Extending is tending out of — intensification: the becoming so
intense that it cannot remain what it was, and form erupts. Felt,
immediate, embodied. A wave breaking, a crystal forming, a word finally
said. Every act extends out of acts already completed — but the
has-been is not carried like cargo. It is taken up in the erupting,
this once, now.
• • • —
The word
Ex-tendere: to tend out of. The first of the three ways of
tending — the out of by which an act becomes, and by which it
arises out of the completed acts before it.
What it names
Extending names the embodied intensity of happening. Not a substance
acquiring properties, and not a form waiting somewhere to be filled:
the intensification itself — the moment where a happening becomes so
concentrated that form erupts. It is the felt way of tending: the
eruption has an immediacy, a presence, a this-ness that nothing
abstract can stand in for.
It is tempting to define extending as inheritance — the past, carried
forward. Resist the shortcut. Seen from later acts, what extending
produces looks like inheritance: the has-been, available, determinate.
But from inside the act there is no cargo being carried — there is
only the taking-up of completed acts into an eruption that is
happening now. The skilled hand does not replay ten thousand prior
doings; the ten thousand erupt as this doing, whole.
The failure
Extending’s characteristic failure is inertia: form repeating
without tending — habit that has forgotten what it was for, the
institution that persists because it persists, intensity gone flat
into mere continuation. The health of extending is the eruption
itself: the inherited actively taken up, this once, into something
that was not here before.
Relations
One of three ways of one act: without attending the eruption has
no arc, and without intending it has no with to erupt in. The
whole is at tending.