Hands and Pandemic

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 bad place to be quarantined. I spend much of the day on a turquoise sofa, pretending to read books while I really stare at the news and social media on my iPhone. Much of the day, day after day. By four o’clock I start to get antsy for 5:30, the appointed time of our daily Zoom happy hour. Yesterday we started at 5. 

For years now, I’ve been writing a book about hands. It’s a lie though, a professional lie. “A book about hands” is the public-facing soundbite for my alleged research project, the notes and fragmentary drafts of which are scattered over several computers and three paper notebooks. ADD When people write about hands, as philosophers, doctors, and poets have done for centuries, then tend to get sentimental, a little happy-bombastic, about the wondrousness of hands and how they pulled us up from an ape-like existence into the ingenious, communicative creatures we are today. These intoxicated celebrations made me queasy, even in the heady days when I thought I really was writing a book about hands. In my book, I said to myself, hands will be devils and saints, amoral creatures, capable of anything. And it’s this chaotic nature that will earn their right to stand for being human. 

This is what my Catholic-limbic brain says: because I was too lazy to write the book, God’s creation is throwing it in my face. Hands are now everywhere, and not to celebrated. They are transmitting the virus; their menace engulfs their virtues, like a return of the repressed. It’s an absurd, self-aggrandizing guilt fantasy. But the limbic brain is stubborn and fundamentally narcissistic. Especially when it thinks it sees evidence; this goads it on. 

Instructions: to wash the hands a dozen times a day. To wrap them in latex gloves. To spray them with disinfectant, and then spray the surfaces they touch: the keypad, the door handle, the credit card, the counter top, the steering wheel. Then to wipe these surfaces down, then toss the rag, with the gloves, which you then replace, or go naked-handed, if you dare, and are in the cocoon of your own home. 

Did you forget and touch your face? Did your nose itch, and, inadvertently, you rubbed it? 

Pete Fields coughs into a Kleenex, stashes it in his coat pocket, then steadies himself on the handrail of the escalator that leads from the main terminal at DIA to the bus loading zones. A few minutes later, Esther Sundquist lifts her hand from the same handrail and brushes her hair out of her eyes. 

There are particles, so small that six-hundred of them could fit in the cross section of a single human hair. A few of these unthinkably small entities move from Pete’s nasal discharge to his Kleenex to the handrail to Esther’s fingers to her face and then, through her nose and her mouth, into her respiratory pathways, attach to their membranes, highjack the cells of those membranes to reproduce themselves, and thus increasing their numbers travel on to her lungs. This migratory population explosion takes several weeks. 

I used to read Reader’s Digest articles like that at my grandmother’s house, narrative personifications of organs, organisms, and biological processes; “This is Fred’s Liver;” “This is the Circulatory System;” “This is a Honeybee.” While objectionable from a strictly scientific viewpoint, during epidemics the tendency to personify a virus is strong, even if a virus is so far from other earthly life forms that it doesn’t have DNA, but instead, like some kind of alien co-habitant, carries its identity in RNA. Nevertheless, a virus is motivated to exist, to persist, and resilient strains develop ingenious methods for reproducing and fighting for resources. And that’s enough resemblance to make viral infection into a story about antagonists. 

Hands have become an enemy, a danger-zone in need of constant policing. They command our constant attention. Used to be, in the years and decades before the pandemic, their services were unremarked, until they stopped working, or started hurting, whether through injury, illness, or susceptibility to the cold. Hands exist to perform, to do things, and so constantly do we rely on them that to stop using them is like trying to stop breathing. A thing vitally fundamental to living in a body is taken for granted until the moment in which it is taken away. Lungs, hands — they must be taken for granted. It is tedious to be constantly aware of them. 

Heidegger writes that the philosopher-human does not think about a hammer until it breaks. The customary act of hammering is interrupted and he stares at this strange thing he is holding in his hand. Once it stops working, the hammer isn’t a tool but a thing. Something to be pondered in its own right, apart from functionality. Heidegger might as well have been writing about the hand that holds the hammer, but he didn’t, even though its considerably easier to imagine a hand ‘breaking’ than a hammer. Any novice who has tried to drive a nail too quickly knows that. What prevented Heidegger from traveling up the arm of the being whose being he called Dasein? The discomfortable thought of a body part as an object? It is and is not myself, this thing the end of my arm, this fleshy tool with which I touch, maneuver, manipulate, interface the things around and outside. The hand drives a chasm through the subject that is covered up with forgetfulness. 

And now forgetfulness has become a health hazard. Every time I go to the store to buy some lemons, garlic, milk, whatever, I’m risking transmission. The risk is slight where I live, but I imagine in NYC the mere act of using a cash machine carries a not insignificant chance of exposure. Hands have become transport vehicles for a new and frightening virus. Hard as it is to visualize, the epidemiologists are telling us that second to being coughed on by an infected person, touching our faces with infected fingers is the surest way to introduce ??? into the nose and throat. So sanitizers and wipes are everywhere, put there by vigilant fellow humans, reminding us. Your cocoon is compromised by your hands.

1. Discarded gloves in Woodside, Queens.  Todd Heisler, “What New York Looks Like Now: A Photo Journey,” The New York Times, April 9, 2020.