Anam Cara

The Witness of Hands

The whole structure of the human body anticipates and expects the presence of others. Hands reach out to embrace the world. Human hands are powerful images. Hands painted the roof on the Sistine Chapel and the heavenly women on the wall of Sigeria, wrote the Paradiso, sculpted the David; in Auschwitz, hands rose to bless tormentors. Hands reach out to touch and caress the lover. Hands build walls, sow gardens, and direct symphonies. Hands wield knives, pull triggers, and press switches that bring terminal darkness. Hands write stories that deface people, strip lives bare. The whole history of our presence on earth could be gleaned from the witness and actions of hands. One of the great thresholds in human civilization was the development of tools with which we changed and civilized the landscape. The use of simple tools still meant personal contact with Nature. In these times, we have crossed another threshold where the tool is replaced by the mechanical instrument. The instrument is a means of exercising a function. With the development of instrumentalization, so much of our work and engagement with the world is no longer hands-on. Rather, our hands press the key and the instrument expedites the action. Instrumentalization saves labour but at the cost of direct contact with the world.

The instrumentalization of contemporary life pushes us ever further away from Nature. Even farmers do not really get their hands dirty anymore. Years ago, when you looked at a farmer’s hands, they were like miniature lexicons of the landscape. The hands were worn and roughened through contact with soil and stone. Often rib lines of clay insinuated themselves into the lines of the skin. It was a powerful image of living hands reminding us that those hands were originally and would again be clay. People dressed in their Sunday best to go to Mass. Serving Mass, you would see perfectly dressed men come to the altar for Holy Communion. They would stand reverently and offer a pair of withered earthened palms on which the white host would glisten: the bread of life on hands of clay. This is a vignette from a vanishing world. Generally, when we lose individual contact with Nature and with each other, we gradually lose our depth and diversity of presence. The world of function, instrument, and image is a limbo where no presence lives, where no face is identifiable, where everything flattens into the one panel of sameness.