Reader: So you want me to feel as if I were reading a letter addressed to someone else?
Poet: I want you to feel as if I had read a letter addressed to you by someone else and am shamelessly quoting from it.
— Vera Pavlova in her notebooks
Thus does Samuel Beckett begin his 1966 short story, “Ping”.
“Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle”: Beckett’s eyes studying a painting or a postcard of a statue, bringing together the labor of eyes and light.
For some reason, this made me think about Picasso, and one thing that has long bothered me about his art, namely, the ways his hands fail. The human hand rarely comes alive or speaks in Picasso; one has only to contrast his pieces with those of Egon Schiele to feel the numbness.
Pablo Picasso created this piece at Juan-Les-Pins. The horse is so very white. A pale horse. The scene of a rape. Themes that are not rare in Picasso’s imaginary.
Hands characterize: they relate through motion, or the arc of an implied motion. In a photo or an image, we see the instant of the hand, the frozen eternity between before and after; we anticipate what the hand will do next. And we read the subject in relation to this expectation, even if we don’t acknowledge this to ourselves. There is always the thing we imagine to complete the gesture and give it meaning.
“A painting is a thing which requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime; make counterfeits and add a touch from nature,” Edgar Degas said (as quoted in Robert L. Herbert's book on impressionism and Paris). The counterfeit that forbids hands an expressive agency, a particular sort of skin in the game of representation. A sin in the game of not-saying.
. . . The diminishing of hands contra the emphasis given to hands by Derek Overfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner in these two pieces:
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Autonomy,” evokes the holothurian, a creature who amputates part of its own body in self-defense, in order to flee and survive.
. . . The extraordinary role given to hands by Gustav Vigeland, in his Kneeling Man Embracing a Standing Woman, where her hands are simultaneously pushing him away and resting upon him, as if we can see her thinking, and feel her thought in the tension exhibited by her curled fingers.
It is not an image of happiness, per se. And now I quote from a novel I gobbled last week, a small book worthy of your eyes and time, namely, Markus Werner’s The Frog in the Throat, as translated by Michael Hofmann):
Often, an image exists to show up the absence of what it stands for. As here. Happiness is remote. That's how it's meant to be. Bliss is scorned. We want values, in other words: supervision. We seek fathers, rules and regulations. Give us the model that will crush us, the measuring rod that will how us what chipolatas we are.
A chipolata is not a sausage. But it is perhaps a clue at the author’s Swiss origin. Light. Heat. White planes. Rodin’s plastercast fingers and arms and hands. Eric Frischl’s subject attempting to contain herself, only to be outdone by her own shadow.
To read is to mince the limbs we can afford to lose in order to imagine the story that comes alive for us. There is a revolving door, or a way of seeing in this, as Marina Tsvetaeva noted in her diaries:
To love is to see a person the way God intended him and his parents failed to make him.
To not love is to see a person as his parents made him.
To fall out of love: is to see, instead of him, a table, a chair.