We all acquire a shell to protect ourselves from the harsh shocks of the outside world. But once we notice that this shell also protects from what gives life meaning – from the meeting of an open heart with an open heart, from the tenderness that the soul craves …
Tenderness is included in the rite of love. A person needs tenderness, because he felt it even in his mother’s womb. Shortly before birth, the baby already feels a lot – not like we do, but no less fully. The womb for him is the whole world, the planet Solaris, and beyond the boundaries of this world, somewhere very close, right behind the beating of the mother’s heart, – Love that moves the stars.
DEFENDING FROM THE ROUGHNESS OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD, DO NOT CLOSE YOUR HEART FOR TENDERNESS, FOR WHAT GIVES OUR LIFE A MEANING.
The baby touches the truth with his skin. Birth is like the end of the world for him. But the light wins, the light for him is his mother’s smile, her gentle muttering, then toys, games. Little by little, games with peers lead away from the mother’s skirt, but the nearest world is the world of a fairy tale, where everything in everything and the boundaries between objects have not yet frozen, have not yet become a hard reality that does not know the wave of a magic wand.
An evil time is coming and … harsh knowledge. Adolescents are divided into flocks of boys and girls, each is affirmed in his own otherness, his superiority. And suddenly, through all the gaps, the gentle sounds of the violin break through, the unexpected joy of touching hand to hand. Culture suggests the ritual of love. But sexual hunger breaks everything, destroys everything with its rudeness. If this did not happen, if the memory of maternal affection, of the music of love, emerges, a tender passion develops: love connects soul with soul, heart with heart, and the heart subordinates hormones to ritual.
Chopin sends George Sand the notes of the nocturne, which captures the night spent with her. Indeed, there is music of touches, as light as dandelion fluff. It binds soul to soul, without any vows. Nadson is wrong: not only the morning of love is good. Nice afternoon and sunset. And the tenderness of grandmothers to their grandchildren is good. Freud was mistaken in reducing all impulses to libido. There is no libido in the tenderness of mother and child, grandmother and granddaughter. Libido arises in due time and gives a new impetus to tenderness, creates a new field of gentle caresses. But in the cycle of tenderness and passion, libido cannot be singled out as the main thing. Tenderness begins in the womb and continues to the grave.