This post is dedicated to the great Dutch marine biologist Geerat Vermeij who wrote a book with this title. Vermeij is blind and knows the world through touch, smell, taste and sound. He has trained his hands to recognize thousands of marine organisms, especially those of the littoral.
My own hands are clumsy and dull, but I learn a great deal through touch and by watching the hands of those much more skilled than I at work. One of the great pleasures of my time in Boston is that my wife Yoshie and I live in a very small walkup in the South End. When we are in the apartment at the same time we are close to each other and can see each other working. Yoshie works with her hands. She makes small, intimate objects by knitting wire forms then weaving in found materials - strips of paper from packing, plastic, bits of metal or heavier wires. Sometimes these are dull colours to give the wire patterns ground. Other times, the found objects can be magpie bright. The forms capture the movement of her fingers. Quick, deft movements, like a bird in flight, then sometimes slower, almost stopped, as she applies strength. The objects themselves are light and strong, supple and alive in the hand. Held up to the light they reveal something of their structure. Holding them in my own hands I remember the movements of the hands that made them. One more way of stitching together time. Hands hold a privileged form of memory.
As I travel I try to touch as many things as possible and remember textures and temperatures. We (or I) lack a rich language to describe texture. I wonder if one could create some kind of visual notation for touch, much in the way some modern composers have created new, more textural, ways to score music: grain, roughness, swirl, sharpness, continuity, concavity, figure and ground as felt in the finger tips, heft in the hand, static and friction, or slip and glaze. The touch of something that crackles. Wondering how to hold flow in ones hands. To know the tension in a string is to know how to touch movement.
Some things touched:
Slimy kelp
The warm rough head of a Jizo at Nishiaraidaishi
The haft of our favourite cooking knife
Yoshie's feet
An old metal bolt, some rust, about three kilograms
Crack in a rock face trying to hold
Rope burn as the sheet runs out too fast
Old chain grease with road grit
The smooth grid space of the keyboard
Orange peel
A fish still alive dieing in ones hand
A dog's soft ears
A child's hand
The same child's hand, years later, bigger and stronger than my own
Dust on the pages of a book
Smooth then rough bark of an Arbutus
A sweaty cheese
Paper cut
Oiled skin
A broom handle, a rake's
Clay soil
Sandy soil
Peat
Bulbs
Hands are the skin over muscles tied by tendon to jointed bones. Arthritic knots. Fine hairs showing the tension. The shape of a hand is its memories.
