is the ultimate witness to love, Vuong said, and I learned that right away. We don’t say, ‘I love you,’ If we do, we say it in English, as a sort of goodbye.

In contrast, he said, love is directly expressed and experienced through the body and through service, you articulate it through paying attention.

Vuong’s words struck such a deep chord in me that I’ve been turning it over in my mind and heart ever since. In characterizing love as a quality of tender attention, enacted through the body, Vuong gave expression in language to the visceral understanding that has been growing in me, but that it has been difficult to articulate— I suppose since it is my body that apprehends it first, and not the mind . 

It is the understanding that love is not, in its essence, an emotion (love as a form of sentiment, the most conditional, volatile and transient of qualities), nor is it a kind of amplified “liking” (love as a form of passionately-held preference). Rather, love in Vuong’s terms is an expression and commitment of presence: you articulate it through paying attention.

More recently, Krista Tippett herself returned to this concept in some end-of-the-year reflections of her own: 

I’m re-summoning the astonishing realization, which we made as a species, that civilization rests on something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies.

(—)

Bodies breathing next to other bodies, paying attention.

That civilization itself might rest on that: on the full and tender attention of a body to other bodies. 

* * *

In  A Paixão Segundo G.H.  (The Passion According to G.H.), Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s  mystical masterpiece of a novel (which I just re-read for the third time in as many decades), the protagonist’s sudden encounter with a cockroach in her closet sets off a chain of experiences in which her sense of self agonizingly unravels, ultimately dissolving into an experience of pure consciousness—a consciousness which, experienced through the body, ultimately comes alive to itself anew, as love.

I was seeing the attention with which I’d also lived before, an attention that never leaves me […] — perhaps that attention was my life itself […] the attention to living, inextricable from the body […]more than attention to life, it was the very process of life in me. ¹ 

In this novel-without-a-plot (unless, as Rachel Kushner quips, you count as plot a woman standing in her maid’s room gazing at a closet for nearly two hundred pages), as G.H. narrates in exquisite detail the experience of this inner undoing that her encounter with the roach sets off, we witness what amounts to, for G.H., a crucifixion of the ego: the self that experiences itself as separate from others, concerned primarily with its own personal welfare, dies. 

It is a process that begins in an experience of pure terror,  as G.H. is plunged into the realization that it is the full, un-self-conscious attention of the body that love not only requires, but that it actually is: that unconditional —even unemotional—regard of a gaze that does not turn away.

The matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and its roaches […] but what an abyss between the word and what it was trying to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t have a human meaning—because—because love is living matter.²

What follows is not transcendence, but rather the experience of the kind of full communion with others that true compassion (literally, “suffering with” ) entails.

Transcending is a transgression. but staying inside whatever is, that demands that I be fearless.

This is love that says I see you, and that I recognize when I feel deeply and wholly seen; it is the love that says I hear you, and that you recognize when you experience feeling fully heard by my listening. And we know the truth of it not by way of the sentimental declarations we may exchange (though we may exchange and enjoy them), but (to come back to Krista’s reflections] in the actions of bodies in proximity to [or otherwise in relation to] other bodies: in how love, through us, behaves.

A few days ago, In the midst of working on this piece, I received a call from a daughter of my dear friend Colleen Brooks, to let me know that Colleen had just died, from a cascade of complications following a brief illness.

In her 86 years of life, Colleen had weathered the deaths of three of her five children, each one as a young adult, followed by the death of her beloved husband. One of the most warmly exuberant, life-embracing people I know, Colleen taught me much about the courage of “this, too” living. Over the almost 40 years of our friendship, I observed (with no small amount of awe) how Colleen navigated grief as wholeheartedly as she met life in its more welcome ways, meeting loss, also, on its own terms…and as a result, was deepened instead of being diminished by its undoings. 

But what I am remembering today, as I think about her in the context of these reflections on love as a seeing and a tending thing, is how Colleen described to me the experience of loving her son, Tim, when she cared for him at home during the final days of his dying.

In those last days, she told me, the sheer physical demands of caring for Tim moment-by-moment ultimately became so overwhelming in their unrelenting intensity, that she remembers a point at which she knew her feelings of love for Tim to be, in that context, superfluous. It wasn’t that she became numb, she said, as much as it reflected her body’s need to funnel all of its vital energy into what loving him most crucially involved: into simply caring for his body with her body, with everything she had. 

None of which was conscious for her at the time, she said, nor did it even feel like a choice so much as it simply was, an imperative. But on reflection, she realized that all my feelings of love for Tim became simply the physical act of taking care of him .

Leaving her with the odd sense, she said, of being at once not like “herself” (being demonstrative and feeling-full by nature), and yet more fully herself than ever.  

Paying attention. 

The full and tender attention of a body to other bodies.

the attention to living, inextricable from the body.

staying inside whatever is

because love is living matter.

That civilization rests on something so tender —

Citations:

1. p.34, “A Paixão Segundo G.H.” ( Edição Crítica, Allca XX, Fondo de cultura Económica, Edições Unesco, Bendito Nunes, Coordenator). Translation of the passage mine.
2. This and later passages quoted are from Idra Novey’s translation of The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions, 1964)

* * *

Postscript

In these days since her death, I have been immersing myself in the memoirs, elegies and poems of Colleen’s later years included in the 2021 anthology, Where We Came From, which collects writing by members of her Vashon Island writing group.

Sometimes my only way of participating is to observe,  Colleen notes in one of these.

In turn, as a way to participate more fully in Colleen’s own observing (and in the Homeric tradition of the cento, in which this collage form is used to create a tribute poem composed entirely of another poet’s lines), the following poem is made entirely of individual lines selected from Colleen’s twenty contributions to the anthology.

* * *

She Who Watches 

(For Colleen Brooks, in loving memory)

My story is ever evolving, changing

like watercolor on wet paper.

Am I always becoming?

What is it that I need to know,

to taste and feel and see?

Is it hanging on or letting go?

How do we open up our hearts

to love and loss and fear

and let the love and joy spill out?

I’m not sure, 

and it really doesn’t matter.

I don’t know, 

but I will watch and listen,

let death teach me how to live,

and trust that the trees are teaching me.

Sometimes my only way of participating 

is to observe.

We were involved in so many ways.

We walked in picket lines

to boycott grapes.

I often felt like a stranger in a strange land.

I left my home in Sweet Home

where I have known beginnings 

and endings—

the sweetness of fresh-cut hay,

the hush and beauty 

of a long deep snow—

shared with all the people I love,

nourished deeply by this land 

and by each other.

Then all the detours

after meeting grace and listening.

Here I am on this piece of land—

this beautiful island—

the trees and me.

Here is where I breathe in the beauty 

that sustains my spirit.

This morning like so many mornings

I could see the morning star.

There really is a ‘crack’ of dawn!

I made a list of words.

It felt so big and spacious

teaching me how to live in it,

a feeling of indescribable peace. 

Like a hush over the morning.

I feel so much a part of the universe,

the sky feels like it is celebrating me!

All life comes together, 

takes shape 

and becomes something beautiful, 

something completed.

We can learn from it all.

It is not a life reviewed,

but a life absorbed.

It is a good life. 

It is the life I love.

The sadness comes, 

I let it through.

There is some light that shows the way—

‘Be happy, you are deeply loved.’

Everything ends when it’s finished.

And everything around me is resting.

***

Next: “ ’T’ is for ‘Tsagaglalal’ ( ‘She Who Watches’, Part II)”

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