Promises to the past
Tenderness and survival in nightingale time
A few days ago, I was trying to introduce my students to Michel Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, of a place where other times and places meet. I’d recently been riveted by something John Berger says in a late interview about tenderness as the “refusal to judge,” mentioned in a draft piece of writing shared by my friend, the creative and insightful thinker Kyle Parry.1 This tenderness, Berger suggests, flowers from the way we ackowledge and attend to the dead, the manner in which we invite them into our lives. In the process of working out what he means by this, he returns to a story that he told many times in books and interviews, of his father’s experience in the trenches of the Great War. Berger comes to the realization that his life, his very existence, is rooted in those trenches, in the horrors of the war and his father’s survival. And not only in that survival—not only in the bare-life fact that had his father not survived, he would never have lived. No, beyond this, the recognition that his life, himself in his own possibility, had accompanied his father through the war. And what is life—what are we as individuals, really—but the magnificence of our possibility?
Berger explores this condition of life before life most urgently and intimately in a poem, “Self-portrait 1914–18.” “It seems now that I was so near to that war,” Berger begins; “I was born eight years after it ended.” And yet he was there—amid the “Very Light and shrapnel/On duck boards/Among limbs without bodies.” In light of flares and the charnel misery of the trenches, he was his father’s “groundless hope of survival.” And he concludes that “Before I could see/Before I could cry out/Before I could go hungry/I was the world fit for heroes to live in.”
After reading his poem, Berger invokes the country people of southern France among whom he lived the last decades of his life; among them, “it is a completely accepted fact that they live with the dead, that the dead are here, that they will be the dead, and that the dead are there … to help them die.” This relation with the dead is very different from a mere sense of the presence of the past, he suggests, with the susceptibility to nostalgia this breeds.
And so in the poem we have the sense of this grim soldier, smeared with mud, bleeding, hungry, cradling in his kit the very future world—and even more, that future reaching back to him with tenderness, with the refusal to judge. Though to say “reaching back” is wrong—for the future was there with him under the flares, amid the mustard gas. “To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading,” Berger writes elsewhere, “for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present, and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applied to the present and past as well as the future can better be called an assurance.”
So I shared the Berger interview with my students, and then we looked at another film, about the British folk singer Sam Lee going into the woods at night to sing with nightingales. The birds have sung this way for millions of years, Lee says; we’ve evolved listening to them. As “one of the few night birds who will sing consistently,” Lee suggests, they are “midwives and sires to us as language and song carriers. And to think that in the million years plus that humans have been evolving, that in my lifetime I might hear the last nightingale—that’s incomprehensible.” And so Lee seeks the music in music’s very possibility, which is the nightingale. “I’ve learned to be in their presence while holding the concept of catastrophe,” he says, “as well as adoration.”
I shared Lee’s film about the nightingales in class because I wanted to talk about how art can turn a place into a portal to other times and places, to other possibilities. That always, already, we were alive in the dark among the leaves in the notes the nightingale sings. To sing with nightingales in the night of now is to do something more than establish a fleeting interspecies encounter—it’s to recognize that encounter as originary and ongoing.
As Lee spoke about the millions of years nightingales sang before us, and the enormity of their possible loss, I realized that he and Berger were saying the same thing: that both past and future are present, and that we owe our tenderness to both, not as mere possibilities, but as companions, as kin. For Berger, the dead are present, and to live with the presence of the dead is to give ourselves to time with tenderness. Tenderness for a father-to-be cowering in a bunker; tenderness for the long-ago birds hurtling north to sing their hearts to the night. Tenderness for the dead, whose time is our time, and tenderness for this nightingale time, too.
And now, I think of the past to which I am present. My father’s maternal grandfather came to this country in 1909, settled on the south side of Chicago, raised a family. When I was diagnosed with a BRCA-related cancer in 2020, I turned to genealogy in hopes of understanding how the gene had found its way to me. In the records of a ship that left Liverpool and landed in New York in 1909, I found my great-grandfather’s name with the text “race: Hebrew / language: Russian” entered into the manifest. Now, my siblings and I were raised as midwestern methodists with little knowledge of our father’s family. Dad (who died from complications of his own BRCA-related cancer in 2010) never mentioned his grandfather’s ancestry. We don’t know whether he knew about it; it never came up in family conversations, although the connection between Ashkenazic ancestry and certain BRCA deletions was understood when his cancer appeared.
Berger looks back and finds that he was a world “fit for heroes to live in.” What world were my siblings and I for our great-grandfather? Before I could see or go hungry, was I a refuge or a getaway, an emancipation or an escape? This world of midwestern methodism, of cancers and forgetting, for whom was it a fit future?
Any answer breaks the heart.
What tenderness do I owe this ancestor? What assurance can I offer, what promise can I make? These questions land with special force now, as those who pledge themselves to imagined pasts set out to destroy the promises of generations—to erase the possibility of such promises—to crush tenderness, including this tenderness of the living for the dead, wherever they find it. What can we do but pledge our tenderness for the dispossessed, for the neighbor, the student, the refugee; tenderness for our fearful ones, the ones now in flight? What can we do but offer this tenderness for the nightingale, too? To name what we can name, to embrace it with our language and our voice? To offer this assurance, to hold past, present, and future as tenderly as we can; for they—nightingales, heroes, escapees, the dispossessed—also are ourselves.
It might seem a strange leap from songbird conservation to the mysteries of long-dead ancestors. But I think there is an ecology of ancestry at work here, tracing its line from Berger through Lee, across no-man’s land and the Pale of Settlement, through the eons that midwife music and meaning. Just as these worlds were alive in the millions of years of nightingale time, so do untold possible worlds lie within our world—within ourselves. To these dead and not-yet-dead, what assurance can we give?
Catastrophe; adoration. I hear a song in these words, or a chant, which is to say, a prayer. For rigor when it comes to actions; for song as the tenderness of language.
Kyle Parry and I worked together for many years at Harvard before he moved to the University of California Santa Cruz, where he teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture. His book A Theory of Assembly: from Museum to Memes is a wonder. I was remiss in not mentioning Kyle’s reference to Berger’s remarks when I first published this dispatch, and I am so very grateful for his generosity and insight.
Heartsore.
Beautifully woven!