‘Against Hurt’ and Towards a New Idea of Delicacy
By: Cameron Hill
Tags: Literature, Community, Life Lessons, Politics, Poetry

Think about how you want to go through life. Not which career path you’d like to take, or where you see yourself in staggered 5-year increments. Take a moment and think about how you want to move through the rest of your time here.

Some days I want to glide through it; a paper plane carried from uplift to down drift, wind-held and soaring. I would dip down and skim the grass, dance with the last of the bumble bees.

Others, I would be a pebble dropped into a pond, making no ripples on impact but just joining and sinking, slowly down. I would mingle with the dirt and the debris of the pond-floor and we would do nothing but look up at our water sky, watching the light play, flicker and fade again. The pond would grow us green together, wet soil embracing us in our nestled viewing as the water carries our gossip and sights in its minor currents.

I want life to be delicate.

Stick with me, there is a point to all of this.

Delicacy is a complicated idea. The Oxford English Dictionary gives it a kaleidoscope of definitions and a patterned history. In its most modern use, it is most often an “Exquisite fineness of texture, substance, finish, […] slenderness, or softness; soft or tender beauty.” This fineness always carries its own frailties with it, its “lack of strength or robustness, fragility; susceptibility to damage, injury, or disease.” I’d like to move away from this tainted delicacy of some posh archaic English rose femininity, of the delicate as the fragile. To exist delicately is not a sign of weakness or fragility. I’m not thinking here of being delicate like a flower, too easily broken or failing. Instead, more like a breeze; ineffable, fluid, coherent, touching, connecting — utterly insubstantial yet undeniably present.

Behind these twinned contemporary definitions of delicacy lies a background of elegance and subtlety. Now-rarer definitions are built around an astute sensibility “acuteness or subtlety of observation, […] understanding, perceptiveness.” Or, more musically, “the ability to detect or measure slight changes, quantities, signals”. This sensitivity to change can also be built around an empathy, a “sensitivity to feelings of embarrassment, shame, […] consideration for the feelings of others.”

The obsolete meanings are even more decadent — “Luxury, sumptuousness; easy or soft living; indulgence, pampering”, and more based around ‘deliciousness’, “being pleasing or delightful, esp. to the eye, mind, soul.” These are ghost meanings, decadent hauntings that follow this fluid idea. ‘Delicacy’ is a delicate word in itself, built out of its relationships to its context, to an understanding of what surrounds it; deft, precise and rich. Rather than pure fragility, delicacy can be a work of empathy and decadence, of understanding and comfort.

There’s a poem that’s been floating around inside me since someone showed me it a few years ago. It’s by J. H. Prynne, from his collection The White Stones. He can be a bit opaque at times, and I suspect I currently am being as well, so I’ll quote it in its entirety here so I might make a bit more sense going forward:

Against Hurt

Endowed with so much

suffering, they should be / and that

they are so — the pain in the head

which applies to me

and the clouds low over

the horizon: soon it

will be dark

We love the brief night, for its

quick passing, the relative ease as

we slide into comfort and

the trees grow and

grow. I can hear

every smallest growth

the expanse is grinding with it,

out in the flats beyond, down by

the sodium street lights, in the head:

pain, the hurt to these who are all

companions. Serenity

is their slender means.

There is not much time

left. I love them all, severally and in

the largest honour that there is.

Now and with the least hurt, this

is for you.

I’ve never been really sure why the poem’s so firmly stuck in me. It manages to be sparse and fertile at the same time. There’s a distinctly contemporary feel to it — an awareness that we are living in a time with a sense of a darkness to it, a time where you can flick through news channels and see a rotating daily variety of sufferings, a million disorientating heart-wrenching pains stitched into a cycle.

I think part of its charm is how it is so built out of empathy, carved from some latent bedrock of care for other people. Its end feels heartfelt, as personal as a mass-distributed poem can feel, with such an unassuming sensitivity to any pain you may have felt or will be feeling.

A lot of our contemporary culture is abrasive. Think about the texture of online discourse, how jagged it is with its deliberate barbs and grasping algorithms. There’s very little space for consideration, for a slow-burning empathy and personal interaction of any real depth.

I think this is part of what has driven the huge boom in ASMR videos on YouTube. They offer extended personal attention and are designed to both mentally and physically soothe you — they know that we should be held and know how we ache for it.

There feels like a real dignity in the poem’s delicacy, a desire to give space and treat everyone in ‘the largest honour that there is’. The poem’s ear is so attuned to what lies out there, ‘every smallest growth’, all the objects of this world creaking with their own existence. Trees in their constancy grow and grow, cells building on cells, bark stretching and cracking with time while we scurry around them.

The poem looks out ‘to these who are all / Companions’. It’s the view over a city at night, each lit window an existence shuffling through their days, each street’s echoed step someone’s worries and hopes.

Our culture (I’m writing this from the UK) seems now so thoroughly, emphatically individualist. I’m a child of neoliberalism, sculpted in a society which is geared more towards capital than people, to profit rather than community. To live well and allow others to live well we need to remember how interdependent we are, how our lives are a series of glittering, interwoven webs.

Once you start thinking about the sheer variety of people’s day to day lives it’s hard to stop. In supermarket queues you stand thinking about what the person in front of you thinks. Whether they’re happy, whether they have people to go home to with their jumbled lottery of shopping, whether they’ve become what they thought they would be when they were little or whether they’re just eking out their lives, baby steps marching towards the end.

Prynne’s poem listens and looks at the varied lives shuffling through the night around you; it is a poem of community, of a willing empathy.

The lack of clarity gives a soft focus, warm in its ambiguity. It is built out of a consideration and a tenderness rather than concrete causes and ills. This ineffability is at its peak in that line from the first stanza:

they should be / and that

they are so -

Those two punctuation marks have been rolling about inside me for going on five years now. They’re impossible to fashion into words, and in that inarticulacy, they show the pains of individuality and self-expression. That they should be this inexpressible thing, but that they are this other, different but equally inexpressible thing is the source of this suffering. In those dashes is all the pain of struggling to resolve who you are, who you truly feel yourself to be, with the other intangible idea of what other people want you to be. All the pain that comes from trying to force and bend something from its original form into a different, arbitrary shape.

The language you use, how you set up your social and political institutions, the way you physically build and frame your cities — these are all sculpting influences which shape how people are raised and formed.

Think about recent conversations in Western culture, how we are only now moving towards an idea of accepting that people are individual shapes that do not all fit neatly into the printed tick-boxes on forms.

Delicacy can be letting people be their own inexpressible selves. Give them space to grow and expand, to find their own form outside of the constrictions you force on them. We need to calibrate a way of constructing our communities which allow a social togetherness while embracing our fantastically, chaotically shaped variety.

To be able to exist in that free-form space, free of constrictions, of pre-supposed ideas of how you should appear or be, to be surrounded and held but not constrained, to live in the gap between piano notes, to nestle into that snug absence where one is falling before the next starts to rise.

I think in the use of those two dashes lies all the delicacy of this poem, and all the delicacy with which we should live and move through the world.

In this sense, it’s not explicitly political. But, like everything, of course it is.

Those vague people of Prynne’s poem, ‘Serenity / Is their slender means’ — they have this moment of calm to relax, to exist peacefully regardless of material and socio-economic deprivations. To live delicately is to live in a society in which people have the economic means to be comfortable, to be able to move away from survival and be able to relax and unspool themselves. Poverty damages people on a fundamental level, damaging cells and shaping how our brains develop.

To live delicately is to live in a way which you are able to express yourself, to move freely, to watch the world whirl around you in comfort and solidarity with those around you — but in a way which allows others to do the same. It is to glide in a way which allows others to soar as well, that gives them the space and uplift to allow them to chart their own airborne courses.

Despite the slightly floral language, it’s vital to remember that these received ideas of how people should be give rise to real, genuine pain. Concrete ideas of gender and of sexuality have irreparably damaged lives around the world, fracturing families and leaving scars on bodies and minds.

To build a delicate society would be to build a society with space for expression, with institutions which afford the comfort and confidence to be your own shape, which nurture rather than repress. Again, this is not an idea of fragility, but a fertile, non-abrasive strength. One of a true empathy, an understanding that people want to live a life in their way, and one of a material luxuriousness, that gives them the means to do that.