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.