still, these hands weren’t painted onto the rock. Mixing ochre or soot with water and putting it in the mouth, the artist put his hand on the stone and spat out the ink that would mark his presence not by painting it in, but by leaving it absent.
The hand that made this silhouette has gone missing, and only its absence remains. It exists by showing forth its own being forgotten, ghost-figure pointing back at the body that made it, its own absence most profound predictor of each human’s common fate, that against all time for most of it we have been missing.
Might it be true to say that the hand is a truer portrait of humanity than the face could ever be? That I grope my way toward being long before I open my eyes to the light in it? That the face can only stare out at the one approaching and through the nakedness of its own gaze say, Thou Shalt Not Kill, knowing all the while that being killed is what happens to a face, by other hands, or by one’s own, or by the hand of time.
Or it’s simpler, less violent, less dark. To be human is to be a made-thing, and the hand is the tool of our making.
I mean to say I cannot see my own face.
But I can see my hand.
Maybe that’s the first thought.
This hand I’m holding in front of me is me. Impossible to tell by looking at the images of the hands in the caves if they were held palm out or palm against the rock.
I’d like to say palm out.
Then the palm is the first mirror. It goes missing when you make a fist or when you die. To paint it is to make it go missing before you go missing yourself. I can’t tell if it offers a welcome or a warning, greeting of the upheld hand or command to stop, if it says stay back, back from this rock wall; or if it says the opposite, come, come, walk into the stone and find out how there to make your next home.
William Wordsworth, in another effort at portraiture of the human, questions: “I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet?” In ancient Greek, poet comes from the verb “to make, to do.” Word of the hand more than the mouth. The poet is a hand that acts like a face: it speaks, it thinks. He goes on:
He has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves:—whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.
Deep in the riddle the poet lives, where absence is present and presence grows absent.
Maybe it’s like holding water or sand in cupped hands; maybe it’s like holding ink in the mouth, wondering whether to swallow or to spit it out.
Wondering why my mind keeps turning back to ancient history when all I want to do is dwell here in my life. I guess I don’t know what my life is, don’t know what the horizon is. In every direction that border-line retreats with every step I take. But step isn’t a true word. I’m not moving at all. Just quiet in a chair, thinking silently to myself. Is that life.
I might say life is what persists through time. It has a duration, and to become an adult is to feel that duration as something both growing longer and diminishing, growing heavier and turning daily into almost nothing. It’s like a word in a sentence grown aware of itself, hearing faintly the echo of those words already said and dimly perceiving that more words are to come, single part of the meaning no single word can hold, just as a day is made possible only by all the days already lived, and this day will drift away into those to come which would not exist without this one, and these moments that seem to be the ones in which we live abandon themselves before we realize we too have been left almost behind.
But I might say other things. Or life might speak better for itself.
It’s hard to keep up; memory keeps looking backward. Love, or is it fear, or is it hope keeps peering ahead. Or maybe I have it wrong, and love looks both ways at once, into the past and into the future; or maybe I’m wrong again, and love like the bashful youth looks down at her feet in the grass; or is it love looks you in the eye. I don’t know.
Poor words.
Numa was the second king of Rome, born on the same day the city he would rule had been founded. They came into the world together.
It is said he knew Pythagoras and so followed the inner laws of silence.
After his mortal wife passed away he wandered the fields and in the quiet grasses a goddess consorted with him. Some deny this is true. They don’t believe a deity would make love to a human being. But almost every day he wandered into the meadows.
Maybe the calm was erotic. Maybe the grasses bending over in the wind.
He put at peace the warlike ways of the Romans. He instituted many religious observances.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
