Hands and Pandemic, cont.

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 greater rate of illness and mortality among black Americans). 

The image of a spread open palm is as old as humanity itself. Stenciled silhouettes of human palms dating back over 30,000 years exist in caves and on stone walls around the world. The spread open human palm in the catalogue of eternal symbols. It hovers over the expanse of human history, ready to jump in as needed or called upon by circumstances. Hence it’s enlistment at this particular moment, for this particular context, is not surprising. But it is also marred by our commercial culture and its rapid-fire circulation of images, which makes it a cliché. After seeing dozens of iterations, it’s not only a cliché but a repetition compulsion. Why do photographers keep going back to it? Do they really think that the emotional capital of the sight of a lonely or barely touching human hand is inexhaustible? And is it, or not?  

A hand is against a window; the hand is in a latex glove. Now we are in a double-enclosure, a double-cocoon. Everything external becomes a virulent possibility, so we need a window to protect the hand from the outside and a glove to protect the hand from the glass. Where does this cordon sanitaire end? Certainly not with the container of the body. After latex there’s skin, and after skin there are internal membranes. And somewhere in there we need to factor in the immune system, a kind of distributed organic process that is eludes the difference between inside and outside. 

The body in a pandemic exists in a system of boundaries that protect a retreating, shrinking core. This is the image we live with when panic and uncertainty reach a certain pitch. Invisible viruses could be anywhere, ready to invade. On sound professional advice, we retreat further and further into cocoons, receding layers of protection. If the virus succeeds in penetrating a person and taking root, his body succumbs to a distributed state of infection. You get sick. If there’s a body image for this, it’s hard to imagine it with an inner sanctum. Hence the common metaphor is that of a besieged city whose walls have collapsed. Your body is a penetrated fortress, everyone running around pell-mell, assailants and defendants hard to distinguish— indeed, the new coronavirus is one of those that fools healthy cells by latching onto them and reprogramming them to reproduce itself. The body image morphs from cocoon or besieged fortress to a penetrated city in the grips of battle. 

Add to this the fact that this you can’t exactly just go home and go to bed for a few days and then reappear at work, no big deal. Nor can you find solace in learning that you are the victim of something that ‘is going around” in a neighborhoody kind of way. In a pandemic, you are not sick in the usual sense but as a participant in the rare phenomenon of a global event. This magnifies the meaning of your sick body. For those plugged into the news — the mediatized circulation of reported cases, charts and graphs, daily briefings, and YouTube videos — your COVID-sick body is an actor on a global stage. The raging cooption of its healthy cells by viruses and the unfolding internal contest between viruses and antibodies is not just yours alone to worry about. Your body has become an actor — admittedly a faceless extra, one among tens of thousands — in a fog of war.  

In fact, well or sick, we are all citizens in a world historical event. It’s important to develop at attitude. For some people, that means yelling at people in parking lots for wearing face masks. For others, especially in the early days, it meant being panicked and defensive, like a blind animal surrounded by predators. An infected person was no longer one of ‘us’, the healthy people, but rather of the tribe of body-snatchers, maybe beloved body-snatchers, unwitting enemies, pariahs. That works if you are susceptible to a naïve belief in your own inviolability. It’s weirder and worse once you process the message that any of us can be contagious and asymptomatic. This produces another attitude, one that has become more popular as the pandemic continues. There is no us and them. Someone — could be us or could be them — is inevitably walking around, infiltrating social cocoons, stores and schools and hospitals, even hiking trails, breathing disease into the air, into the porous areas of other fleshly cocoons. A problem with these attitudes is that while they sound hysterical to the pre-COVID state of mind, in current circumstances they are reinforced by the science coming from the CDC and our beloved Dr. Fauci. 

If we believe, as many of us do, that humanity flourishes when the fortunate do not deny their kinship with the unfortunate, then the attitudes and imagery of pandemic pose some interesting challenges. One challenge is how to practice a hygiene of separation without succumbing to an ideology of separation. Another is how to do that and not feel utterly alone.

Hence the ubiquity of images of hands. The hand is the center of the paradox of being a human being. It makes and crosses our boundaries. It’s the functional joint between the inside and the outside of ourselves. It separates and connects. Insofar as we hope to survive separation and restore connections, the hand is an avatar of that hope.

 An active, always touching appendage over which we are now asked to perform a constant vigilance. A person depends on her hands to navigate, balance, grasp, collect, open, close, and a hundred other moment-to-moment tasks that bring her in contact with externalities, with walls, doors, groceries, keys, handles, railings, air. In all these activities, she depend on her hands but must continually shore up the hygienic barrier of her hand’s own flesh. And then, if now only in dreams, she reaches out and takes another person into her arms, and wraps her hands around them.  

We are terribly dependent on our hands to maintain and enjoy the privilege of having a singular life, and yet we share this dependence with every other singular human being. There is nothing special about having hands. Having them is something that connects us to every other human being across time, perhaps most poignantly to those who have lost or been violently deprived of a hand. 

As John Berger observes of the hands painted in the caves of Chauvet 32,000 years ago, “when we look at them we say they are ours” (1). 

NOTES

1. Berger, John. “The Chauvet Cave Painters (c. 30,000 B.C.)” (1996), in Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (New York: Verso, 2015); 5.