If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.
-Matthew 18:8
I am fascinated by symbols. In a way, each symbol we appropriate goes a certain distance towards unearthing the "who we are" at any given moment and time. Our tangential velocity, so to speak, at any given time t.
Of course this is merely gesture in a world of such mutability and rapid fire change. Not that the world is this way by any characteristics that it possesses itself. More likely, our non-static way of life owes its existence to our conceptions of time.
We’ve all heard the argument that time is a construct, and not something that inherently exists. When we try to quantify time, we are really only approximating locations. It’s not that we show up to the meeting because the meeting is at 7:00, no--the meeting is at 7:00 because that's when everyone--including Johnson--can occupy that space without causing conflict with other obligations.
In the sense of personal development, though, and because of our mortality, the way we view time is a measurement of personal progression, a way of organizing experience, and discovering information through the lens of cause and effect.
An example: in my younger years, I aspired to become a computer programmer. I thought, computers are fun, they’re hip, and I’ll probably make a lot of money working with them. Then I researched what a computer programmer actually does. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the task is repulsive in any way. I think I was disillusioned with the idea of playing with code in front of a computer all day long, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.
Something happened in this exchange, and it goes deeper than "it didn't sound interesting anymore." There was a reason that it no longer sounded interesting, a cause to partner with the effect of me bailing on one dream and searching out another. There were components of my identity, symbols of what I was, that could not exist in conjunction with the profession of computer programming.
I told my brother my discovery. I told him that all of the things that build up who we are can be reduced to symbols. I told him that even thinking this was a reflection of a symbol.
“These are my symbols.” I said, then thought about the mutability of time. “Were my symbols. Are my symbols. Were my symbols.”
“You see?” I said. He blinked at me.
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The more I thought about symbols the more I thought about objects, and which came first, and which meant what. How does a handgun symbolize both violence and self-defense? Somewhere along the line somebody created the handgun for one reason or the other. Maybe they had both offense and defense on the mind, though what I know of history i.e. people killing other people suggests that self-defense wasn’t on the mind of the first firearm inventors.
A handgun is only one of these weapons. But the handgun means nothing until it is held. Until it is used, until it is experienced through the ultimate interactive technology known to man: the hand.
We are what we do, what is done by our hands; creators, destroyers, artists and artisans all. All by the same mold, all by the same hands, all different for any reason at all.
The hand is us, and we are the hand.
It is a palm, a touch, a caress, a slap, a giver equally of pleasure and pain, a comforter and a deliverer of offensive commands too shocking to vocalize. The hand is as indeterminate and versatile as is our own person, and as such we are defined by our use of it. Does the hand hold a pen? A guitar? A baseball bat? A knife?
Does your knife cut tomatoes or flesh?
It makes a difference.
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I cannot type with my mind. Not yet, at least. Everything you see here passed from synapse to nerve ending to Hand to nerve ending to synapse. The telepathy of language facilitated by finger movements on a piece of plastic with differently lettered keys. Can you hear me inside your head? That’s my hand speaking to you through the accumulation of letters. Is that natural?
Wrong question, maybe.
Perhaps we should ask; Is it what’s natural to us that defines us? What feels right as it sits in your palm? The machete from your dead grandfather? The one he probably used in Vietnam? Maybe. What about a tennis racket? Sure.
What these say about me is what they say about anyone else. I exist; I use tools. Without them I am still a man, but maybe not a tennis player. Maybe not a foot soldier. Is the war in my blood?
Is it not in everyone’s?
Curl the fingers inwards, wrap the thumb around, and your instrument of interaction is now a bludgeoning weapon. Or a symbol, yes, symbol of brotherhood, if two fists connect and separate shortly following.
Why is it that a fist feels so natural to me? I, who have never had to use it? Is there a violence somewhere underneath my skin? A self defense? What about my grandfather’s machete? Or his army relief? Both symbols of a militancy that shook out before my time. Both symbols with which I feel an uncanny connection.
In the end we are only what symbols we pick up and pick out; only what we use, and only what the Hand allows.
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