Your One Wild and Precious Life: End of Year Campaign

Our theme for Festival of Friendship 2021
Photo courtesy of: Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization

by Suzanne M. Lewis

We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts; this brings us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in fostering dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect.

We have found that the best tools for fostering true dialogue and effecting real healing within our broken culture are humanities education and free cultural events.

Humanities Education

Despite an overall increase of 29% in bachelor’s degrees awarded over the ten-year period ending in 2016, the steady decline in the number of humanities degrees conferred has only accelerated. In 1967, 17.2% of all degrees conferred were in the humanities. By 2014, that figure was down to 6.1%. Why should this precipitous drop concern us?

The very name “humanities” provides the answer: the various subjects that make up the humanities provide a curriculum for becoming more human. The more we lose touch with the humanities, the more we lose access to certain dimensions of our own humanity.

“Where scientific observation addresses all phenomena existing in the real world, scientific experimentation addresses all possible real worlds, and scientific theory addresses all conceivable real worlds, the humanities encompass all three of these levels and one more, the infinity of all [imaginable] worlds.” ― biologist, Edward O. Wilson

The humanities teach us how to extract and absorb facts from a document, how to interpret data, particularly in relation to the whole field of knowledge, and how to evaluate whether a claim is true or false; they also show us how to formulate an argument and find evidence to support our own claims; most importantly, they put us in conversation with others who grapple with the same human questions that preoccupy us, expose us to other perspectives, and open us to continuous learning – even teaching us how to learn from those with whom we disagree.

A quick visit to a handful of social media platforms, or a cursory scan of the headlines for competing news outlets, provides overwhelming evidence of how the tragic decrease in humanities education has had devastating effects on our public discourse.

“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.” ― English literature scholar, Stefan Collini

With these considerations in mind, Revolution of Tenderness has founded Convivium: A Journal of Arts, Culture, and Testimony, Convivium Press, and the Festival of Friendship. Each of these initiatives provides educational tools and programming to introduce humanities education into the public sphere. We sell our journal, and all other educational resources, at cost so that they may be accessible to the greatest number of people. Our free cultural programming offers content from pre-eminent scholars and experts while modeling the practice of respectful dialogue.

Free Cultural Events

The annual Festival of Friendship, our largest free and open cultural event, contributes a celebratory dimension to our educational work. This year, though we had to move the Festival online, we had nearly 1,300 attendees, a new record for us!

While our printed texts, videos, and other materials provide crucial substance, our events confer a body with living, human features. Without this living body, learning becomes a dry and toilsome duty, a “prize” to capture and use, or a meaningless intellectual exercise. Instead, our free events serve as life-giving feasts for the human heart and mind.

Our next exciting project will involve a commission for a new piece of music from composer Richard Danielpour, who spoke at the Festival of Friendship last month. The projected performance will take place in early 2021. We’ll provide further details as they become available.

Our working hypothesis, that “all things cry out in unison for one thing: Love” (13th Century friar and poet, Jacopone da Todi), allows us to “assume an extended shared world” (Stefan Collini) and meet anyone and everyone with curiosity and an embrace. Our festive gatherings serve as laboratories, where speakers and performers present their findings and launch new experiments in human flourishing.

Your generous support for Revolution of Tenderness makes you a creative protagonist who generates a culture of dialogue in the public arena. Please contribute to our end of year campaign today. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.

The Enormous Room

Cover design for E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, a memoir that details his experiences as a WWI POW in France

First among the conditions needed for finding and generating novel, creative, and ingenious human responses – in any and all circumstances – is an “enormous room.” We want this blog, and indeed all the work of Revolution of Tenderness, to open up this enormous space of possibility.

Our blog title alludes to a book by E. E. Cummings called, The Enormous Room, published in 1922. This autobiographical work describes Cummings’ imprisonment in France during World War I, and the “Room” the title describes is the barracks where Cummings was incarcerated along with about 30 other prisoners. While the “enormous room” that we want to build and that is crucial for fostering human flourishing and creativity, need not be a prison, it’s fascinating to note that Cummings’ confinement opened up a space in him where he could find and develop his poetic gift.

Two other secondary conditions for developing a richly creative and truer humanity are food and music. But not just any food (for example, not “bread alone”); and not all music will suffice for this purpose.

Cummings’ Enormous Room

E.E. Cummings was no ordinary prisoner, and the way that he experienced and narrated his involuntary detainment helps us understand the importance of cultivating our own enormous rooms. For Cummings, the space of his incarceration became a symbol for memory, for the space where he could keep the companionship of his fellow inmates alive. This “room” contained Cummings’ likewise enormous affection for all those with whom he shared it. The quality of the friendships formed within that communal cell also provides an insight into the needs of inventors, innovators, and all those whose daily work, no matter how hidden or “small,” can rebuild and unveil our humanity.

Each of us carries multitudes within. These throngs could become, over time, a faceless and colorless mob; sometimes it’s less painful to allow this degradation to happen, where memory breaks down the sharp edges of detail and leaves only a melted, vague mass of humanity. For a person to remain fully alive to her work and her environment, however, decomposition is worse than death. Distinguishing between one face and another, even between one subtle expression on a particular face and the mere flicker of a muscle that alters its meaning, could transform the essence of a relationship from ordinary to sublime. As Cummings’ notes, when describing his fellow prisoner, The Schoolmaster, in The Enormous Room: “Lessons hide in his wrinkles…” All creative contributors to a more human culture need the enormous room in order to keep track of every lesson that hides in each wrinkle.

Even more than lessons, though, the enormous room preserves and enlarges the affections among those who inhabit it. Cummings’ genius with words comes in second to his particular gift of tenderness for the subjects he writes about, even his captors. For example, during his entrance interview, he describes the petty official who interrogated him:

[He] looked as if he was trying very hard, with the aid of his beribboned glasses and librarian’s jacket (not to mention a very ponderous gold watch-chain and locket that were supported by his copious equator), to appear possessed of the solemnity necessarily emanating from his lofty and responsible office. This solemnity, however, met its Waterloo in his frank and stupid eyes, not to say his trilogy of cheerful chins–so much so that I felt like crying ‘Wie gehts!’ and cracking him on his huge back. Such an animal! A contented animal, a bulbous animal; the only living hippopotamus in captivity, fresh from the Nile.
He contemplated me with a natural, under the circumstances, curiosity. He even naively contemplated me. As if I were hay. My hay-colored head perhaps pleased him, as a hippopotamus. He would perhaps eat me. He grunted, exposing tobacco-yellow tusks, and his tiny eyes twittered.   – from The Enormous Room, by E.E. Cummings

The impulse to “crack him on the back” and cry out, “How are you?” in German brings silliness into a humiliating situation. Cummings gives us burlesque, even as he dances in the arena of his own prison. When Cummings turns his attention to his fellow prisoners, his affection deepens:

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition workers made la grève [a strike], and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who—when he could not keep from crying (one must think about one’s wife or even one’s child once or twice, I merely presume, if one loves them) … -used to, start up and cry out, taking B. by one arm and me by the other:
‘Al-lons, mes amis! Chantons “Quackquackquack.”‘ [Come, my friends, let’s sing the “Quackquackquack”] Whereupon we would join in the following song, which Monsieur Auguste had taught us with great care, and whose renditions gave him unspeakable delight:
…’finirons nos desseins,
…………………………Quack.
……………………………….Quack.
……………………………………Quack.
………………………………………….Qua-
…………………………………………………ck.’
I suppose I will always puzzle over the ecstasies of That Wonderful Duck. And how Monsieur Auguste, the merest gnome of a man, would bend backwards in absolute laughter at this song’s spirited conclusion upon a note so low as to wither us all.

If only we could reprint Cummings’ depictions of all his fellow inmates: the Schoolmaster, Orange Cap, the Zulu, Emile the Bum, the Silent Man, the seeker of cigarette ends, the Turk, the Bear, and many others, who all received similar, loving treatment from Cummings’ pen, but you can read them here.

We’re all, more or less, thrown together with a raft of characters, most of whom we would not have chosen for company. Out of these personalities, we can either make beauty or a living hell. Out of the hell of his confinement, Cummings made a love poem for a good number of men he would never see again. His is the room where memory sharpens affection’s focus and gives back art.

Food

Not just any food, no matter how exquisitely prepared or how locally-sourced and organic the ingredients, will satisfy the deepest needs of the human heart. In The Hiding Place, an autobiographical account, this time by concentration camp survivor Corrie Ten Boom, Corrie and her sister Betsie arrive at Ravensbrück camp and are able, against steep odds, to hang on to their Bible and a bottle of precious vitamin drops:

My instinct was always to hoard [the vitamin drops] – Betsie was growing so very weak! But others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest – but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, twenty-five…
And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the top of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.

The vitamin drops from this episode in The Hiding Place represent what nourishes an abundant life. These drops must be rare, needed by the owners, and yet freely shared, in love, all the same.

Why take examples from a prison and a concentration camp?

If something is true under great duress, then it can also be true in any circumstance. So to validate the need for memory, for affection, and for sharing a stranger’s precious, life-giving drops, we must see whether these things have value in the harshest circumstances.

Music

The “Quackquackquack” song provided a kind of oxygen, without which the enormous room’s inhabitants would have asphyxiated from lack of joy. Likewise, without Betsie’s hymns, which she sang despite the ugliest of circumstances, those vitamin drops would have dried up.

The impulse to song – including when music takes the form of a lyrical novel, or a well-mopped floor, or a dialogue that leads to deeper friendship – must rise up in us, or even the best memory, the most playful description of one’s tormentors, or the most noble impulse to share will fall flat.

Love needs to be set to music before we can play it. Let’s form a band. We’ll call it Saxifrage.