A Natural History of the Senses (18 page)

Perhaps the most famous kiss in the world is Rodin’s sculpture
The Kiss
, in which two lovers, sitting on a rocky ledge or outcropping,
embrace tenderly with radiant energy, and kiss forever. Her left hand wrapped around his neck, she seems almost to be swooning, or to be singing into his mouth. As he rests his open right hand on her thigh, a thigh he knows well and adores, he seems to be ready to play her leg as if it were a musical instrument. Enveloped in each other, glued together by touch at the shoulder, hand, leg, hip, and chest, they seal their fate and close it with the stoppers of their mouths. His calves and knees are beautiful, her ankles are strong and firmly feminine, and her buttocks, waist, and breasts are all heavily fleshed and curvy. Ecstasy pours off every inch of them. Touching in only a few places, they seem to be touching in every cell. Above all, they are oblivious to us, the sculptor, or anything on earth outside of themselves. It is as if they have fallen down the well of each other; they are not only self-absorbed, but actually absorbing one another. Rodin, who often took secret sketch notes of the irrelevant motions made by his models, has given these lovers a vitality and thrill that bronze can rarely capture in its fundamental calm. Only the fluent, abstracted stroking and pressing of live lovers actually kissing could capture it. Rilke notes how Rodin was able to fill his sculptures “with this deep inner vitality, with the rich and amazing restlessness of life. Even the tranquility, where there was tranquility, was composed of hundreds upon hundreds of moments of motion keeping each other in equilibrium.… Here was desire immeasurable, thirst so great that all the waters of the world dried in it like a single drop.”

According to anthropologists, the lips remind us of the labia, because they flush red and swell when they’re aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick. Today the bee-stung look is popular; models draw even larger and more hospitable lips, almost always in shades of pink and red, and then apply a further gloss to make them look shiny and moist. So, anthropologically at least, a kiss on the mouth, especially with all the plunging of tongues and the exchanging of saliva, is another form of intercourse, and it’s not surprising that it should make the mind and body surge with gorgeous sensations.

1988: Summer in upstate New York passes in a slow, humid embrace. The big event this week is a convention of psychics meeting at the Ramada Inn downtown, to tell fortunes and swap stories. Classes and special events take place in nearby rooms, but for a small fee the general public can enter the main ballroom, and choose to visit one of the many booths arcing around the walls in a horseshoe, or browse through the parapsychology books laid out on bridge tables in the center of the room. There are palm-readers, numerologists, telekinesis and UFO specialists, as well as men and women perched over crystal balls and Tarot cards. One tall thin woman wearing a tie-dyed muumuu works at a large easel with pastels. Not only does she do “past-life regressions,” she draws the incarnations, complete with “past-life guides,” as she talks about them. Watching for a while at a polite distance, I notice that many of the local people seem to have Indian guides whose names consist mainly of consonants.

Finally I decide on a palm-reader with a serious face and a bouffant, country-and-western hairdo, whose literature recounts her cavalcade of solved crimes and timely predictions. Giving her husband-manager twenty-five dollars for a short reading, I sit down across from her at a small bistro table against the wall. She is a middle-aged woman wearing a rabbit-skin bolero vest and a full skirt. What I’m really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it’s a psychics’ convention, shouldn’t everyone just
know
where and when to meet?

Taking my hand, she rakes it lightly with her spread fingers, then lifts it up close to her face as if zeroing in on a splinter.

“You drive a red car,” she says in a solemn voice.

“No, a blue one …,” I say, hating to disappoint her.

“Well you
will
drive a red car in the future sometime, and you must be very careful,” she warns. “I see a lot of money for you in December, but someone you work with will betray you, and you must watch out.… You’re close to someone named Mary?”

I shake my head no.

“Margaret? Melissa? Monica?”

“I have a mother named Marcia,” I offer.

“Ah, that’s it, and you’re very concerned about her, but she’ll be all right, you don’t have to worry.” Now she presses the fleshy side of my palm and folds back the thumb, separates the fingers and peers closely at them. The hand is “the visible part of the brain,” Immanuel Kant once said. She searches the
flexure lines
(creases made by moving the hand),
tension lines
(wrinkles that grow with age the way facial lines do), and
papillary ridges
(fingerprints), traces my head line, heart line, life line and fate line. Among our near neighbors, the apes, the heart and head lines are the same, but so mobile and powerful are our forefingers that they tend to separate the lines on most people. My hands are cool and dry. Palms sweat when we’re agitated, in tribute to a time deep in our past when stress meant physical danger and our body wanted us ready to fight or flee. A tiny discoloration at the base of my second finger brings a nod of interest from the palm-reader. It’s only a scar left from a rose thorn, nothing like stigmata, marks some Roman Catholics claim appear spontaneously on their feet and palms and bleed, reproducing the wounds Christ suffered on the cross.

“You know someone who had an abortion?” the palm-reader asks.

Throughout history, palm-readers have chosen the hand as their symbolic link to the psyche and soul, as their raft through time. After all, the hand is action, it digs roads and builds cities, it throws spears and diapers babies. Even its small dramas—dialing a phone number, pushing a button—can change the course of nations or launch atomic bombs. When we are distressed, we allow our hands to console each other by wringing, stroking, fidgeting, and caressing them as if they were separate people. At the outset of a romance, the first touch people share is usually the taking of each other’s hand, while couples of long standing, moving through the world on their daily rounds, often hold hands as a tender bridge. Holding the hand of someone ill or elderly soothes them and gives them an emotional lifeline. Experiments show that just touching someone’s hand or arm lowers their blood pressure. In many cultures, people fiddle obsessively
with worry beads, polished stones, and other objects, and the brain-wave patterns this produces are those of a mind made calm by repeated touch stimulation.

In these days of mass-produced objects, we treasure things that are “handmade.” We think of manual laborers as working harder than desk jockeys, though it might not always be the case. Sometimes working hands seem to perform with a cunning and sensitivity that defies explanation. Lorraine Miller, though totally blind, works as a hair stylist at a beauty salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A mother of five, Ms. Miller had always wanted to be a beautician, but the rigors of raising a family never allowed time for it. Later in life, blinded by disease, she decided to pursue her lifelong ambition. A hair salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, trained her to cut hair by touch, carefully feeling the shape of the head and the layers of hair as she cut them. In time, she touch-cut so well that they hired her.

The tiny ridges in our fingertips, whose roughness makes it easier for us to grasp objects, are randomly formed, resulting in the unique swirling weather systems we call “fingerprints.” The swirls run through a few basic patterns of whorls, loops, and arches, but combine in endlessly different ways. Not even identical twins have the same fingerprints, which makes guilt a lot easier to establish when it is necessary to do so. The idea of one’s fingerprints being the ultimate personal signature isn’t new. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese used the imprint of a finger as a way of signing a contract. When the FBI searches for fingerprints on a holdup note, they use a laser. The oily residue absorbs laser light and re-emits it at a longer wavelength. Forensic experts wearing amber goggles then filter out the laser light and see the fingerprints—always a distinctive signature.

A hand moves with a complex precision that’s irreplaceable, feels with a delicate intuition that’s indefinable, as designers of robotic hands are discovering. Because we use our hands so often for so many purposes, flexing, bending, gripping, pointing, stretching them millions of times, University of Utah Research Institute engineers have invented a glove to wear over a hand that has lost the sense of
touch—through the use of electronics and sound waves, it gives the wearer a sense of pressure, which is essential to being able to grasp. A wire leads from the glove to a tiny piston that is connected to a part of the body where feeling hasn’t been lost, and the wearer feels hand sensations (in his wrist or forearm, for example) and learns to translate them into hand responses.

The sensitivity of the fingertips reveals itself in the use of Braille, which now appears everywhere, from elevator panels to the faces of Italian coins. Braille can be read quickly, and people are always looking for better ways to use it. A recent study reported in
Education of the Visually Handicapped
suggests that Braille can be read more accurately and efficiently if the readers move their fingers vertically over the dots rather than horizontally, because the fingertip’s touch receptors are more sensitive when used in that way.

Handclasps and handshakes have served throughout history to prove the lack of a weapon and to pledge one’s good faith, although shaking hands as a common greeting didn’t really come into practice until the Industrial Revolution in England, when businessmen were so busy making deals and shaking hands on them that the gesture lost its special purpose and entered casual social life. A handshake is still a watered-down contract that says: Let’s at least pretend that we’ll deal honorably with each other. The hand has been symbolic of the whole body for some time, as in “I’ll give you a hand,” or referring to a worker as a “hired hand.”

Think of all the ways in which we touch ourselves (I don’t just mean masturbation—from
manustuprare
, “to defile with the hand”), but how we wrap our hands around our shoulders and rock as if we were a mother comforting a child; how we hide our face in our open palms to be alone to pray, or that they may receive our tears; how we run our hands briskly up and down our arms as we pace; how, with wide eyes, we press an open palm to one cheek when we’re startled. Touch is so important in emotional situations that we’re driven to touch ourselves in the way we’d like someone else to comfort us. Hands are messengers of emotion. And few have understood their intricate duty as well as Rodin. Here is how Rilke describes Rodin’s artistry:

In the sea of so-called healers who cater to desperate people, there are practitioners of “therapeutic touch,” who claim to cure people of physical ills without actually touching the body, by running their hands at a discreet distance over a person’s energy field. The ancient practice of “the laying on of hands” can be seen weekly on most TV sets in the United States. A preacher calls a sick or troubled person out of the audience, seems to intuit their problem without being told (charlatan-debunker Randi has revealed simple magician’s tricks that are used), and then touches them on the forehead with such force it knocks them off their feet. They fall to the ground in religious ecstasy, stand up and claim to be healed. Throughout the world, shamans and medicine men perform similar rituals, seeming to draw the demon out of a person’s body, healing them with an incantation and a touch.

Touch is so powerful a healer that we go to professional touchers (doctors, hairdressers, masseuses, dancing instructors, cosmeticians, barbers, gynecologists, chiropodists, tailors, back manipulators, prostitutes, and manicurists), and frequent emporiums of touch—discothèques, shoeshine stands, mud baths. Illness usually sends us to a doctor, but often we go just to be fussed over and touched. A doctor can’t help much when one has a minor allergy, the flu, or some other small affliction, but we go anyway to be patted, stroked, listened to,
inspected, handled. Monkeys and other animals engage in a lot of grooming, especially of the head. The ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians wore elaborate coifs that required the steady attendance of hairdressers, but this voluptuous touching eventually went out of fashion and didn’t reappear until after the Middle Ages; the professional beauty salon didn’t come into vogue until the Victorian era.

Gynecologists do the most intimate professional touching of all, and few situations are as awkward for a woman as having a male gynecologist she’s never so much as said hello to walk into an examining room, lift up the sheet, and set to work. Such a blasé attitude hasn’t always been the hallmark of a gynecologist’s calling. “Three hundred years ago he was even on occasion required to crawl into the pregnant woman’s bedroom on his hands and knees to perform the examination,” Desmond Morris observes, “so that she would be unable to see the owner of the fingers which were to touch her so privately. At a later date, he was forced to work in a darkened room, or to deliver a baby by groping beneath the bedclothes. A 17th-century etching shows him sitting at the foot of the labour bed with the sheet tucked into his collar like a napkin, so that he is unable to see what his hands are doing, an anti-intimacy device that made cutting the umbilical cord a particularly hazardous operation.”