Art of Hands and Feet

“Imagine surrendering to entirely different agents of knowledge:  say the pressure of fingers, such that we feel a world.”

We wet our arms in the women’s locker room so it would look like we showered and made our way through the cold corridors into the humid air of the pool area.  The shallow end was filled with animated people but was strangely quiet.  They are making shapes with their hands, my eyes told my brain.  “It must be the MSD kids.”  MSD is the acronym for Michigan School for the Deaf.  Katya and I dropped our towels and bags and found a spot along the pool’s edge where we sat to talk as we tried to ease our hot bodies into the cool water.  I learned from her that there was pleasure in watching our own feet.  Relieved of the pressure of bearing our bodies’ weight, they hung down into the watery blue, looking light, white, and even delicate.  For a second, I could imagine them detached, separate creatures. 

Lost in that meditation, I didn’t see or even sense the silent man inch toward me.  His gentle hand seized mine, which must have been dangling loose in the water, too.  His grip didn’t hurt but did feel bony and angular as if he were perhaps trying to make a shape in my hand.  I looked at Katya and felt a lump form in my throat.  I never saw his face.  He did not look at me but stayed bent over in an attitude of prayer.  Feeling the need to say something, I touched his shoulder as if to say “it is okay … it is good.”  One of the teachers drifted over (probably to make sure we were okay with his advances), and she told us that he was a person who rarely signed.  The teacher guided him away from us and waved all the others out.  Time’s up.  “Deaf people are the nicest,” Katya decided.  

We splashed around and swam.  She wanted to grab my feet and find the ticklish spots.  I eluded her easily by swimming underneath her woman’s body animated by a kid’s spirit, dog paddling on the surface so her blue hair wouldn’t turn green.  “Surrender,” a small voice told me, “Let her touch you.”  I obeyed.  Then she remembered funny assignments she was given in religious schools:  Choose your favorite station of the cross and label the prepositional phrases—“on the cross, next to the tomb, after he died.” 

--“And Mrs. McNea asked us to draw a picture of ourselves talking to Jesus.  I drew me and him at the beach.”

--“It sounds like a nice thing to try to imagine,” I said, thinking that I would try to draw the crouching man who seized my hand and pulled me toward a world where the body expressed the mind in simple shapes.

Something I like to wonder about:  where is the life in one of Shakespeare’s playworlds?  What produces it, or counts for it?  How small or brief can a playlife be?  Is it located in character or plot?  Maybe it is more manifoldly possible than our theme-driven, commonsensical, or sentimental responses to plays capture.  Maybe we access it by attending to the moment-by-moment phenomena.  To carry this insight into life is to realize that there are centers of feeling at every turn.  We can enter the life in anything at any moment.  So … it makes perfect sense that the Italian ballerina, Alessandra Ferri, can dance the role of fourteen year old Juliet even though she is 52 years old!  Ferri, I learned from a New York Times review of her one-off performance of the ballet at the Met, is famous for her arched feet, and with age “the arches have grown yet more strangely pronounced” making her appear more touchingly fragile.  But the reviewer singles out for praise her “vividly particular acting” in which the movement of thought was evident in every movement of her body.

It seems that the extremities of our bodies (which we ignore or cosmetically enhance with manicures, pedicures, and garish paint) are undiscovered artists.  This is as it should be since hands and feet are the means by which we come and go, touch and mold each moment in time, making it a potential pas de deux (“step of two”) or pas de Dieu with the always present, only sometimes unseen, beloved:  my daughter, my brother, my stranger, my mother.  

I have recently experienced something extreme, and it happened to my body.  "The survivor cannot reconstruct a sense of meaning by the exercise of thought alone.  The remedy for injustice also requires action."  Thinking about the way I have been pulled toward the notion of shapes made by singing hands and dancing feet, I remember that Robert Frost, somewhere in his prose, wrote that if you suffer from any confusion in life, the best thing to do is to make forms.  He goes on to give a list of suggestions: weave baskets, plant gardens, build woodpiles, blow smoke rings, write letters or make poems.  Even though I don't trust words because I was deluded by false ones and because it is hard to find true ones, I am doing this blog.  Not writing it, but doing it.  It is a formaction, a path to possible life, a way of digging my fingers into moments and not letting go.  It is a way of both saying and hiding the truth that something happened which I can only sign and solve with my whole self.

Creature Conscience

            “Their souls expanded beyond their skins.”  This is Thomas Hardy’s way of describing the transformation that happens to poor rural working people when they step out of the rounds of labor to have a pint at the Pure Drop and share rumors of their noble Norman ancestors with neighbors.  I am still taking deep whiffs of Tess of the d'Urbervilles as if the novel were the boxwoods in the Mary Garden outside St. Michael’s church from which I inhale deeply to remember South Jersey.  I appreciated Hardy’s phrase because I have, over the last ten years, experienced soul expansion “under the influence” of an extramarital involvement that was as intoxicating (for better and worse) as Tokay wine.  Imagine my delight when I today I had my soul expanded in the company of my blue-haired teenage daughter, and all it took was a walk in familiar woods.

            Content-making was the way I would describe the experience.  And it could not have happened at home.  Or could it?  I have to relearn the movements and gestures of everyday life as if clumsily learning a dance I have never danced.  At home, I am usually buried in a book and she is connected to her phone, listening to music, texting, or in her room with the door closed, face-timing Lonnie or Trevor.   “Let’s do something,” I suggest midday on July 4^th.  “Okay.  How bout the Hogbacks?” she offered.  I was surprised.  The Hogbacks are a favorite place of mine.  Because of the hills that surround a lake where, on a day in April, we spotted trumpeter swans and active beavers.  When I am there, I am almost at home in the Adirondack mountains.  Katya probably associates going to the Hogbacks with stopping at Speedway where I always buy her a Monster or Rock Star, but perhaps there is more in the experience for her, too. 

            After we made it up the first hill and started along the spine of the ridge trail, walking into fully leafed-out woods—done in the verdant palette of a master.  I was stunned by the intimate beauty of it all.  “Isn’t it lovely and peaceful,” I said aloud, as leaves lifted and fell like the petticoats of some fairy, curtsying and inviting us into a veiled layered space.  I thought about Eden—the garden God created for man, that needed man to watch over it as much as it needed rain to water it.  “It is good,” God, the maker, decided after each day of creation.  But after making man, he decided that “it was not good” for the man to be alone.  

            “I just want this to be over with,” said Katya when flies were buzzing around her head and the thorns of wild roses scratching her ankles.  “Oh, no.  Let’s just enjoy where we are now,” I said as much to call myself back to myself as to coach my daughter.  She and I are different.  She is not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.  I adopted her when she was nine months from a baby-house in Kazakhstan, yet we have lived the same seasons and sadnesses for 14 years.  Too much sadness.  “I hate to see you like this,” she said to me in the depth of my depression several weeks ago.  She has cut herself since she was in sixth grade and is in therapy for ADD and anxiety.  Mother and daughter, genetically and ethnically different, occupying the same invisible body of emotions.  That is why I now know that I must defend myself for her sake.

            Eden was not perfect, and that was its special beauty.  God rested on the seventh day, leaving creation open-ended, letting his creatures be … creative.  She and I begin to tend the garden as we walk.  We stop at the run-off pond, dotted with duckweed, where she likes to chase frogs and I like to observe the miraculous growth of skunk cabbage (the first green thing up as the ground thaws—a plant that generates its own heat).  We delight in the alarmed squeak of frogs, and she looks when I point out the tiny sky blue flowers of forget-me-nots.  Talking about bands, boys, and coming back to life after break-ups, we get to the end of the lake and she groans as I turn downhill to find the path along the opposite shore.  “It’s too long.”  “Oh, it isn’t far, and we can dip our feet in the water.”  My mistake:  the path is seriously overgrown, and there are places where we have to crawl to make it under the thick growth.  “The struggle is real” is one of Katya’s favorite expressions, and it suits the moment:  arms and hands, arms and other brains, stay low, watch out for your head, cheek to the ground, the moss is dreaming, listen. 

            “Mom, I need a moment,” she says, and, after GI-Joe crawling through the thicket, we stop.  In the silence, she listens and alerts me to a tap tapping that is not a woodpecker.  “It’s a beaver,” she says.  We are near the lodge and actually saw a beaver with two kits swimming around Easter time. “Let’s sit on this rock.”  Although I don’t say it, I remember an intimate moment sitting on this same granite outcropping with my imaginary lover who couldn’t feel the spirit of the place without putting his hands all over me.  I remember him gazing over my sunglasses and commenting on the amber flecks in my irises.  He couldn’t see the greater loveliness of the wild purple irises hidden in the grasses along the water.  Oh.  It was sweet but ultimately ephemeral because groundless.  Sitting in the same spot with Katya, from which I spot a deer in the thicket and point it out to her, I am happier … really content … we are together forever and, as we help each other connect to real things, we are nourishing our shared body. 

            Rest time over, we continue walking and, although she groans her way through brush and prickers, I can tell she is enjoying my company.  “Just move through them gently like that deer … which must be bigger than either of us."  Imagine yourself a deer, with the grace to pass through a forest of tree trunks, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration.  A few steps later, Katya slaps my back.  “A bug?”  “No, it’s your punishment” [sarcasm] … “this was all your great idea.”  We make it through the woods at squat down along the water’s edge to look at the creatures in the shallows.  We see tiny crayfish scuttling along the bottom and a catfish whose existence we debate.  I think he is dead, but Katya votes for life.  Turns out, she is right.  “When you get really old and sick, what if this all turns out to be a dream and I am your conscience?”  I think about how wonderful it is to be a mother, imagining the doe with two fawns following that Katya and I saw in a different woods just yesterday.  What a privilege it is have to learn to move gracefully around obstacles for the sake of a creature conscience.

            By the time we get back to the car, together we’ve spotted a bronze toad, captured, kissed, and released him.  Katya is still swatting flies but laughing, “I want to be attractive to boys not to insects.”  I am laughing inwardly that, at this stage of the game, I find insects far less irritating.  We are humans from the humus of the earth, animals amazed at understanding what we do.  With Katya, I started to trust that I have enough vitality to assume the responsibility of my vocation, the human vocation, which is to feel the world, to be affected—like God who sat back and admired on the seventh day.