The path of hands
I see the sea, white, shimmering, in the distance. Mornings are spent at the kitchen table. The window open, the curtains floating, as if without weight. On the wall the first rays of sunlight. In the basket, beneath the table, pieces of fabric, threads, paper look at me. I start with touch, texture, feelings. It is all there, inside a hesitation.
I think of paper and dust. I think of the summer of 2015, I was about to give up. The material called me back.
Again touch, hands, their tiny movements. Work, repetition, years. Never forgotten, just held inside like a fire under ash.
Now there is a kind of nostalgia, a strangeness. I dig deep, but something returns only when I am not screaming from inside. So I write. I follow a rhythm. I place one word beside another. Their meanings shift; so do their texture and patina. Light and shadow matter.
I am trying to make something instinctive, something raw. I allow myself to wait: my hands soft, my heart quiet, my body an unfolded map. In recent weeks, I have thought often about hands. Hands that hold, touch, believe. I have thought about the aesthetics of touch. Touch matters deeply to me. The way we touch reveals the way we love.
Keats writes:
“Touch has a memory”.
Touch is also a language, like notes in a musical composition, one beside another. The way we share a space matters too. So does what is absent.
In recent weeks, I have made small things. Beginnings. Brief encounters with the self. I have made them as a counterweight, because I am nearing the end of a large project—larger than I am, larger than my present maturity as a maker, a thinker, and a writer. It has been difficult to work in isolation, in a tiny space, a room overlooking a tree which lost the only nest, in a day of early April, after a storm.
April is the month of storms, of death and rebirth.
I’m about to finish my big project, the biggest I have ever worked on. I want to be done with it. It is hard to keep it in my life. It has been seven years.
I came to the sea only to discover that I needed simple sentences, fragile and vulnerable ones. They are my land, my language, my skin. I don’t need difficult words, hidden meanings, complex philosophical concepts. I need words like love, embrace, texture. I need hands, touch, the history of presence.
Over the past seven years, I have cried a lot. Perhaps that is why I came to the sea: to speak to water, to feel it, to exchange one water for another, to become water. The sea and I. The sea of life.
I’m creating tiny quaderno’s (notebooks). It is the only thing I can finish now. They are all written in English—a language that is not mine, with a vocabulary too simple to hide behind. A language I did not even know I possessed.
Where was all this when I needed it?
I’m ready to keep pages blank. No fear, no pressure. I have learned to create without applause. I have learned to create from nothing, but ashes are never nothing, they are everything, maybe they are the beginning.
For a long time, I thought I was alone. Then I realised that beside me were painters, writers, weavers, potters, musicians, gardeners. There were also those who left too soon, and those who spent their creative lives in obscurity. They are my inspiration. They walked the path of making—the path of hands.
I want to offer my hands like a pilgrimage is offered to the believer.
