The heart is beaten. Besieged. A bit assaulted around the edges. With enmity or indifference. The heart is fractured and threadbare. So many pages have been devoted to the hard edges of love it would have felled a forest, but is anything more exact than this?

Is it true the ribs can tell
the kick of a beast from a
Lover’s fist? The bruised
Bones recorded well …
Love by nature, exacts a pain
Unequaled on the rack.
From Maya Angelou’s “A Kind of Love, They Say”

If love, by its nature, exacts a pain, as the beloved Angelou wrote, the heart is the locale of that pain. It is the center of our embodied pain and the center of the body, a muscle in extraordinary demand. The heart tears, beating and beaten in every way.

“Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot,” writes American poet David Whyte in his reclamation of too-often used words.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot. [It] colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, […] in the attempt to shape a more generous self.
From David Whyte’s Consolations

“Heartbreak is not a visitation,” writes Whyte, but it feels like one. Heartbreak is like standing still while something pummels our exterior. It comes at you, moves after you, moves through you, and you are relentlessly stuck.

And the pain sits on our chest like a chest.

I return to this short short story by Lydia Davis, a writer of meaning stripped of accessory.

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions.
‘The wind,’ said the woman.
‘Hunters,’ said the man.
‘The rain,’ said the woman.
‘The army,’ said the man.
The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

In Davis’s Essays, she explains that in the first draft of this piece, she initially imagined a dog in the house, but it was removed – too domestic, too comforting. When I read Davis’s work, I mentally remove the man and the woman and place my heart inside the house—pulsing out its little, nervous hope.   The fact that the couple is “already home” carries a huge weight in the story, home as a proxy for safety and refuge. A final retreat. Read more about this psychological and literal place in The Alienation We Feel When We Go Home, What is the Feeling of Home?, Sebastian Junger’s study of home and belonging, and the rich stories of animals who home. A heart visited – despite what Whyte argues – by heartbreak.

The heart is, a poet might argue, the smallest parcel of a conceptual human, at least in metaphor, if not actuality. To have heart, to do something with heart is to do something with conviction, power, and the whole self.

“The human heart is so delicate and sensitive that it always needs some tangible encouragement to prevent it from faltering,” writes Maya Angelou in her glorious generosity of self. Has anyone given more heart? This woman spent her life writing pain, sweeping up heartache, and bundling it tight. Who went from a childhood limited by racism, sexual assault, and poverty to carrying a nation on her back through poetry and song.

So what are these reparations for a beaten heart? How do we give it tangible encouragement?

The key, argues Whyte, would be to look at heartbreak not as a besieging but as… what’s the word… a companion.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. […] If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it.

Angelou wrote about a companion. Did she mean her pain?

Where We Belong

In every town and village,
In every city square,
In crowded places
I search the faces
Hoping to find
Someone to care.

[…]

Then you rose into my life
Like a promised sunrise.
Brightening my days with the light in your eyes.
I’ve never been so strong,
Now I’m where I belong.
From Maya Angelou’s “Where We Belong”

I often think I belong next to Hermann Hesse of Germany’s Black Forest (as my people were). Hesse was formed by a strict religious upbringing and coaxed frequently to the edge of madness by an irreconcilable sense of self against society. He believed in the social wholeness of people yet suffered alienation from a society that did not include him. He nurtured a sinewy connection to nature’s cycles and held solitude as a primitive need in the quest for self-knowledge.

In the touchingly tender poem called “Do you know this too…?” Hesse lays his vulnerability at our feet.

Do You Know This Too?

You are in the middle of a cheerful party,
when a sudden stillness takes hold of you,
and you hastily have to leave the happy hall.

Back in your bed, you lay awake
like someone suffering from a sudden heartache.
The fun and laughter disappear like smoke
and you break into tears: do you know this too?
From Hermann Hesse’s Seasons of the Soul

Whether it’s a sharp pain or aching fatigue, our hearts are beaten. I instantly connect to Hesse over this poem. And so many others. Do you know this too?

I have no reparation for the beaten heart. There is no armor against it (well, none that doesn’t extract its own grave toll). No transaction to set it right or stop it from stag our steps.

But as I write this, surrounded by sitting in the warmth of something good, the glow of something bright, the company of these artists who met their pain with grace and generosity, and the imagined company of you, dear reader… That is the reparation – no, the recourse – for this beaten heart.