Hands Hold Our Own Fate and the Planet’s Future
My hands have a mind of their own. They draw on memory and experience to press the keys that spell out the words read by your eyes and transferred to your brain to unscramble, savour and store.
Hands find the light switch in the dark. They find the itch that needs to be scratched. They do up buttons. They remember telephone numbers and codes. The hands on the clock never stop. They tick off time, measure our days. Hands are like the winds and tides, never still. We may share our mother’s eyes and our father’s nose, but our palms are unique, it is where our destiny is written.
Hands make us human. Our relatives, the monkeys and apes, lack the agile thumbs and sensitive fingers Michelangelo required for carving the David, Picasso in painting Guernica, John Lennon playing Imagine.
The piano requires ten fingers, but a solitary digit can pick out blame, point at the villain. You can give someone you don’t like the finger. Or two fingers. A little boy’s finger in the dyke saved Holland from flooding. Those without hearing or speech sign with curling fingers and shaking paws.
Many hands make light work. Busy hands never get into trouble (unless they get caught picking someone’s pocket). You can offer a hand to be shaken. Clean hands inspire confidence, just as getting your hands dirty has its own malign significance.
The surgeon in latex gloves delivers the new baby. The strangler’s claws reach for unsuspecting windpipes. The hand that rocks the cradle can carry a gun. Bananas come in hands. Packs of cards are dealt into hands. After a fight, men will give five, slap palms, shake hands. Or kill each other. Stories are best told first-hand. Sometimes I buy clothes from the Oxfam shop second-hand. But never shoes.
Hands of Fate
Flamenco dancers beat out illusive rhythms with cupped clapping hands. Audiences bring their palms together to show appreciation. Hands fold in prayer. Hands wave to say come, good bye, hello. Cupped hands take water from the river flow.
The hand on the wheel and the hand at the tiller guide us. A bosun’s whistle calls all hands on deck. Masons and magicians have secret handshakes. No uninvited hand except the hand of God should touch the Queen. Politicians and corporate bosses are hand in glove. The workman’s hands with dirt beneath his nails tell us he is a workman.
Truman Capote said – When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
Anaïs Nin wrote in The House of Incest – What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.
From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scent 5 –
Romeo – (taking Juliet’s hand) Your hand is like a holy place that my hand is unworthy to visit. If you are offended by the touch of my hand, my two lips are standing here like blushing pilgrims, ready to make things better with a kiss.
Juliet – Good pilgrim, you don’t give your hand enough credit. By holding my hand you show polite devotion. After all, pilgrims touch the hands of statues of the saints. Holding one palm against another is like a kiss
Pontius Pilate washed his hands after the trial of Jesus. Oedipus with his bare hands ripped out his own eyes when he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. Robert Oppenheimer wrung his hands when he looked out over the New Mexico desert after the test explosion of the first atomic bomb and quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
The very planet is in our hands. If we decide to take ourselves to nothingness, a fingertip is all that’s required to press the red button.
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