Stillpoint Magazine is dormant as of December This site remains available for all past issues and articles. Former supporters-only issues are also now available for free. CONTENT NOTE: This video contains footage of a scalpel incision into skin, a wound and blood being handled in a lab setting, as well as other images of medical equipment, such as scalpels, testing machines, and biological samples.
I like to joke with my friends at Stillpoint Magazine that I pilfer my personal life to write these editorial statements. Yet again we selected the concept for Issue TENDER around the time of a particularly juicy personal mishap, which has become my greatest loss to date.
We are like this. And that lost dream, like so many of the losses experienced since March by those I love or admireโand like many of the losses articulated in the artworks and texts that followโleaves a wound, the kind that will never heal. Tender indeed. I offer myself here not I hope for narcissistic exhibitionism, but instead as a metaphor, an example of that ambivalence we find in TENDER itself, since tender is the place where delicacy, adoration, and careโof the child or the mother, of the lover, of the selfโcollides with the painful crush of power imposed, of guilt, of loss and grief.
Illness, death, abuse, false seduction, the universal-yet-overlooked aggression between the mother and child. There are many tender times that bloom gorgeous, bloody blossoms into a life.
This second concept is something I seek to produce in a flash of inspiration, after months of analytic development. From this place of purgatorial drifting let me venture: embraced, humility can be a surrender to the impossibility of well-planned futures.
