Hands

When asked what physical attribute I like most about myself, I inevitably reply that I admire my hands.

At this age my hands are somewhat arthritic and not as expressive as they used to be. Yet I still find pleasure in them. I speak as much with my hands as I do with words and always have. And I always watch the hands of others -- especially of artists.

In the mid-seventies I took a photograph of my friend Terry Salzmann's hands hammering to create one of her folded copper bowls. The photograph was the graphic for her MFA graduate exhibition announcement and a print hangs on my wall today. In that photograph is the bowl she made that she gave to me more than a decade later. I love it because it is hers, but also because it is a work of art -- not a bowl one could ever use for anything, but a purely gratuitous expression of the creative imagination.

One of my favorite novels is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I have taught it many times, I am so in love with it.

The first chapter of the 1947 novel, following the introduction "Book of the Grotesques" [for we are all grotesques], is about Wing Biddlebaum. Wing has settled in Winesburg in an attempt to escape the fact that he has been found out, not so much as gay but as "one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralised." A boy has gone "forth to tell his dreams as facts." And that is the undoing of Adolph Myers who becomes known as Wing Biddlebaum in his exile. With little said, Anderson communicates the anxieties of Wing's nervous hands, hands that led to the false accusations that have made him seek asylum and anonymity in Winesburg.

All of the residents of Winesburg have secrets, betrayals and griefs; yet all are saved by the grace of their humanity.

I consider the central chapter of the novel to be "Tandy." It is more about the mysterious stranger who arrives in Winesburg, and stays at Tom Hard's hotel, than it is about Hard's daughter, Tandy.

The stranger says, "I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean." The child Tandy is, for him, "the quality of being strong to be loved." He goes on, "Be brave enough to dare to be loved. Be something more than man or woman. Be Tandy." And then he disappears as the mysterious stranger typically does.

For me, Tandy is not the girl per se. Rather she is a concept of self realization. Not in the sense of egoism or narcissism but of the self reliance that comes with a belief in one's self and what that holds for future potential. And that is what the rest of the novel is about, hope for youth to transform the future.

It has always been one of my favorite novels within the canon of American literature -- a novel about the self-made possibilities of the central character Tom Willard who has been nurtured amongst the community of his small town upbringing. They are human in their grotesqueries -- and loving and well-wishing in spite of their human frailties. He wishes to break away into the broader sensibility of an urban adulthood, and in the closing scene of the novel the entire cast of Winesburg sees him off.

Tom is the diametric opposite of Gatsby, who has manufacured his self-image in the quest for his fantasy of Daisy. Greil Marcus has called these grotesques, which he finds personified in American folkloric story and song, the characters of "the old, weird America."

I can only hope that in some backwater, someone like me is still making Winesburg, Ohio required reading in an obscure American literature class.