The other hand – by Carly Stone
ISLAND | issue 168
the gold parts
Bright blue day in Central Park with T. We stop at the dog statue, take off our gloves, and pat the front paws. The dog is a dull bronze, but the paws have been rubbed gold, as have the nose and ears and tail, and these parts feel warmer, as though the paws have held the heat of every hand that touched them.
pause
January 2020. I watched the construction workers unroll the caution tape outside the library. Class was cancelled. Everything was cancelled. I called my mum – it’s all about touch, she said. She told me to imagine one sick person touching two people and those two people touching another two people and so on and so on forever.
forever
There are a thousand ancient handprints on the walls of Cueva de las Manos. They’ve been there for nine millennia or more. Some of the hands are blurred at the edges, as though in motion. Other hands overlap, or partly obscure each other, which gives the impression of many people touching one another through time.
hand
The word might come from the Ancient Greek kentéō (prick) or the Albanian cander (pitchfork). Somewhere in Europe it touched the Swedish hinna (time) and the h rubbed off on it. Hinna comes from hinnō (to split off), and when I click on hinnō to see where it came from, Wikipedia tells me to Write An Entry. My cursor hovers over the textbox, pointer finger raised, as if with an answer. But no-one remembers where it came from. Hinnō, like hand, is a composite of many different phonemes getting caught on one another over time.
write an entry
Email from the philosopher in Melbourne. He wants to know what I’m writing about. I say: depictions of hands in literature and the visual arts – no, boring. I backspace. How about: hands as sites of transference. Illness, love, et cetera – delete. My cursor blinks in its blank box.
crowbar
T’s hands, with their bold love lines and the complex little calluses on the fingertips. He’s a handy person. He built his own guitar when he was sixteen. Before he and I moved in together, my mum went looking through her cupboard for a housewarming present. She showed me an old crowbar she found on a farm: I think he would like this, she said. He did.
like this
This new AI software can generate precise imitations of the human face, right down to the crinkle between the nose and mouth. The problem: it doesn’t seem to know how hands work. The imitation hands look like anemones, with fingers poking out at all angles. Sometimes the fingers have fingers. Sometimes those fingers have fingers, and so on and so on forever.
handsy
In 2015 I met T twice, first on Facebook. In his profile picture he was spotlit, shrouded in stage smoke – I raised my blue thumb at him. Barthes emphasises the truth of gesture in the important moments of life,[i] and here’s the gesture I recall from that important night: he poked me, and I felt it.
recoil
The second time we met he had his fingers on the fretboard. High school battle of the bands. He was the guitarist, I was the sound guy: I taped an X on stage for him to stand on. Then I passed him a lead – it was frayed, the cable exposed – and there was a bright white crunch when I plugged it in. I asked him is it loud enough? and he didn’t hear me, so I said it again: is it loud enough? He turned to face me and our signals scrambled. We’d struck up a feedback loop: there was a low thrum; the drumstick rattled on the snare drum; the crowd raised their fingers to their ears.
scramble
The theoretical value of art, writes Barthes, comes from the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes. He tells us to compare the harpsichordist’s petty digital scramble to the audible pad of the fingers on the keys – which sound has more warmth? Hard to say. It’s a dated comparison. The contemporary reader might instead compare the click of a cursor to the squeak of a guitarist’s finger: the former, a digital scramble; the latter, a warm gesture. All this to say that Barthes would call our Facebook meeting false. But what use were my real hands? T was in the year above – I couldn’t touch him.
click click click
2023 in the coffee shop with T. He’s hard at work on his computer – listen to the scramble of his fingers on the keys. I tell him I could make a whole book out of his hands. A book of gestures. But he’s busy and doesn’t have time for my interjections – he raises his index finger to his lips.
index
New York, 1917. Georgia O’Keeffe poses for her photograph. Her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, takes the photo – click – but her face is out of frame. Only O’Keeffe’s hands make the shot: her right palm, with the left fingers curled into it. Over the course of twenty years, Stieglitz takes hundreds of photos like these. O’Keeffe’s palms are sometimes open, sometimes closed. Her fingers are sometimes intertwined. The result is an index of gestures: an extraordinary composite portrait[ii] of the artist.
composition
But why leave out the face? A theory: when you look at a portrait of somebody’s head, you imagine yourself standing a few feet away from the subject, and looking at her. When you look at a portrait of somebody’s hands, you imagine yourself standing inside the subject’s body – you feel your fingers curl into your palms.
intimacy
Last day of school. I was leaning on my locker, rifling through my folders, when an envelope appeared in my hand. I turned around. T was already disappearing down the stairs. I opened the envelope. A love letter! He wrote with tall, oblique letters that moved diagonally up the page. I don’t remember what it said. I remember there was a smudge in the top-right corner. I pictured the corresponding smudge on his finger – I imagined the hand as it writes.
correspondence
When Barthes writes to his lover, he rubs his language against the other.[iii] That’s what it felt like. When we wrote each other letters it was like we shared a skin. And it was a long time before we ever really touched – then, before exams, we were lying on the library lawn – he stopped, touched my cheek, turned my face towards his – it was as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.[iv]
fingertips
Summer holidays. I snuck out of my bedroom and rode to T’s house. It was late. My bike light blinked the footpath white. T was in bed, reading – I tapped on his window. He yelled. The scene has been told many times from his perspective, so this is how I remember it: from the inside, I see my dark body on the outside, lit at the fingertips.
perspective
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: if I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail.[v]
comet
Tonight I’m going to New York without T. He rubbed my shoulder when he said goodbye. Coming up over the city, I pay close attention to this shoulder, which feels warm, blank, and golden.
looking down
Email from the philosopher in Melbourne: all my years spent playing video games have made me better at seeing myself in the third person.
attention
Coffee shop with T. I open my draft. Close it. I open the email from the philosopher in Melbourne. The same question: what am I writing about? Answer: the hands of lovers – corny! Backspace! Maybe I need a better question. Why hands? I follow the thread – warmth … touch … fear – then I minimise the email. I write a short passage about my first kind-of-boyfriend. The rock climber. I was fifteen, he was – now T taps my shoulder and I cover my screen with both hands.
bolder
The rock climber. He put chalk on his palms for traction. Sometimes when he touched my clothes he left an outline. The first time I went to his house he made me wait outside his bedroom. I watched him throw his pillows off the bed. It was raining. He said something like I can’t let you go home in this. Then he asked if I wanted to lie down. And I hesitated. My hands rolled into fists. Then I caved – okay. I didn’t even say a word against it. He placed a hand on the small of my back, to guide me through the doorway, and with his other hand he shut the door behind us.
traction
In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick encourages her cat to look at the full moon. A predictable choreography ensues.[vi] She points to the moon, and the cat fixes her attention on the tip of her extended index finger and begins to explore it with delicate sniffs.[vii]
misdirection
Nuar Alsadir: attending to unintentional manifestations from the unconscious that slip through in the form of linguistic displacements can increase access to a person’s interior.[viii] (In other words: follow the line of the finger and you’ll find the inside story.)
access to a person’s interior
That was the year I fell asleep on a train and woke up with a hand between my legs. I’ve written about this before: it was dark – two or three in the morning – the hand belonged to a man – it was his right hand, and he was using it to – you know – and when I wrote about this hand I was trying to make a point about girlhood and trauma and et cetera, but what I didn’t write about was his other hand – his left hand – which squeezed my fingers and held them to his lips.
story
It was as though his personality was split between his hands: on the right hand, assault; on the left hand, affection. Enough has been written about the right hand, and many people have written about it better than I can, and besides, I’m not interested in it anymore. What I’m interested in is his other hand – the left hand – the tender hand – the hand that squeezed my fingers the way a lover’s would.
squeeze
A squeeze of the hand, writes Barthes, is an enormous documentation.[ix] Okay. A documentation of what? Interior discourse.[x] But what kind of discourse? That which creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothing.[xi] In other words, there are some kinds of touch that stick to us forever, like handprints on a cave wall? Someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse.[xii] So the unknown hand impels me to make meaning out of it. And this is how I became its document.
mystic impulse
Painful spasmodic contraction of muscles of the pelvic floor.[xiii]
contraction
Every contact … raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.[xiv]
pelvic gore
For a long time, sex was impossible. They referred me to a women’s health clinic. The doctor had the red face and blown-back hair of someone who ran very fast to get there. She told me to take off my jeans and underwear. Placed one hand on my belly and the other hand inside me. Painful spasmodic contraction – I told her that it hurt. What? It hurts. Sorry. Won’t be long. She poked around for a minute then she tapped my belly twice. (Picture a mechanic slapping the roof of a car: everything looks in working order.) Later, in her office, she said the problem wasn’t physical. It was psychological. Theoretical, even (her wording: we have theories). As though the man’s handprint had gone too far inside me. As though the hand had got into my head. (My takeaway: only the theorists can help me.)
vaginismus
We’ll try another night, says T.
I open the email to the philosopher in Melbourne. I write: For a long time, I’ve had this theory that, if I find the right question, it will be like holding a magnet up to life. A cloud of metallic flecks will fly towards my magnet, and the cluster they form will be an nswer, and that answer will resolve all of my other questions. In other words, it will contain the meaning of my life. And I suppose that’s the reason I wanted to study philosophy.
philosophy
Hugo, the philosophy professor, with his little black spectacles and his brows like feather quills. Because he is disposed neither to laughing nor frowning, the task of self-expression falls to his hands. He has a remarkable repertoire of gestures: when faced with a particularly challenging concept, for instance, he rotates two invisible spheres in opposite directions. When he’s interested in what someone is saying, his fingers make a triangle beneath his chin.
Since I took that seminar with Hugo, I continue, I’ve been obsessed with a particular question, almost at the exclusion of all others. It’s a small question, and it doesn’t seem conducive to ‘serious philosophy’, but I can’t help it: it’s my question. And I keep returning to it, privately, over and over again. It goes like this. What should one do with one’s hands? What should one do with one’s hands? What should one do with one’s hands?
philosophy
Class begins when Hugo raises his index finger. This pose is followed by a question (for instance, is free will compatible with determinism?); then, after a thoughtful silence, somebody counters the question with another question (how can a will be free?), and another, and another, until we run into one of those unanswerable questions that appears at the very end of thought, like the black mark on the final frame of a film reel (why is there something instead of nothing?), at which point Hugo breaks into a small, almost imperceptible grin.
For me, the question strikes a balance between the profound and the answerable. It’s smaller than Kant’s question (what should one do?) but bigger than Plato’s (should one do good?). It’s popular among the phenomenologists (Ahmed: is the hand an object? Merleau-Ponty: does my hand belong to me?) and it dogs the self-conscious narrators of the Western canon. When Swann is confronted with the hand of the woman he loves, he obsesses over the question of whether he ought to bring it to his lips (should I do it, should I not do it?). After some dithering, Proust gives us an answer: Swann carr[ies] to his lips the hand she was holding out to him. But as I write this I realise that this answer is of no use to us – it tells us only what that character, in that moment, ought to do with his hands – and, for all the times I’ve come across the question in literature, I have never found a good enough answer.
no use
T’s birthday in Chinatown. I find a box of fortune cookies in a stairwell. I take a cookie and put it in his pocket – your birthday fortune. We forget it almost instantly. That afternoon, when T finds it, he asks: what does it mean if it’s cracked? I look it up. It says that things will happen that are out of your control.
out of control
On the table between T and me, there are dumplings and rice and a bowl of greens. Out of nowhere I say: what if we never fuck again? will you still love me then? The heater starts up behind me and his hands turn red.
The obsession began in Hugo’s philosophy seminar. Something was happening to our hands – it was like watching a new gesture develop in real time. It went like this. A student would extend his hand out in front of him, palm up, then make a hefting motion with it. This gave the impression that his idea was so hefty that he had to hold it physically afloat. His eyes would squeeze, as though this was a great effort, but he was humble, and he didn’t want us to know about his burden. He would hold this pose for the time it took to express his idea – sometimes this was a very long time – then, when the idea was over, his palm would pinch shut, and he would lean back into his chair. By the end of the seminar, everyone was talking like that. Palms out, hefting up and down, for five, ten minutes at a time. And sometimes I would try to replicate the gesture. I wanted to be taken seriously. But then this thing happened. As I spoke, my ideas would get floaty, and my palms would start drifting upwards, until I was in the unmistakable pose of ‘I don’t know’, and at this point someone would interject with a better idea, and my hands would float back beneath the table, into bitter little fists.
love me then
Grey day in Prospect Park. T and I walk circles in the fog. We have our gloves and beanies on, and we’re holding hands, and we’re talking about the fog, and walking through it. When I break the hold to pull my zipper, my hand slips out of the glove, and T doesn’t notice that he’s holding the glove now, so he drops it, and by the time I realise the glove is gone, we’ve already walked away from it. I stop and turn around. There are gloves all over the park. It’s as though a hundred people have bent down, touched the grass, and disappeared.
But maybe this obsession started earlier than that. When I was fifteen – I might have told you this already – when I was fifteen I went to the cinema with two friends who were in love. Their names were Sash and Perry. The cinema was playing Rocky Horror, and I’d never seen it before, so Perry drew a V on my face with lipstick. The V was for virgin, which was true, but they didn’t know that yet – we were wearing fishnets and everything was sexy. We sat at the back, where the walls were carpeted with red fur. On the way out, Perry pressed their hand into the wall and left an imprint. Then Sash put their hand beside it, and I did mine, and three years later we could still find our outlines on the wall. This is after Perry died. Sash and I went back to the southside. The cinema was playing Rocky Horror again. After the movie we found Perry’s handprint. Sash put their fingers in the groove and pressed down. Said something about how, when someone dies, any place can be a passage to the afterlife. And all I could think about was how small our hands were.
love line
Forgot my keys. I call T from the street corner, then I stand under the dim red hand in the pedestrian light. His tiny voice in my speaker: is that you? wave if it’s you. I wave. It’s you! He waves back. But I can hardly see him, he’s so far away. I’m hanging up now, he says. And I say no! I’m not ready! What do you mean you’re not ready? Look at you, I say. You’re still so small. You’re too far away! You want to stay on the line? Yes. You want to keep talking? Yes. Keep talking until I can see you proper
[i] Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), p 56
[ii] Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands, The Met (2023): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/271617
[iii] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (Hill & Wang 1978), p 73
[iv] ibid
[v] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A Landes (Routledge, 2012), p 103
[vi] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), p 168
[vii] ibid
[viii] Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022), p 66
[ix] Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p 67
[x] ibid
[xi] ibid
[xii] ibid
[xiii] ‘Vaginismus, n.,’ Oxford English Dictionary (2021)
[xiv] Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p 68 ▼
Image: Joshua Hoehne - Unsplash
This essay appeared in Island 168 in 2023. Order a print issue here.
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