by TJ Price
In the past two weeks since acquiring this new hobby, I have wounded myself twice. Both times, the injury has occured on my left hand—once on the medial side of my index finger, just above the knuckle, the second on the palmar side of my thumb, just above the Mount of Venus. I can rub the two together easily, and often do, to feel the warmth of their healing. The constant throb has been distracting, and even sometimes variably painful depending on the action. Pulling on my socks, or drying my hands on a towel, for example.
I’ve never been very proud of my hands. I’m an inveterate nailbiter, for example, and have been my entire life. (Though when I say “nailbiter,” I don’t mean a casual, delicate trimming with one’s teeth—I mean onychotillomania, or perionychophagia, those ominous-sounding terms that belong to the school of “grooming disorders.”) When I was a kid and played games of palmistry, excitedly diagnosing splintered life-lines and love-lines, I would bluff that I knew something about chiromancy. Yes, my knobbly-knuckled fingers were indicative of “magician’s hands,” I said proudly, and it meant that—rather than being impossible to fit for rings—I had a philosopher’s mind. I could see the future. This inspired a small degree of awe in those who believed it, which pre-empted what I believed would be negative comments about my weird hands.
They’re not that weird, to be clear. They’re fairly normal, I think. I just have a strange relationship with them—we coexist uneasily, warily. “The Body Politic,” by Clive Barker—a really ingenious piece of horror fiction—depicts what happens when this truce is broken. In Barker’s story, the protagonist’s hands suddenly acquire a separate sentience from their owner, and have come to resent the “tyranny of the body.” It’s a diabolically clever device: our thumbs alone mark us as separate from other species—imagine what we would be without control of our hands entirely! Left, loosed from Charlie’s body in a bloody secession, begins to scamper around the city, inciting rebellion in other hands on other bodies with a campaign to “free” Right. This obviously takes it to a place of horror fiction, and the ensuing splatterfest is fun, but I think of it often whenever I catch my right hand pulling at the hangnails of the left, like a fretful animal, or their own fingers picking at themselves.
Barker ends “The Body Politic” with a clever button, too: even after the rebellion of the hands is quashed, it seems that still other limbs are deciding upon secession. “Skeleton” by Ray Bradbury—in which a hypochondriac is made “tremblingly aware” of their own bones as something disparate from themselves. This awareness is deliberately installed by a marrow-sucking predator, however—one with a poetic, albeit hollow, tongue. Once the protagonist’s focus is aimed on his own skeleton, it becomes alien to him—his, no longer. This opens up a kind of hideously organic Ship of Theseus argument, vis-à-vis sentience: if all of our parts become disparate, are we ourselves anymore? (I imagine the brain suddenly beginning to wriggle around in resentment, ballooning abruptly to break out of the skull and cracking it like an eggshell.)
In both injuries, it was one hand against the other, but it was my own fault. Neither were intentional, mercifully—both were simply accidents—and I am now learning slowly how to apply the compound to the strop and how to strop the blade before using it. (Paradoxically, in this hobby, the worst wounds come from a dull blade.) The idiom for hobby is “to keep one’s hands busy,” as if the aim is to distract them from possible thoughts of rebellion. “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” goes another phrase, from which an oft-overlooked movie gets its title—the 1990s stoner-comedy Idle Hands, starring teen heartthrob Devon Sawa. In Idle Hands, the idea is much the same as “The Body Politic,” except for the film externalizes the concept as a force from without: the protagonist’s right hand becomes possessed, committing evil against Anton’s wishes. The film very early on establishes the severing, which then leads into a strange exercise of genre that is nonetheless entertaining (if slightly goofy), but still wonders at the extremities of the body. If the hand is entity enough to be possessed by an external force, then is it not entity enough to have its own will and its own sentience? Is that the delimit of our respect for others, that something be authoritatively autonomous?
Of course, stropping the blade and making it sharper is not the only thing I’m doing—I have also taken the necessary step of acquiring a cut glove to accompany my work with the knife and the basswood, which has drastically reduced my risk of future injury. I remember the cold flash of terror when the blade slipped, frantically trying to convince myself that it wasn’t that bad, until the blood began to flow. Then, the slow rising of alarm, out of the shock. Get some pressure on that, now, warns the internal medic. It’s a wonder my left hand hasn’t fomented rebellion—if not against the tyranny of the body, against the cruelty of my own right hand. (Come to think of it, my left hand is also the one’s that’s been tattooed, and there are a number of other scars in and around it that have been inflicted by the other.) Still, despite authorship or blame when it comes to the wounds, some protection is indeed important, and is advice I would give to anyone attempting the same art. (I would also suggest eye protection.)
As a result of this pursuit, my corner of the bedroom’s carpet—where my desk is situated—has become furry with wood shavings, and the vacuum has been making multiple trips to and from the hall closet. I have started discovering little curls of basswood like burrs in the cuffs of my pants, and when I look at my hands I often see little scabs of paint, or ink. Yesterday, I picked off a patch of hardened adhesive from my thumb, an unexpectedly pleasant sensation: the slow, prickling separation of glue from flesh, all at once, like a scab. All this, on the right hand as well as the left. On the right hand, too, I have developed a slight callus above the Mount of Apollo on my palm. This location traditionally signifies creativity and artistry, so I am taking that as a sign that I am on the right path, even if a callus is the body manifesting protection against repeated and constant friction or pressure. (A protest, of sorts, against discomfort; an organic buffer zone manifested to lessen pain.)
Besides which, writing has not come easily, of late. I sit down to type and it’s as if my hands have become hooves. They are big dull insensate and infuriatingly docile. I have to prod them into their dance over the keys, and even then their motion feels mechanical, hesitating. This, and the traitorous eye! (Perhaps it is some kind of cosmic joke, my last article being entitled “The Eye Moves,” and now that’s all they seem to do!) You see, I had to satisfy an entire range of conditions in order to write this. First: the room temperature had to be in perfect homeostasis: sensing the air against my skin made me unpleasantly aware of my own flesh. This also meant there could be no fans or vents pointed in my direction, as the slightest frisson caused distraction. The lights were warm to neutral; cold, shrill LED light would have overexcited my pineal gland and led only to a frustrating blank in lieu of anything substantive. The window nearby, shaded. Then, I pruned all other distractions: apps, windows, mail clients shut, then opened the word processor, made it full screen, and put it into “composition mode.” Further, I engaged “focus mode,” and chose “sentence,” which dims every other sentence on the page except for the one that is currently being written. Once a full stop is reached and the next letter is typed, that sentence passes into gray. This is necessary, because I cannot seem to keep my gaze from otherwise flicking back to snag on some repeated word or some gauche turn of phrase, and then the brain (too easy a turncoat, too willing to please) will scramble to rephrase, edit, or delete.
But if the eyes can be fooled, I logically conclude, then the brain continues to hum along in the skull’s idiot chamber, and the fingers continue to loom out their thoughts over the keys. There’s some kind of hierarchy there that I can’t figure out yet; the eyes appear to have some kind of control over the hands, or at least, the fingers. (Perhaps only the fingertips?)
So, at around three hundred to four hundred words, a kind of pace settled in. Like someone jogging or running, thoughts of the exercise fade into the hum of the white noise. The taxiing, the takeoff. Soon, the climb, and then the leveling out for cruising altitude. The pleasantness and serenity of being detached from one’s own body—a kind of bizarre nirvana for me. Floating free of somatic intrusion, divorced entirely from the necessity of reliance on a squishy organic construct, pneuma from sarx. The fabled “flow” state, initiating disconnect and eliding of self-awareness—all in order to connect. (Again, the dullest blades…)
A therapist once asked me, in a conversation regarding dissociation, if I had ever experienced a time when I “wrote something but didn’t remember writing it.” I laughed and said “the dream!” because that is, in fact, the dream. I remember once, a long time ago, in the middle of the night, being alone in my room, staring at the computer screen. (This was back when monitors were still powered by cathode ray tubes rather than flat and sleek and powered by plasma or liquid crystal.) It must’ve been the perfect environment, all conditions met, because at some point during this marathon session of writing, I recall the distinct feeling of levering out of myself, as if I had crouched deep down inside of my body and then leapt, grasping the rim of my skull with the tips of my fingers and hoisting myself up and out, perching on my own head weightlessly. Still, my fingers flew over the keyboard: a flurry of plastic and metal, and I watched myself from above, fascinated.
Then: sudden vertigo, rising from this impossibility of bilocation. A skewing and a tilting, felt in my physical body, a tingling in my fingertips and in my toes that spread throughout my body, like fireflies in the blood. I was giddy with the sensation—an enormous air bubble was lifting in the middle of me, like the indicator in a level, or a burette for titration. As bubbles do, though, it popped—probably upon being noticed—and I fell back down inside of myself, hard, riveted to the innocuous blink of the cursor on the screen. Then I noticed the word count at the bottom of the document: 42,745 words. When I’d begun, that number had read somewhere around twenty thousand. I’d more than doubled the amount of words, and I had absolutely no idea what I’d written during that time.
I had been chasing that feeling ever since, as I explained to the therapist, who wore a mixed look of concern and amusement. But the issue with achieving this “flow” state is that it is not a place that can be attained by trying. It is like a mythical Shangri-La, only open to those who happen to stumble in unwittingly.
Time to readjust the thermostat—the room’s gotten slightly too cold, and I feel the chill raising the hair on my arms: horripilation crawls down my skin, racing toward my hands. (If the “idle hands” proverb is true, then vexilla regis prodeunt inferni.) I get up and shift the frequency of the ambient noise from brown to green, or vice versa.
But the damage is done, the focus has fled. Whatever immaterial network of concentration and conditions was necessary for me to focus has been disrupted and unbalanced. My eyes are roving against my will, I’m reading back, despite internalized admonishments to leave it be, stop picking at it, I can’t. My upper jaw is working its teeth against the soft pillow of my lower lip, whose plump flesh protests the pressure. I idly pick at my fingertips again, and discover a hangnail prodding out from the side of my index finger. I rub the pad of my thumb over it, back and forth, scraping minutely against the whorls and ridges of my fingerprint. I soon find that it’s not the only one: there’s also the ragged edge of a cuticle on my ring finger, and the bitten, throbbing quick of my little finger intensifies when I accidentally scrape the two together.
I roll back from the desk and pick at the offenders, hoping to quell them with minimal effort. The hangnail prises loose at the blunt fumbling of my other fingers, but not far enough to fully detach. So, apply teeth; pressure; yank—it rips free, with a shock of pain so bright and so ephemeral it feels like cold water being dashed over my face. Instantly, blood wells up and fills the lunula, turning the white crescent at the base of the nail red. I jam the finger into my mouth and suckle—saliva being a natural coagulant—and my tongue registers the blood’s metallic taste. Adrenalin spikes, and my heart starts to pound.
I have recognized that there is some degree of pathology to these neuroses. They appear to follow the pattern for what are called “Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors,” or BFRBs, as described in the DSM, and one of the techniques to stop their (often) self-injurious practice is called “decoupling.” Decoupling involves the interruption of the repetitive behavior with a different, competing action. This alteration triggers the brain to realize that the action is automatic, and thus, by bringing it into the sphere of conscious awareness, can halt the biting of the nail, the pulling of the scab. In other words, you distract yourself with something else. You keep your hands busy.
When I was a cashier at a supermarket once, a long time ago, during a casual interaction with a customer during the holiday season, I said “yes, it’s been really busy,” in response to a normal question. She said casually, “did you know that ‘busy’ is actually Japanese for being shredded to ribbons?” I did not know this, in fact, and was impressed. It made a kind of linguistic sense to me, the sound of it, zizz-zizz, like the sound of claws, tearing. I’d written a semi-ironic poem in high school (that I thought was very clever) about this very thing: “we slice ourselves to ribbons / on the cutting edge.” Later, I found out the customer had either been misinformed or had made it up. There is, however, the collective noun for a group of ferrets—a business, or, in an earlier form, a busyness—for their restless, darting behavior. “Business” is also the term for what an actor does while they’re onstage—not explicitly indicated in the script, but usually performed to accompany a line of dialogue and enhance the scene’s verisimilitude.
Under the light nearby, there is a cut glove and a knife, whose edge I’ve sharpened on the strop, and a scattering of half-finished projects from my new hobby. (There’s also an overturned box of Band-Aids.) I don’t think of it as keeping my hands busy, though. When I’m in the middle of the activity, I don’t even think of them as my hands, really, and I wonder if they don’t think of me as theirs, either. Maybe we’re both just focused on the fact that in front of us is a small block we’ve turned into a rough sphere and have carved into a jack-o-lantern. We’ve painted it orange, and it’s about halfway done, and when it’s finished, we’re going to mail it to a friend. That, for now, satisfies all the disparate parts of me—a harmony of purpose. Something, perhaps, approximating peace once again, if not in the body, then in the soul.
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