creative forces

Blog # 87…November 2018

Our hands are fascinating... what they represent and what they can do.  The Current had a piece a while ago on the function of hands and how robotics are being developed to replace that function…hmmmm, not so fast.

Will they be able to fashion something with the grace of Rodin?
Will they be able to replicate a mother's touch on a child's brow?
Or know the right pressure to lift a feather or a bowling ball?

Our hands are our most personal interface with the world and with our bodies. We caress our children and our lovers, pat our animals, bathe and scratch ourselves. We sew, paint, cook, drive, hold a tennis racquet, a hand of bridge or raise a bottle of beer to our lips. Walking has always been a huge priority in rehabilitation after illness or injuries, but for me, getting hands to work is the big thing and an incredible work of art.

Think of how often we say hands…hands up, or down, hand held, give me a hand, hand it over, hand made, tip your hand, hand over hand , put your hands together,  hand to mouth, hands across the ocean - next time conversation flags at a dinner party, suggest finding expressions containing hands.

Poet Robert Priest devotes a 1998 collection called The Mad Hand to “plaster the propaganda together into mad tirades of affection…reactivate old hopes…sending out these bleeps with love…hoping for the best.”  Thirty years later, these words resonate on many levels. I remember meeting Robert playing the guitar with a bandaged hand from an industrial accident - there are two poems about this in the collection. Attacks on people in the press who use language to keep us informed, the confusing proliferation of language online and a general loss of interest in precise and beautiful language in the public sphere makes me hugely grateful to people like Robert, guardians of our tongues.

I also  have memories of my colleague therapists in the Hand Program at Toronto Western who performed miracles instilling function into reconstructed hands, and helped people accept the new hand that did the work but seemed a foreign part of their body. One of them told me patients often came in holding the reconstucted hand out in front as if it were an object on a platter. 

Modern medicine with all its technical wizardry poses some large questions about altering the human body…where’s the point in the process where we lose our essence of humanity?  Words help us explore and make sense of our world, let's not lose them either.