Hands Don’t Make Magic
“The errand of the hand started millions of years ago. The hand has been an indispensable means of our turning human. It was the opposable thumb that made us able to climb down from the tree, while our distant primate relatives are still hanging – four-fingered – from the branches. Some of them still raise their paws to the life-giving Sun at dawn, like Sun adorers. They capture the beams of the Great Fireball and bathe their faces in them. Now we are capable of radiation, not just adoption. We heal with laying on hands, our caresses are miraculous, the language of affection. We use our hands to communicate, to carpenter our world, create, write, design, and some of us can read with their fingertips. As little kids, we get to know the world by spanning and groping around. Hands, fingers are our most ancient measuring and counting tool, our basic creation accomplisher in the world. We achieve everything we think of with the help of our hands. Nevertheless, in this stroll through life, we still wish to scan this haptic world with our retina. We have neglected our handvision, and feel sorry for the visually impaired, although they have ten epidermal eyes. No fingers know light and shadow, but they still tell the tale of a world beyond color, a real world of here and now, and not one made up of illusory rainbows.”
“…She puts on a fig-leaf-glove, which may come from Buddha’s tree of enlightenment or the Garden of Eden, and with which Adam tried to cover up our original sin, our false self-identity, the promiscuity of our stripped corporeality. She hints at the unique print of our outstretched fingers through the metonymy of philodendron stencils. The radiating plant-paws transubstantiate into hands. She turns the human and vegetative world penetrable by shape-synonyms. She outlines the “fingers” of the anthropomorphic plans without any real drawing, the prints and hole-like images camouflage in leaves. We see the sketched pattern plates of the hollow-play of a chirologized plant. Just as every person’s fingerprint is unique, the veins, shapes, worm-eaten holes of every single leaf are also unique… “
Excerpts from Handtrasfusion by Géza Dabóczi