broken circles

It is somewhat of a platitude to say that our understanding of something can be heightened by its absence; not it's absolute disappearance, mind you, since the continued existence of its trace must always be there or thereabouts, offering the distinct possibility of a restoration.

The ageing of one's hands is astonishing; the experience of an individual's life (fundamental gestures, what has slipped though the fingers) is something to behold. The ancient affinity between hand and eye (Lowell: finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the heart follows its trackless way). For hundreds of thousands of years the repetition of something in our lives leads to a form of understanding.

The hands, that in the final hour, bear witness to all we were. 

~

'Their eyelids were always downcast; and, if now and then they were raised, no treacherous glint appeared, nothing but a sedulously cultivated  calmness, withdrawal and mansuetude and occasionally an expression of remote and burnt-out melancholy. The muted light...'

--Fermor.

~

What remarkable simplicity there is the faces of those who have lived a life of hardship: bare and elemental. Theisger's 'Visions' offers a wonderful glimpse of this. By contrast, our faces cannot belie a fundamental set of anxieties that stalk us, not the least of them being the impression of lost chances that forms in pools of shadows under our eyes. 

Fermor, it is said, is a great stylist but in our own day and age this is increasingly understood to mean a person's outward character or skills do not refer to a substantive notion of the self or to an unruffled centre. Style, in this sense, is superficial, incidental, a tangent away from our true focus. And this disjunction is, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the marginalisation of an older way of thinking about taste; for taste now is the most rudimentary of our senses, and not the vehicle of a specifically human quality that allows us to meld the general and the particular, principle and expediency, desire and thought in the form of judgement. And, it should be added, judgement itself suggests an openness to our approach: we often say 'in our better judgement', thus allowing for the possibility of second spaces, re-vision, the entry of other considerations over time. A judgement is decisive, but very rarely final. Our hands, too, retain something of this ultimate ambiguity and mystery.