Handedness

Every great and profound experience would like to be insatiable, would like repetition and return to last until the end of all things, the restoration of an original situation from which it emerged…the transformation of the most upsetting [and joyous] experience into habit: This is the essence of play.
—-W. Benjamin.

Each people’s gestures are determined by their response to the environment they live in and are a product of the type of work they are engaged in. These gestures are carried over into all walks of life , from art to dance to language. These gestures become so internalised that one can meaningfully talk about a style of soul emanating from a particular region-a fundamental ’speech’ or set of gestures that is unique to a certain place. Through repetition the distinction between geography, history and nature gets blurred.

Could it be that there is a religious vocation or temperament, say, that orders the body and the soul? And within these fixed categories -be they determined by work, landscape, an inner constitution or some combination of these elements- is there a further stratification along family lines? (I was once recognised by a cousin who had never seen me by the way in which I kept my head in my hands). Just as a household may have a ‘taqiya kalaam’ ( a set phrase) , might it not be the same when it comes to rudimentary gestures, the way one holds one’s hands?

A distinct landscape (urban, mountains, rural etc) can be associated with a particular relation with the body. It is said of the Bedouin Arabs that their expressions (linguistic and non-verbal) had remained unchanged-like the landscape itself-for thousands of years, chiseled down to a few quintessential self-revealing gestures of the soul. One is reminded of the hand positions of Buddhist statues that depict the interior state of the soul or the hands in Leonardo’s Last Supper.

But beyond this deep continuity between the land and gesture there is the desire to re-create it , to see it before our very eyes, and this is manifested in our Utopian projects, our sense of play. The city is, in this sense, not just an ordering of the soul, a pattern for the mind to follow, but a space that reconfigures our awareness of our bodies and those of other people. A way of binding and separating: the body politic.
—–Based on Plekhanov.

I’ve started so I will not finish. I’m struggling to complete even a single book. These are the books that I am currently wading through-some half completed, others only barely a chapter old and discarded: Herzog, Three-arched Bridge, Cabaret, Philosophy and Law , Goodbye to Berlin, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Lawrence’s Essays, Dangling Man, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Language and Solitude, What Ought I To Do?

Today I ‘ve given them all up and turned to Tallis’ Hand with its endlessly fascinating insights, though why one should renounce style in favour of ideas remains a mystery to me. The hand as the agent of action, knowledge and communication. On the handedness of the universe see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lopsided.shtml