To sit with The Threatened Swan is to practice restraint. Not the restraint of withholding judgment because judgment feels dangerous, but the restraint of refusing to hurry. The painting does not open itself easily; it resists being ushered too quickly into explanation. Painted around 1650 by Jan Asselijn, the work confronts me first not as allegory, history, or symbol, but as presence. A swan, wings fully extended, neck arched in tension, body braced against an implied threat. Before I can name what it stands for, I am asked simply to stay.
“In the seen, there is only the seen; in the heard, only the heard” (Udāna 1.10). This instruction frames my encounter with the painting more faithfully than any interpretive key. Tathātā, suchness, asks that I remain with what is given prior to explanation. It is not anti-meaning, but pre-meaning. The swan does not symbolize vigilance; it enacts it. Its wings are not graceful but strained, feathers lifted by effort rather than air. The posture is unsustainable, held only for a moment, and that temporality matters. This is not an image of triumph or resolution, but of necessity. It is an image of action taken because something must be done, not because success is assured.
Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is not a detached operation of the mind but the ground from which meaning emerges. Seen this way, the swan’s body communicates before thought intervenes. Muscle, imbalance, tension, exposure. The animal is not reflective; it is responsive. Its body answers the world directly, without abstraction. Dōgen’s observation, “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things,” feels unexpectedly apt here. The swan is fully absorbed in circumstance. There is no excess, no interior commentary, no performance. Just this body meeting this moment.
What deepens the experience for me is the way the painting allows memory to surface without demanding interpretation. I am a child again, standing at the edge of a small lake outside of town, feeding ducks with my Grandpa Chuck. We brought cereal and bread crumbs, a ritual of sorts. At some point, he put bread between my toes and laughed as the birds pecked at my feet. The moment was not traumatic, but it was uncomfortable both physically and relationally. What stays with me is not pain, but imbalance: his amusement, my vulnerability, the asymmetry of power disguised as play.
Seeing the swan does not evoke fear or distress. Instead, it recalls that complicated relational texture. Donald Winnicott wrote that “it is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found,” a line that captures something essential about childhood exposure. In that moment at the lake, I was neither fully hidden nor fully found. I was visible without being protected. bell hooks offers language for this ambiguity when she notes that care and love are not identical; not all care is loving. My grandfather’s laughter was not overt cruelty (I hope), but it was not care either. Tathātā allows this memory to remain unresolved. My grandfather does not need to be redeemed or condemned. Like the swan, he is allowed to remain complicated.
This is where suchness becomes more than a philosophical concept; it becomes a discipline of ethical seeing. To attend without rushing to judgment is not moral indifference. Simone Weil argues that attention itself is an ethical act, “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In holding both the swan and my memory without flattening them into lesson or symbol, I practice a generosity toward reality as it is, not as I would prefer it to be.
Historically, The Threatened Swan emerged from a world deeply familiar with vigilance. Painted shortly after the Dutch Republic secured its independence through the Peace of Westphalia, the work reflects a society living with uncertainty rather than resolution. The Republic was young, internally divided, and alert to threats both external and internal. Independence did not produce peace so much as responsibility. Swans, known for their fierce defense of their nests, were culturally legible as guardians rather than conquerors. This was not the iconography of empire, but of protection rooted in proximity.
Significantly, the political inscriptions that later identified the swan with Johan de Witt and the nest with the state of Holland were added after Asselijn’s death. Meaning accrued to the painting because it was already open enough to receive it. As Svetlana Alpers observes, Dutch art of this period tends to describe rather than narrate. The painting does not tell a story with a beginning and an end; it presents a condition. That openness made it adaptable to civic anxiety without becoming propaganda. The image could hold fear without specifying its source.
Seen in this historical light, the swan’s posture becomes ethically suggestive without becoming allegorical. Hannah Arendt distinguishes power from domination, grounding it instead in responsibility and action taken in relation to others. The swan does not attack to dominate; it interposes itself. Emmanuel Levinas would describe this posture not as choice, but as condition. Responsibility arises not from deliberation, but from proximity. The swan stands where it stands because something behind it requires defense. There is no guarantee of success. There is only response.
What continues to hold me, however, is that neither tathātā nor historical context resolves the image. The threat remains partially obscured. The wings will lower. The moment will pass. Ethics here is not heroic or permanent; it is situational and finite. A Buddhist proverb reminds us that one cannot remain on the summit forever. Suchness includes impermanence, fatigue, and return.
This feels especially resonant within my own vocational life. There are moments, particularly in work shaped by care, education, and systems under strain, when defense is misread as aggression, and vigilance is mistaken for defiance. The swan offers no reassurance that its posture will be understood or rewarded. It only shows what it looks like to respond faithfully to necessity. That clarity, rather than comfort, is the gift of the image.
John Berger insists that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. I see a swan. I remember a lake. I understand a historical moment. I feel the pull of philosophy and the weight of lived experience. None of these cancels the others. They coexist, layered rather than synthesized.
“When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark,” Dōgen writes. I close my looking there. The swan remains. Its wings spread, body braced, responding to necessity. Just this. Nothing added. Nothing resolved.