“Decolonizing the colonizers is necessary so that they can once again learn how to respect themselves and others.” —As Long As Grass Grows, Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Over the past two or three weeks we’ve been doing a lot of garden harvesting, which means my hands have been very busy. Digging up potatoes, scrubbing carrots, drying onions, throwing on another batch of cucumbers to ferment, cleaning and freezing huckleberries, cleaning and drying mint (my family goes through a lot of mint tea), roasting and canning tomatoes, deciding what to do with the tomatilloes, thinking about hunting season, . . . there is so much involved in gathering and preserving food for the months ahead, so much for my hands to constantly do.
As someone who’s written a great deal about the importance of walking to being human, it struck me as almost funny when I thought this week about the significant role hands—and by extension sitting still to use them—play in my own relationship with life. But it’s a whole-body thing: my feet in their wandering practice a love for the world; most of what my hands do is about a love for human beings, for all our flaws and failings.
Recently, I’ve felt overcome with the uncanny feeling that these hands are a disembodied part of me, a whole different self busy busy busy picking and chopping and digging and lifting and soothing and caring and hardly ever resting. They write, too, and occasionally play music. I forget that sometimes.
It’s made me wonder how many other caregivers—of earth or of people—have this kind of relationship with their hands. What about artists? Musicians? Sheetrockers, finish carpenters, baristas, photographers, lab techs . . . how many people all around you at this very moment are pouring care into their hands, care that you will never see no matter how visible the work itself is?
This seems like a good time to admit that I have never before liked gardening. My parents can both verify this, having witnessed my complaints for many years, including a two-week period in August when I was sixteen and they were in Russia and I failed to water the garden even once. All the peas dried up and died. It was very sad.
This garden has managed to be different, or I managed to be different with it. I like being in there, like watching the bees work the borage, like planting and weeding and picking and turning over. It’s made a difference that it was more of a collective effort than my gardens have been in the past—my father and stepmother did a tremendous amount of digging and planting, along with a retired friend who managed to turn it into a space to grow food rather than mostly thistles and knapweed. But my hands also just plain enjoyed the work for once, like they enjoy so much other work.
Last week Patrick left a comment with a quote from Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, whom I’d never heard of before. When I read the whole poem, titled “Sonnet” (I hope I’ve got that right; it was hard to find!), another line hit me: “I am tired / Of loving through the medium of a sonnet.” It brought back to me something I wrote about last year, of being tired of metaphors. Knapweed isn’t white supremacy and thistles aren’t the patriarchy, though they’re very handy metaphors for both (especially as knapweed releases a toxin that makes it hard for other plants to grow, plus wildlife can’t eat it). And the surprising productivity of the garden, despite the clay soil and scant nutrients, isn’t a metaphor for life and birth and death and resilience.
That doesn’t mean metaphors aren’t useful. They’re part of how humans story the world, and I find them necessary when doing science writing because many of the research and concepts are so hard to grasp. But there is something about them that has felt increasingly distancing to me, strangely akin to turning living things and human needs into data points.
The garden didn’t need to become a metaphor for anything. It has had a meaning all its own, its only medium the hands of the people who cared for it.
In his fascinating book The Hand, neurologist Frank R. Wilson lays out a case for the theory that our hands’ evolution and activity shaped hominin brain growth, not the other way around:
“I would argue that any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function, the historic origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans, is grossly misleading and sterile.”
Something that happened to a family member recently, a bad hand injury, made me wonder how we might be forced to change if and when our hands can no longer express care in the ways they always have, whether temporarily or forever. How long can I keep picking, hunting, slicing, stirring, serving, stroking, and touching—caring in all the ways that have always come naturally? My hands have been kind to me. I hope I learn not to take them for granted.
I wonder—how many of the metaphors that shape our language and perception come through the use and care of our hands? Maybe it’s not just the brain’s growth that relied on the evolution of human hands, but its ability to transform the world into the stories that in turn mold our lives.
Aspen grove in a forest area near Glacier National Park.
Some stuff to read or listen to:
Before he wrote The Hand, Frank Wilson was interviewed for a 1986 New York Times article in which he made the case that not only can humans learn music at any point in our lives, but that we’re evolved to play music: “‘Because of the unique organization of the human brain, not only can everyone be a musician but,’ he says emphatically, ‘all people are meant to express themselves musically.’”
Paris Marx on the Team Human podcast talking about his book The Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation: “We also need to recognize that not every new technology is good for us, not every new technology is beneficial, and we need to assess these technologies on their merits to make sure that they’re actually going to serve the public.”
Kyle Rowe on Traffic Technology Today with an I-couldn’t-agree-with-you-more piece on the long-past-due need for abolishing jaywalking laws.
Hayley Campbell on the Smarty Pants podcast discussing All the Living and the Dead about the labor of death workers—embalmers, undertakers, mass casualty investigators, executioners, and more, including bereavement midwives, who serve the mothers whose babies are certain not to survive. (This episode was a little intense but I think necessary for Campbell’s repeated reminder of how insulated most of us are from the end of life.)
Smarty Pants with a slightly lighter episode, a conversation about retelling the Eastern European and Russian Baba Yaga fairy tale, transferred to America in GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot.
Paul Tullis in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with a sobering investigative piece on the avian flu strains mixing and mutating in Netherlands’ poultry farms: “With such broad distribution this year, there is now a very real concern that the spread of a virus that originated with human activity—mass poultry farming—is now coming around to bite humans back.”
Scotland Outdoors podcast with a conversation with Peter Cairns of Scotland the Big Picture on what it would mean to rewild Scotland: “It perhaps means a different mindset so that we don’t see nature as something to be continually extracted from. It’s not a resource that is just there to serve us. . . . We’ve used it as a commodity, and I think we need to turn a switch off in our minds that has a different reimagined relationship with nature.”
Nicole Iturriaga writing in Aeon on the role of forensic science in truth, and possibly justice, when investigating genocides and political executions: “The countries that require the services of forensics-based human rights are reckoning with rips to the societal fabric so deep they seem endless – and often, for the victims’ families, they are.”
Followers of Chris La Tray’s work have probably already seen this one, but if not, first of all I highly recommend becoming one, and secondly, Tony Tekaroniake Evans’s essay in Atmos, “Yellowstone Reveals Its Indigenous Soul,” is one of the more instructive and powerful things I’ve read in a long time: “‘It’s OK again to be who we are here. We are connected again to what this world has to give, not just to the small square of our reservation, which is the same as a [prisoner of war] camp.’ Longknife said the whole concept of land ownership is foreign to her: ‘Our culture is based on reciprocity. For us, it’s crazy to think that we have this land inside this fence, and it’s not yours.’”
[very late, not at all on time]
"My hands have been kind to me. I hope I learn not to take them for granted."
If I contemplate these broken and beat up meat hooks I have, I'd say they done an enormous amount of work over this lifetime (they have certainly been cut and scraped and bruised enough) so yes, I'd like to keep them. Along with the other assorted body parts. (I took on-board the hand hypothesis somewhere back there and I assumed it was presumptively true, and so far the evidence has born that out.)
"This seems like a good time to admit that I have never before liked gardening."
I like it, although not so much on this property. Very handy to have fresh herbs for everything and roses to go along with it.) What tends to suck is 'ranching' at least in the south western sun. Man, repairing barbed wire in the summer sucks.
Also, because I forgot at the time - you linked this story back there: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/featherweight ... and this sentence landed:
"Northern Plains people, though, it’s all out in front for us. No secrets where I’m from. Fistfights and open hatred and telling someone straight out you want to fuck."
I expect the 'Five Civilised Tribes' are much the same way.
elm
home and other familiar things
Maybe the best metaphors are ones that come to *you* spontaneously, emerging as an immediate response to some embodied experience in the moment, not "How do I force this situation to fit the metaphor that seems to fit this situation the most perfectly," or overapplying a trite recycled metaphor that has grown detached from the original circumstances that first inspired it. Something you never thought of in that way before, but now suddenly makes perfect sense, which in turn allows something even bigger to suddenly make sense. "A metaphor is two disparate experiences of very different quality and scale that magically collide in the universe, not because they have to but because they can." "A metaphor is just a definition on acid." Which is the real metaphor here?
"It's a whole-body thing: my feet in their wandering practice a love for the world; most of what my hands do is about a love for human beings, for all our flaws and failings." What a neat way to put it. I've always felt like the feet, hands and head are the three key antennae of our body (perhaps for people without hands or feet this shifts elsewhere).
I wasn't familiar with Frank Wilson's book, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the one by Raymond Tallis, a philosopher who never fails to say interesting things:
Raymond Tallis: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-hand.html
For myself, reading your essay, it was hard not to think of pop culture's best homage to the hands:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdrChyGb574