Give Me a Hand

Geof Huth, "my life in segregated versions of" (31 May 2012)
Yesterday, during a workshop on managing email, I sat at the midmost seat of the uppermost row of the Carole Huxley Theatre as I listened to two of my staff give a workshop on email. I also participated in the workshop along the way. But I was making a little fidgetglyph, trying to make something not quite like what I had made before, and I liked the results. The poem had some clear letterforms, so quasi-letters of an asemic nature, so shapes more like drawings, and even handwritten serifs (a rarity).

After looking at my creation for a few moments, I decided to write beneath, in full longhand. With no idea what I was going to write, I wrote a little poem, a little quasi-sentence, in four lines. And, thus, my creation was finished. As I surveyed its tiny expanse, I thought that the results resembled a 16th-century emblem poem. Atop the page was something letterish, but something that resembled a drawing, and below it was the illustrative text. (Because that is how I understand emblem poems: the text is the illustration, the visual is the core of the piece because the text merely explains the visual.) This was a satisfying accomplishment because I like the emblem poem form, and people rarely use it anymore, or even make references back to it. The past retreats past memory into some rockier and even more barren place.

But I realized more forcefully that my hand was not working as it should. The original fidgetglyph (admittedly, drawn on lap) exhibits some flaws in draftsmanship but it was fine enough. The text, however, showed the weakness of my hand: that body of fingers and flesh, but also that force of that body that creates writing on a page, and that writing itself. The line all drift upward, which I cannot forgive, but which I can explain away as a longterm fault of my hand. What was disturbing was how poorly I had made the letterforms in the text: the weakness of the r's, the flaccidity of the f's. It was deflated.

Sure, I had written this on my lap, and I was wearing a carpal tunnel brace at the time, but this was not working. My practice was failing. I created two others in this series that day, finishing one and a half others of these after the first. Then, upstairs at my desk, I wrote the text for the third and last of these emblem poems. Two of the g's are so malformed I can barely look at them, yet, it might be the brace that is the problem. Maybe my hand still works.

But I'm not sure if I'll ever know. My right hand, which types thousands of words a day and wraws sometimes dozens of glyphs a day (not to mention cutting and folding and all the other things my hands do), now is so pained by incipient carpal tunnel syndrome that I have taken to wearing my brace constantly, joking that it is a fashion statement to do so. I need to rest my hands more, to use voice-recognition software, or maybe even have surgery to correct or contain this problem.

But then I thought, What if I did have surgery? Would I still have the same hand afterwards? Since my hand is controlled by my brain? Or would my hand be changed in such a way that it could never do what it used to do? Even if what it started to do was still good, only better. I don't know. But I may find out sooner than I'd ever wish to.

And then I thought to myself that these were appropriate thoughts to have since each of these three poems was a poem somehow representing and speaking of myself, even if that person were merely a general representation of a poem writing those words to represent the idea of self rather that the self itself.

Geof Huth, "my thoughts in versioned and" (31 May 2012)ecr. l'inf.