Intending is tending with — tension as constitution: the
holding by which different happenings keep one shared while, each
kept different, each kept in relation. Not the everyday “having a
plan” — something older and structural. A cell’s membrane does it. A
real conversation does it. Nothing happens alone.
• • • —
The word
In-tendere: to tend in, to tend within. In everyday English
intending has narrowed to mean having a purpose — “I intend to call
you.” That is a late, specialized descendant. This work restores the
older sense: the with-ness of happening, the relational way of the
one verb.
What it names
The best picture is the living cell’s membrane. A membrane is not a
wall between two things that were already there. It constitutes
inside and outside as faces of one another — each kept different,
each kept in relation, and the membrane nothing apart from that
constituting. Life begins there: not in the stuff on either side but
in the holding.
Or a real conversation: not your words, not mine, but the between
that makes them answers to each other. That between is not a third
thing standing beside us, and it is not nothing. It is the
conversation’s own while — a shared time that neither speaker owns.
Wherever different happenings keep one while together — a duet, a
household, a forest — intending is at work.
The failure
Intending’s characteristic failure is fragmentation: the with lets
go, and what was held-in-difference falls into pieces that no longer
answer each other — the conversation that becomes two monologues, the
community that becomes a crowd. Its health is the rarest of skills:
holding difference without dissolving it — with-ness that never
requires sameness.
Relations
One of three ways of one act: without extending and attending
there is nothing distinct to hold and no arc for the holding to
travel. The whole is at tending.