Everything is happening. Not things first and events after: a stone, a cell, a conversation, a life are acts at different speeds, and the happening is what there is. Every happening is a knot of tensions. It spends itself into this shape and no other, it answers what it happens among, and it stands open at its own completing. To tend is to come to care for the tensions you already are. That is not what everything does, and it is what you are doing now.
• • • —
The word
Tend descends from an ancient root meaning to stretch, the root that survives in tension, tendon, and tent. Latin carried it as tendere and added directions: ex-tendere, out of; in-tendere, in and with; ad-tendere, toward. English inherited all three whole. Extend, intend, attend.
The English verb arrived twice, and the doubling is worth hearing. Tend meaning incline toward comes straight down from tendere. Tend meaning care for, as in tending a garden or tending the sick, is a worn form of attend, from ad-tendere. Two routes out of one root, converging on one English word, so that tend is the word that means both caring for and leaning toward.
That is a felicity and not a proof. A word’s history can license a suspicion; it cannot carry an argument. What holds the two senses together here is care, not philology, and the sections below have to earn it without the etymology’s help.
The claim
The claim at the heart of this work is that reality reads better through happenings than through our usual nouns. What we call things are acts with their own pace. A mountain is a very slow one, a thought a very fast one, and neither is a substance that happens to be changing.
A happening does not occur in time, the way furniture sits in a room. Its happening is its time. “Was,” “is,” and “will be” are how acts sound from inside other acts, and there is no clock outside all of them for those words to point to.
What every happening is
Before anything cares about anything, a happening is already a knot of three tensions. They are not stages, not parts, and not a sequence. They are three characters of one act, always all three, always in some proportion.
Intensity holds this happening with what it arises on. A wave gathers until it cannot stay a swell. A crystal takes the only shape its lattice leaves it. Something spends itself into being determinately this, and it inherits in order to do so.
Resonance holds together and different at once. Two strings that answer each other stay two strings, and the answering is what keeps them distinct rather than what merges them. Nothing happens alone, and the with-ness is not a link laid between things that were already there.
Openness holds the gripped and its release. A happening is never finally clamped by its own nature. There is room in it, room that is not used up by whatever is currently filling it, and that room is why the next thing is not simply the last thing again.
A rock-event holds all three. It spends, it answers, it stands open, and it does so whether or not anyone is watching. This matters more than it looks. The tensions are the happening’s own rather than our way of looking at it, and any account on which the world waits for a reader in order to have a structure has quietly become idealism.
What tending adds
Some happenings come to care for the tensions they are. That is tending, and it is a real local achievement rather than the shape of everything. A tender is a knot of tensions that has taken up its own knot.
Humans tend. Animals may tend, and the honest verdict there is case-by-case rather than settled in advance by what kind of thing something is. About rock-events the careful thing to say is that tend-talk earns no purchase on them in any frame we have, which is a statement about the reach of our frames and not a verdict on rocks. The line between tender and non-tender is drawn by signatures, from somewhere, and it stays revisable.
Getting this backwards is the mistake this work most recently caught in itself. For a long time the writing here used tending for what every event does, which promoted the reader’s own verb into the form of everything. That is the move where a description mistakes itself for the world, and the correction is now load-bearing: tensions are universal, tending is regional, and the second is what the first becomes when a happening comes to care.
Tending reality
Put the two words together and hear them exactly. Not reality, tended, as if the real sat waiting like a garden bed before the gardener arrives. And not tending, inside reality, as if the verb were one process housed in a larger container.
The question “but is there a reality outside all this?” assumes a vantage no one has. To check, you would have to step outside every happening and look, and the stepping and the looking would themselves be happenings, and the looking would be a tending. So the honest answer is narrow and specific. There is no vantage outside, for us, and that is a limit on us.
It is not the claim that the real is made of our caring. The real answers back, resists, surprises, and goes on holding its tensions where no one is tending at all. What is met is not what the meeting made. This is why the work calls itself a realism: that a happening happened is met and holds without us, while what it was, its character and its weight and its significance, is read from somewhere and is ours.
Two cautions keep this honest. Tending is not a new ground, not a finer stuff beneath the world doing the holding-up, and neither is tension. Everything leans on other happenings, with no floor under the leaning. And “only tending” never means one great Tending rolling through everything. Tendings are plural, this act and that act, each once, none containing the others.
The three stretches
A tender stretches its knot three ways at once, one for each tension it is. The three are not parts or ingredients but one verb in three inflections, and none of them is a stage of the others.
- extending, the extension: taking up what you arise on and spending it into this act. Felt, immediate, embodied. It is why a tender is a mortal body with a history rather than a watcher.
- intending, the care: the answering held, difference kept while the with-ness is kept. Attunement rather than architecture, two who stay two.
- attending, the orientation: the toward held open, direction before any plan or purpose, a leaning that puts nothing later.
None reduces to the others and none happens without the others. Every characterization of a tender is a proportion among the three rather than a choice between them. A lean is not an absence, and raising one never spends another.
What lives here
Two of the oldest mysteries have their address in this neighborhood.
Consciousness is not a spark inside the skull, and it is not attending alone. There are two questions inside it, and running them together is what makes it look impossible. The first asks whether something is inhabited at all, and it is answered by signatures rather than by degree: endogenous rhythm, self-maintenance, mortal onces, aims held. The second asks how deeply, and that comes in grades. Reflexivity, a caring that also cares for its caring, is the deep end of the second question rather than the definition of the whole. Depth runs more than one way, so a forest’s attunement can be vast and intelligent without being the same thing. It gets its own page: consciousness.
Agency is a doing and never a doer. No little commander sits inside. Its roots run deep, since a membrane holding itself together already has a stake in its own continuing, and agency proper is that stake taken up by the one who has it. Freedom lives here, not as escape from the happening but as room inside it. It, too, will get its own page: agency.
The once
One more thing is true of every happening, and it may be the most important: it happens once. No act repeats. What completes becomes definite, which is not the same as becoming past, and it is what later happenings arise on.
The invitation
All of this is offered as a way of reading, as far as we can tell, revised in public. The invitation is practical. Take one thing near you, this page, your breath, the room, and read it as a happening rather than a thing. Then notice which of it you are tending, and which of it was holding its tensions long before you arrived.