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    Speak, Hands
    Speak, Hands
    Speak, Hands
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Speak, Hands

    By Lillian Moats

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    About this ebook

    Speak, Hands is a meditation on memory and the unconscious which employs innovative narrative techniques to transport us into the wordless realms of meditation and gesture.

    This daring new literary work defies the conventions of memoir by questioning the very nature of memory and the traditional autonomous subject. Lillian Moats negotiates this complex narrative using four inner voices which challenge the distinctions between mind and body, subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious. Speak, Hands breaks through verbal bounds to transport us into the wordless realms of meditation and gesture. Combining prose, poetry, psychology, and philosophy, Moats conveys an extraordinary personal struggle that could not have been told with common literary devices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9780966957686
    Speak, Hands

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      Book preview

      Speak, Hands - Lillian Moats

      Reverberations

      REAWAKENING

      Our hands turn the page of a book, unlock a door, stroke a loved one as we pass by, gesture the passions that underscore our damped-down words, all without conscious direction. The day-to-day relationship between mind and body is so sympathetic, we rarely think about the varied layers of consciousness that direct these silent agents of our unspoken will – our own two hands.

      Help me, Hands, to tell this story. Isn’t the work you perform in my life, and the work of other hands in other lives, the gesture dance of the unsayable? Dance through my memory. I will not restrain you. Time is meaningless to you, yet in your repertoire are the sweep and pattern of a life. Dance for me. I will translate as I can.

      Will you begin with the gesture that precedes all gesture, the universal reflex – first clench of a newborn hand around the monumental finger of the other? Shall we chronicle the turning points of our relationship, move by move? No. Too plodding, time-bound for you. Step-by-step goes the dance of feet, not hands. You assert your rights to be unbound by time, by gravity.

      You test me. Do I really mean I will not restrain you? You recall to me small hands clamped to the floor beneath the shins of a child – my hands, my shins. You remember a woman’s hands cringing and turning, enduring their inspection under accusing eyes – my hands, my eyes. Yes, I distrusted you. Now, I repeat, I will not restrain you. Take up my faith in you. Begin where you will.

      From childhood on, I have been drawn to quiet solitude. In late summer of 1996, soon after I turned fifty, the allure of deep silence drew me to a house where a Burmese monk was teaching meditation.

      I was the novice, accompanied by two experienced friends eager to learn more. Over the phone, we had been directed to make our way down a gravel driveway on the ridge of a ravine and enter the house quietly by way of a sliding glass door. The unpretentious modern home, made available by its traveling owners, was nearly clear of furnishings. At the far end of the living room, a few students were already engaged in meditation, seated on the carpet of meadow green. Like subtly colored petals of a great flower, they were arrayed around the vibrant center of the monk’s orange robes.

      As he opened his eyes to welcome my friends and me, his placid smile became engaging. Quietly, he offered instructions on the breathing method he found most useful in entering a meditative state. We were to concentrate on the exchange of air at the very edge of our nostrils as we measured our inhalations and exhalations to the count of eight. He closed his eyes again. I would soon learn what powers of observation were veiled behind those lids.

      As I arranged myself cross-legged on the carpet with my companions, how out of place I felt and yet, how oddly at home – mine was a mind divided. On that first visit, I squirmed, shifted, repeatedly forgot to breathe, but on the second, settled peacefully and deeply. As I was leaving, Dhamrakita noted the dramatic change. And did you see anything? he asked.

      Only a vague magenta circle.

      Ahhh … he replied, the magenta circle! I hoped my face was not disclosing my amusement, since I liked this gentle monk so much. You are taking to meditation instinctively, he said. Don’t be surprised if soon something happens.

      When I came for private instruction the next day, something did indeed happen. Perhaps ten minutes after I settled into meditation with my hands resting open on my knees, I felt an invisible tug on my left thumb, pulling it insistently toward me. As if I were strung like a marionette, the tips of my fingers were slowly cinched together – drawn so tightly toward my thumb that my straining wrist lifted from my knees. Then, tighter still, the clumped tips of my thumb and fingers were pulled toward my shoulder until the hinge of my elbow closed.

      Slowly revolving around the axis of my wrist, my hand pointed down before each finger, smallest first, freed itself in turn and fanned upward. Palm out, fingers curved and spread, my left hand lifted on its own as if it had outgrown its need for strings. It floated weightlessly in front of me at shoulder height. Moments passed before the same startling animation happened to my right.

      Only momentarily did my hands hold their suspended pose before lowering in unison. With unaccustomed grace, they alighted once more on my knees as my ephemeral meditative state dissolved away. Dhamrakita was occupied with another monk when I had to leave, yet I knew by a deliberate bow of his head toward me that he had observed my hands’ levitation. I left with a knot of emotion in my stomach: its strands of apprehension, exhilaration, amusement and calm hopelessly tangled all day.

      I quietly entered the living room where Dhamrakita was meditating alone the next morning, and took my position on the floor in front of him. He opened his eyes to look at me. You are moving very fast. Don’t be afraid, he reassured me. I want you to meditate for twenty minutes … I won’t stop you until the time has passed, but I will be watching over you.

      After a few moments of concentrated breathing, my left hand, then my right, lifted effortlessly. Eventually, I heard Dhamrakita rise from his cross-legged pose in front of me. I thought I heard a chair creak at a distance. To my mind, far more than twenty minutes had already passed. My suspended hands seemed to have volition apart from mine. Evidently they had no intention of lowering without a signal from Dhamrakita. My fingers were growing cold. Was he still in the room? How long would he leave me – puns were becoming irresistible – hanging like this?

      Eyes still closed, I visualized my hands as they floated in the air. If I could happen upon myself, would I laugh or shudder? How bizarre to feel such underlying serenity while my thoughts ricocheted with irreverent humor. Now that I had helium balloons for hands, why didn’t my well-aimed sarcasm shoot them from the sky? Was my emerging tranquility irrevocable? I could not even puncture it myself.

      Suddenly, the manic clamor of my thoughts was pierced by a single phrase of a bird call outside the open window. Tears welled up so rapidly that my closed lids could not dam them. They poured from the corners of my eyes, sluiced along the rims, until I felt my cheeks glazed and chill. Why this sudden shift of mood? What the bird call meant to me, I did not know … nor why it triggered in me this startling vision: though it was late summer, here and now, sparkling flakes of snow spiraled down behind a picture window. I sat upon a carpeted floor, as now, but how compact my body felt. I was two, three, four years old, in the winters of my mother’s pneumonia. I was keeping my terrified vigil on the floor beside her couch. Never before had I remembered that my hands were – then, as now – weightless, spread-fingered, shoulder-height.

      Tears began to drip from my upturned jaw, but sorrow was contained in fascination. I heard rustling, felt hands on my hands. My eyes fluttered open to light on Dhamrakita’s orange robes. He knelt beside me. Breathe now. Deep breaths. he instructed. When I looked at you after twenty minutes, I knew you would have to cry, so I simply sat and waited for you. He and a female monk rubbed the circulation back to my icy fingers. I need to warn you, it would be too dangerous for you to meditate alone – you may not be able to come out of it. But with me, you will go far, Dhamrakita predicted,

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