38 WSJ. MAGAZINE
WSJ. asks six luminaries to weigh in on a single topic. This month: Tension.
CHERYL
HAYASHI“Spider silk can be
stronger than steel, and
in terms of toughness
it surpasses nearly all
man-made materials.
Spiders are naturally
using tension to pull the
silk out of their bod-
ies, to make webs or to
wrap their eggs or an
insect they’ve caught for
dinner. Especially
when you’re wrapping
prey, you don’t put them
in a loose wrap—you
wrap them tight! Ten-
sion is a way to store and
release energy. As you
start cutting away parts
of a spider web, you’re
releasing energy. But
the amazing thing is that
they’re designed such
that, even if you break
a line here or there, the
web stays more or less
intact. In nature, there
are all kinds of solu-
tions to problems. I can
imagine the problem,
but I could never have
imagined how nature
solved it. The rules of
physics apply to spiders,
but they do things their
own way.”Hayashi is a curator and profes-
sor and the Leon Hess director
of comparative biology research
at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York.“Tension is a very good
word for Gothic archi-
tecture—it describes
what’s going on at
various levels. A Gothic
building has to be in ten-
sion; there’s the outward
thrust of the vaults that
needs to be counteracted
by the flying buttresses.
But on the inside, you
don’t see those flying
buttresses. You just see
stone suspended al-
most 150 feet in the air.
Underneath, there’s
nothing but glass...what
seems to be diaphanous
walls. At Paris’s Notre
Dame Cathedral, the
dynamic relationship be-
tween the parts, the
tension in which they
exist, is exactly what’s so
challenging about the
restoration. Perhaps
within this catastrophe
there is a lesson for
the public about the im-
mense creativity,
originality and yes,
tension, in the creation
of the great works of
art. Reestablishing the
equilibrium of the
building, recreating the
balance of the tension,
is the challenge for now.”
CAROLINE
BRUZELIUSBruzelius is the Anne M. Cogan
professor emerita of art, art
history and visual studies at
Duke University.
“In my book I tried to
write about how, in a
sense, our parents push
us into the future and
our children pull us
back into the past. Often
enough it’s your parents
who are bothering you
to bring about the future,
get married, settle
down, have children.
In our hypermobile age,
there’s this extended
period where people are
neither at home with
their parents nor at
home with their own
children. The book
is about how there is
something slack about
that middle period....
It gets too comfortable.
There’s a tension in
all of us of What is it to
be free, truly free?
Is it being able to hold
onto what you want,
or is there this greater
freedom in letting
go and surrendering to
what fate and history
have always had in store
for you? That tension
seems, at least in
my own life, to be where
growth happens.”MICHAEL
BRENDAN
DOUGHERTYDougherty is the author of
the recent memoir My Father
Left Me Ireland.SOAPBOXTHE COLUMNISTS
Francis is the frontman of
the Pixies, whose new
album, Beneath the Eyrie,
releases this month.BLACK
FRANCIS“Tension is a necessary
component of music. For
something to be good,
even if it’s a happy song,
there has to be some
kind of tension going on.
When things sound
boring, that’s a red flag
for a musician. Where’s
the tension? I think you
can apply that to a lot
of art forms. You see a
film or look at a paint-
ing. When there’s no
tension, it kind of falls
flat. It’s sort of like when
the wind is filling the
sail. That doesn’t mean
you’re in a storm and
you’re about ready
to capsize. It just means
that it’s functioning
the way it should, and
there’s something that
feels good about that
wind in the sail. Or it’s
like when the flag is
blowing in the wind—
the architecture of the
flag is being served by
the tension. The tension
brings it up and shows
it in all its glory.”Miller is a cartoonist. A novel
he illustrated, Cursed, is
out next month and will be a
Netflix series in 2020.FRANK
MILLER“The conflict between
Batman and Superman
in The Dark Knight
Returns was between
two completely different
points of view. Bat-
man’s story begins with
a murder and everything
descending into chaos.
Superman’s begins
with him being raised
as a small-town boy
in a well-ordered world.
He represents the more
Apollonian side of the
universe. These themes
keep getting repeated.
We always have our
two sides. Story is con-
flict. Going back to
ancient Greece, we
have our tough, milita-
ristic, Spartan side, but
we also have our more
intellectual, artistic
side—the side geared
towards beauty, which is
distinctly Athenian. In
any healthy person, both
sides are present. To
survive, one needs a bit of
the Spartan in them, but
for a reason to survive,
one needs some of the
Athenian. The tension
between the two sides is
part of what makes
a human being work.”“Tension can be uncom-
fortable, but the reason
it exists is because it’s a
signal that we need a
shift. The tension builds
and builds, and then
you’re so uncomfortable
that you’re forced into
a new reality. And often
it’s a better new reality.
But I also think there’s
value, as you get older,
in looking at the tense
moment, pausing and
saying: Is it actually bet-
ter to make a shift?
Or am I just avoiding
pain and jumping into
more pain? Is this just
a moment of discomfort,
or what I am really
supposed to do? Because
everything passes, in-
cluding tension. Oprah
always says everything
so well. I saw her once
talk about how the uni-
verse whispers to
you. It’s so true. Is this
tension the universe
trying to tell me some-
thing? If you can get
still, I believe you really
can know.”SARA
GILBERTGilbert is an actress and pro-
ducer. She currently stars in and
is an executive producer
of the TV show The Conners.