Hands

/ Alistair Ian Blyth

We have hands not merely so that we can grip, grasp, squeeze, squash, stretch, peel, twist, twirl, tweak, pinch, scratch, pick, flick, poke, prod, press, wring, pat, stroke, wipe, scrape, scrabble, grope, rummage, fumble, punch, slap, pull, tug, jerk, push, thrust, throw, catch, bend, pummel, knead, crumple, crush, tap, rap, jab — and all the other countless ways in which we manipulate objects in the world around us — but also, ultimately, so that we can utter words. In his treatise De hominis opificio (On the Creation of Man), St Gregory of Nyssa tells us that the human organism is, within the divine order of all created things, specifically adapted to the purposes of language. Moreover, not only has man’s vocal apparatus been created for the specific purpose of speech and song, but also his hands, which form a particular aid to the voice. What the wordless beast performs by means of jaws, fangs, mandibles, proboscis, tongue, snout, muzzle or maw, man carries out by the multifarious actions of the hands, thereby leaving the mouth free for the articulation of language. The hands are thus an adjunct of the organs of speech, just as gesture — the language of the hands — is the adjunct of the spoken word. Likewise, the tool is the adjunct of the hand, and the manifold ways in which the hand that wields the tool fashions various matter into things of use and beauty each form a particular language. Over the aeons of human pre-history and history, these languages have known innumerable dialects and idioms, but the hand of the individual craftsman has always been the unique and unrepeatable voice whose timbre thrums in his handiwork. The mass production and industrial replication of things for everyday use (improperly named ‘manufacturing’, a word whose etymology incorporates the hand as the origin of all things shaped and made by man) has silenced these voices, which once resonated in every object fashioned by hand and tool. Perhaps the din of mechanically reproduced music that now pervades every space in the human environment and accompanies every human activity — a music which is itself, more often than not, produced not by the hands or voice but by computer circuitry — is a means of drowning out any disquieting awareness of this silence that emanates from the uniform things that surround us. When things themselves no longer speak, no longer resonate with the voice of any hand to have fashioned them, then we ourselves no longer carry on a dialogue with objects. We fall deaf to things when things themselves have been rendered mute.

In a world of voiceless things, the initiative to revive the all but defunct craft of making paper by hand is a means of restoring a voice to one manufactured object of use that incorporates within itself the organically linked functions of hand and voice. For, paper is the medium of inscription, which is the act whereby the tool-wielding hand renders the voice visible in the material world. Even in an age of computers and electronic communication, paper still surrounds us in our everyday lives, more than we are consciously aware, since paper has become mute. It no longer speaks to us. Handmade paper, however, necessarily resonates with the individual voice of the hand that has crafted it, giving voice to the medium upon which the voice is inscribed. Among the many crafts whose voices a dedicated few are striving to prevent from being silenced forever, paper-making is thus especially significant as a means of restoring authentic dialogue between humans and the objects they fashion and use.

(text apărut în MEŢERIAŞII I/04)