During this week in which we may choose to give thanks or perhaps to mourn, my mind inevitably turns to hands—those sometimes elegant, sometimes workmanlike, but always expressive body parts that engage us in praying or tear drying or spirited gesturing or reassuring touching.
Often one of the first things I notice about someone is their hands. The muscularity, the boniness, the length of the fingers, the stretch of the tendons, the particular curve of nails, the way they echo and enhance their words, the way they soften and shush their being. My grandmother used to comment on my beautiful “moons” by which she meant to refer to that lighter portion of one’s skin beneath the fingernail that curves upward as a delicate, pale rising sun…or moon. Come to think of it, she was an attentive observer of hands. She rubbed and shared worry stones, and she loved to trace life lines and beauty lines on my palm and tell stories…not so much to predict anything but rather to open her extensive imagination (and mine) as the opening of a hand had invited her to do. I'm not surprised she was also a poet.
I, too, am an observer of hands. Hands have their hands (excuse the pun) in so many of our activities. We greet each other by shaking hands. A good handshake consists of a particular firmness and, with the good ones, an ever-so-brief squeeze to acknowledge another’s humanity. We garden in the dirt with our hands—we dig and pull and grab and come in with the grit of things living beneath our fingernails…and somehow that feels honest. We cut wood to build cradles and toy boxes, shared family tables and rocking chairs—our hands create the places where magical moments of life can happen. Children trace their own little pudgy hands to create narrow-feathered Thanksgiving turkeys, slender-petaled flowers, and even swans.
We frame our newborns’ tiny handprints, their delicacy forever documented. Our hands contain the very imprint of our uniqueness in our fingerprints. Hands are the first discovery of one lover by another… first, the sweet fumblings perhaps over the table at dinner… the way that one person opens a palm and offers, waiting, hoping the other will reach forward just a little further…and then that first touch…one hand barely glancing another… the achings transformed into mutual reality…perhaps further, the gentle caress, the tracing of fingers from top to bottom and up again, the way that our eyes follow the fingers in discovery as if the hands were working independent of the brain, indeed straight from the heart, un-interfered with by logic, head, anticipation, time. Scientists have studied how holding hands with a partner reduces stress. In fact, even holding hands with a stranger is calming. Holding hands can even bring things most elusive—like moments of happiness. Depressed and alienated Holden Caulfield finds as much in The Catcher in the Rye:
She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they'd bore you or something. Jane was different. We'd get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we'd start holding hands, and we wouldn't quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.
Hands tacitly connect us and require no words to get straight to the point—that we are alone and fragile and vulnerable and that, with tenderness, we so desperately want to reach out, to connect…and that sometimes, we can.
Hands are an access point into “the absolute,” the present in which hands, unlike words, are the ones that are “making and unmaking promises.” Hands can dig into the loamy earth and unmake time, pull the time out of its layered sequences, as Jorie Graham observes in “The Visible World” and thereby “Leach the humidities out, the things that will / insist on / making meaning.” Hands are the doing and the meaning. Hands are the exquisite and underappreciated frontispiece of our being with their “ten fingers, / fifty-four bones, / capacities strange to us almost past measure.”
And yet, like so many beautiful and strange things, their beauty does not excuse them from participation in intimate horrors nor their workmanship side from sometimes necessitating their own destruction. Hands are some of the most beautiful things in this world and yet can execute unthinkable cruelties. The converse is also true. Some of the most beautiful things in this world destroy hands. During an apprenticeship in Japan learning how to shape bonsai trees, Ryan Neil was faced with an indifferent master who belittled him tirelessly for years; yet, Neil “was even more disheartened by the abuse that the senior apprentices inflicted on those below them: slapping them, striking them with sticks, even punching them in the face.” An even worse mental warfare—enacted through and witnessed in hands—occurs in the film Whiplash, defining its infamous scene of Andrew practicing drumming until his hands bleed. Thus, traumas come from our hands and are placed back into them.
Even when emotional agony is self-wrought, hands can take the beating. While rowing crew in college, I contended with endlessly blistered hands which would rip open daily at the constant pull and flip of my oar, the wet and often cold wood tearing at my thin skin. I simultaneously developed piercingly painful carpal tunnel syndrome in my wrists from overuse. Yet, at each practice and at each race, I knew that it was not what the demands of rowing did to my hands, it was what my hands could bring to the speed, tempo, and smooth flow of the boat. On Common Climber, Dave Barnes describes a similar experience with rock climbing where “rock and hands have been in exchange since Dreaming began.” Climbing demands giving up the tenderness of hands in exchange for jamming them into cracks or sacrificing skin to sharp rocks like granite. Barnes recalls a bouldering area in Sydney where:
There’s nothing grand there, just several metres of sandstone consisting of walls and aretes, ancient bulwarks guarding modern suburbs. One of these sports a problem called Wiltshire, named after a brand of knives. The irony is that what holds there are on this thing are as sharp as knives, killers. What’s more they will slash your skin with the precision of a seasoned butcher.
Wiltshire’s holds are truly evil. When I frequented the crag there were marks of blood lining each edge. Red badges of courage of recent climbers who had tried their hands on this problem. A smooth gold sandstone face interrupts this macabre interface with climbers.
I was but another lamb to the slaughter, every tip I had on either hand was cut, slashed and rumbled like a common street fighter. By the end of this round on Wiltshire each of my fingers was dry firing and I was dry reaching just looking at them. When I sent Wiltshire I was delighted but my fingers were raw and my tips were burning from the experience.
Legendary climber Tommy Caldwell sawed most of his left index finger off while building a platform for his family's new washer and dryer. Immediately fearing he might not be able to climb again, his second fear concerned the value of his remaining worth: “Would Beth still love me if we no longer had the connection that had brought us together in the first place?” he wondered. Hands connect us metaphysically as well as physically. After returning nearly index-fingerless from the hospital, Caldwell was determined to resume his climbing career at the same level as before. Physical therapy to overcome the now overly sensitive stump consisted of retraining the new nerve endings or as his therapist put it “Basically, beat the hell out of it.” Where the therapist recommended one hour of excruciating therapy a day, Caldwell put in three or more. Years later, with his partner Kevin Jorgeson, Caldwell made the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite.
In fact, it turns out that climbers can reshape their hands to fit the tasks—something called hypertrophy where not just muscles, but tendons, ligaments, even bones can grow and adapt over repeated training sessions. If you haven’t had the pleasure to take a look at Alex Honnold’s hands close-up, let Anita Chabria of Sactown Magazine do the trick for you:
His mother calls them “monstrously huge” hands.
Universally, it is agreed they are massive and preternaturally strong—the kind usually dubbed mitts or hams. The fingers are the size of ballpark franks swollen on a hot grill. They’re thick and round all the way to the nails. The tips are so strong that the topmost joints, which most people have trouble even bending on their own, can curl over and clamp down on the most miniscule protrusions, moving the entire 160 pounds of the long, lean body to which they are attached—fingertip pull-ups, if you will—often done in defiance of death while hanging thousands of feet above barren ground.
On the pads, the fingerprints are worn away from being jammed into cracks and pressed on ledges during years of rock climbing. What’s left has been ruthlessly, purposely eroded with a sanding block to prevent bulky calluses. These hands will never pick your pocket or fix your watch. It is difficult to conceive of them comfortably gripping a pen, and who knows what mayhem they wreak on texts. They are extremities that are both the product of the trials they have weathered and a testament to the physical prowess of their bearer. You would not want to thumb wrestle this guy.
We all work with our hands in one way or another—often through mundane but reassuring tasks like the laundry, the cooking, the leaf raking, and even the shoe tying—but perhaps it is how we use them in concert with other aspects of our being that determines the outcome. Trial lawyer Louis Nizer once wrote that: “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.” Artist and writer Austin Kleon acknowledges as much in his work with redacted newspaper clipping poems. On his blog earlier this year, he wrote about how he and a friend spent an afternoon preparing to make zines by creasing and tearing paper. Leaving later, his friend remarked, “I haven’t made anything with my hands in a while…that’s probably why I’m sad!”
Maybe it is this tactile quality of apperception from the hands-on that leads so many of our sayings about understanding and connection to involve hands. In order to really know something, you must experience it first-hand. When you attempt something new, you try your hand at it. You may know a place like the back or perhaps the palm of your hand and we don’t just take control of an untenable situation, we take matters into our own hands. (On the contrary, we give up control by putting decisions into other’s hands.)
Our feelings and thoughts reside so fundamentally in our hands that they are an exalted symbol. The clenched fist, often thought to have first appeared in the symbolic gesture at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their closed hands in a sign of protest against Black poverty and disempowerment, in fact arrived far earlier in the hands of anti-Nazis, anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and in Daumier’s painting, The Uprising, illustrating revolutionaries in 1848 France.
Most recently, there is the iconic image of Donald Trump, blood dripping down his face, fist held high as secret service surround him after an assassination attempt, reviving in the imaginary the fist as symbol of the working class; in it we see both their physical labor and their political voice. Hands can speak volumes where words fail. Hands get straight to the emotional heart of the matter—in the case of the clenched fist: defiance, resistance, resilience…man’s first weapon.
Is it the hand’s tragic beauty, its ability to encompass both tenderness and rage, that allows us to almost, but never quite, touch God? As in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The iconic image from the plethora of images and stories told and unfolded across the man-made sky of this church is that of God reaching forth and bestowing life upon Adam. Of course, the spark of life is passed through the (almost) touch of hands.
Look at the hand of God on the right. It is authoritative without being patronizing. It is commanding and firm while still guiding. The extended finger holds intense power and force and yet the hand itself is relaxed as evidenced by the fall of the rest of the fingers and the curve (not strain) of the thumb. He gives life as a gift, a gift imbued with charge, decrees, knowledge, and responsibility. And yet, with the point of this finger towards Adam’s hand, the force is no longer solely His.
Look at Adam’s hand. Receptive, almost surprising in its nonchalance…or perhaps this is merely the droop of a lifeless hand, a hand yet to receive the charge of life’s vigor, violence, and vitality. And yet that one finger. It lifts, ever so slightly, towards God’s assurance, towards God’s authority, towards God’s trust. The trust that exists in that space between two hands reaching towards each other. The energy and tenderness and transience and permanence (eternally so) of that moment, that movement, that space. The external expression of all that is internal, eternal, and so very human.
From Michelangelo to Samuel Bak to Oskar Kokoschka, hands have often been the quiet communicators of an artwork’s power.
Of course, the painter, the photographer, and the sculptor bring deep attention to hands. Hands are their very tools. As with musicians. Hands are the key to the full expression that can be educed from beautiful instruments like violins, cellos, pianos. Have you ever been close enough to someone playing the guitar, strumming (even with a pick)—their touch upon the strings like something known and understood, like something to be made love to. Or a great pianist—the strained reach of long, spare fingers for notes stroked softly or emphatically…but only momentarily—the reach itself, the work of the hand so much more than the effortless grace upon the keys. The hand the dancer upon the bongo or the tombak.
I fidget often with my hands. I have a hard time wearing rings. I love dresses with pockets because they give me an easy place to hold my nervous hands, unseen, and unfettering me from the decision of what to do with them. But often I just mindlessly fiddle with my hands—sometimes gently squeezing my fingers, sometimes clasping my hands together, sometimes fondling whatever small item may be around—a paperclip, a pen, a small smooth stone. I used to love collecting shells with my grandmother on the shores of Lake Michigan in late summer. While not an unusual penchant, I think my fondness stemmed from the feel and not the look of the sea-worn, abandoned structures. They were sharp, round, sandy, or gossamer. They held histories and memories that I could not possibly understand…but I could hold. I think with my hands. I feel and express and even hide emotions with my hands. Cold hands, warm heart, my grandmother used to tell me. Cliché, of course, but the cliché speaks to the essence of how hands are fundamentally entwined with an emotional reality…are the physical manifestation of such.
We express much through the brush of a hand across the cheek of someone we love…tracing their eyebrow, cupping their chin, following the curve that begins from ear to neck across strong, broad shoulders. There is knowledge within a hand, a unique way of knowing, of seeing, of memorizing moments, of telling secrets that cannot find their way to words. My father wrote me a letter once when he wanted to express his deep appreciation of the unique father-daughter bond. I was struck by the fact that he began the letter with a memory of my colic as a baby. With my stomach so often upset, he would turn me over, hold me across his lap and pat or rub my back in order to soothe my anxious stomach. He did this for hours at a time. And decades later, this was how he chose to communicate our bond to me—this very physical memory contained within the reopening of a quiet tender space and a pair of devoted protective hands.
If you are a reader of my newsletter, you know that I worked in Alaska for a summer. I was an intern with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and our work was part of a larger project intended to follow, document, and assess where migrant songbirds were living, traveling, and relocating. It was a magical summer. Alaska is a magical place. I found my voice amidst the stillness and immensity of the tundra, volcanic mountainscapes, glacial lakes, and endless unnamed, untraveled spaces. The work itself unfastened a part of my soul and expanded my understanding of the world, of life itself. The birds—plovers, warblers, swallows, thrushes, buntings, finches—amazed me. In order to band the birds, we would set up mist nets at various locations around our field site. We would rise each morning before sunrise in order to do so…in order to be there early enough to alight before the first birds awoke—a reversal of the usual order. We were never woken by the trilling songs of the birds. It felt secretive, mystical, and preeminently important.
After the nets were set up, we would make rounds and “collect” the birds who had gotten caught in the nets in order to measure, take blood from, and band them. This was the part I loved the most and still think of when I close my eyes and just feel, rather than think, the memory of that summer. The birds weighted the space and quality of air, of cold breath in winter, of that space between God’s and Adam’s hands. They would often be quite tangled and extricating them required patience and a gentle touch. I learned that I possessed both. I would sing gently to the birds. I did so without thinking—often it would be Bob Marley:
Don’t worry about a thing,
‘Cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singin’: “Don’t worry about a thing,
‘Cause every little thing gonna be all right!”
Rise up this mornin’,
Smiled with the risin’ sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin’ sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Sayin’, “This is my message to you-ou-ou”
I found I could calm the birds. Of all the birds, I especially loved the Wiwas as we nicknamed the Wilson’s warblers.
To hold a bird in the palm of your hand is enchantment. It is to hold fragility and weightlessness and innocence and song and the wind and air itself. It is to hold the atmospheric, the cosmic tenderness. It is to hold the sacred and the profane. It is to hold life without life weighing into you. It is to hold the effervescent, the ethereal, the graceful and to feel those things enter into you, to become real in an awakening physicality such that breath and air and wind become things that you know…that you know in the palm of your hand…that you know as you know the palm of your lover, the feel of your newborn’s soft skin, the aging, wise shake of your grandmother’s arm as she shows you how to properly roll out her heirloom pie crust.
If you have ever had the pleasure of reading Shakespeare carefully (and repetitively as does an English teacher), you will find how much he refers to hands. Take Romeo and Juliet. The play begins with a Prologue spoken by the Chorus “Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” And then, of course, the famous scene v at the end of Act I wherein Romeo and Juliet first meet is entirely based on the metaphor of touch and communication expressed through hands.
ROMEO
[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Prayer, kissing, devotion, tenderness…this work that our hands can do. This meaning they can generate. My hands are legion, I once wrote in a poem. I knew this before I could articulate exactly what I meant.
The love that hands extend to us and the love we can reflect back can be a ceremony of healing as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved:
And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!
Or in e. e. cummings’ serenade to a lover whose hands become his life itself where in their “most frail gesture are things which enclose me, / or which i cannot touch because they are too near” Those hands which “not even the rain” can compare to in their smallness, a smallness which is simultaneously an infinite, a holding of all that is, all that holds us together and keeps us alive, a space as Neruda writes “where I does not exist, nor you, / so close that your hand on my chest is my hand.” In our final moments, it likely will not be words we so desire, but the caring hold of another’s hands around ours as we pass.
Open your hand. In your open hand unfolds a life, life itself—in the smallness, in the rhythmic quietude of the rain, in the other that becomes your very self. I give thanks indeed for hands.
In gratitude,
Katie