Hands

Mmmmm, hands.
I like hands; I more than like hands — I am enchanted by them, knee-buckled at times. How could I not be? They’re a conduit for knowing, hands, a way of learning and understanding the three dimensions that surround us, and maybe some other dimensions too (I think of Helen Keller touching Annie Sullivan’s face and mouth to begin to understand language.) Each time we put our hands on another person, or have another person’s hands laid on us, we give or are given, we teach or we learn. That is quite delicious to contemplate.

Musicians’ hands are very shiversome for me; carpenters’ hands too. People who make fine or complex things with their hands charm and delight me. The hands of Edith Sitwell were as beautiful as the most beautiful painting or jewel or wild-whipped storm-sky.



(And apropos of nothing, can this be the place I tell you that in the great pantheon of total strangers I’m madly in love with, Louise Lecavalier is the greatest goddess of them all?)