Lives of the Hand

Cocoon 1 “... because the world is not friendly to mankind, and the only thing to be done is to find a shell for yourself and your loved ones, and stay in there until you are released.” Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Tales (1992), trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2010. Twisted Spoon Press.  Late March, 2020. The idea of a world unfriendly to mankind has taken on a sinister immediacy in the weeks since a new coronavirus has swept over the planet. Humans, as a whole, have not been friendly to the planet for several hundred years, so this new state of affairs, where a seemingly vindictive COVID-19 has us all hunkered down and scared, can hardly be said to be unwarranted, even assuming, as most of us do, that the planet and its biological systems are without moral intentions.  My cocoon is a loft with high ceilings, facing the foothills to the southwest. In addition to a spectacular view, it has lots of wood and light, a dog, good WiFi, and a well-stocked freezer. Not a ...

Cocoon 2 During the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, the image of an open palm spread against window has gained an iconic status. The person attached to the palm is sometimes visible, sometimes not. Frequently they are blurred. Some photographs capture two people holding their palms up to each other. Flesh splayed against the glass between them, a hygienic touch.  It doesn’t much matter if these images are related to COVID-19 or not, although in fact they  all are. The point is that right now it isn’t possible to see them otherwise, barring a clear indication to the contrary. It’s a fascinating situation really, that for the moment these images  universally  read the same way,  universally  invoke a shared humanity, all other differences — geographical, political, economic — aside. It’s something that I can no sooner write down than the problems with the statement start to scream out loud (e.g., the much greate...

In second grade, I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Walking single file from the second-grade classroom to the lunch hall, beside an empty courtyard where we played at recess and where the Fall Festival’s bingo games and cake walks took place, I repeated the word “archaeology” over and over again, like a mantra, making sure I had it memorized. An impressive word. A word that said adventure and mysterious knowledge. Archaeologists, I knew, wore khaki shorts and a wide-brimmed desert hats. They were suntanned, burnt bronze, and covered in a thin layers of dust.      Digging in dirt, making mud pies, hunting for arrowheads, these things are inherently enjoyable. Archaeology connected them to a career whose name itself was an act of mastery, multisyllabic and esoteric, a veil behind which were stored secrets of human origins. More compelling than the knowns of this branch of science (not that I had learned any of them) were its unknowns. Most imp...

Andre Leroi-Gourhan, second from right, with fellow archaeologists outside the Altxerri cave, 1966. In 1964, three years before I started dreaming of becoming an archaeologist, Andre Leroi-Gourhan published  La geste et la parole  ( Gesture and Speech ). That is a mostly meaningless coincidence, except for the fact that Leroi-Gourhan begins the book by reflecting on the same question that was soon going to preoccupy my eight-year-old self — the question of human origins. Having been himself preoccupied with the question for much of his professional career, he further wonders why the mystery of human origins matters at all, why it exerts such a powerful pull on the imagination. “When confronted with archaeological finds, almost all of us have a sense of returning to our past, and few, if given the opportunity, will resist the temptation to delve into the recesses of the earth like a child taking a toy to pieces” (1). Something there is in humans that compels us to ...