“Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, "has" the word, can and must "have" "the hand." Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the "work" of the hand, the "hand-work," and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the "work" of destruction. The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand, and a hand never originates from a paw or a claw or talon. Even the hand of one in desperation (it least of all) is never a talon, with which a person clutches wildly. The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not "have" hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting….
It is not accidental that modern man writes "with" the typewriter and "dictates" [diktiert] (the same word as "poetize" [Dichten]) "into" a machine. This "history" of the kinds of writing is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand, but by means of the mechanical forces it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something "typed." Where typewriting, on the contrary, is only a transcription and serves to preserve the writing, or turns into print something already written, there it has a proper, though limited, significance. In the time of the first dominance of the typewriter, a letter written on this machine still stood for a breach of good manners. Today, a hand-written letter is an antiquated and undesired thing; it disturbs speed reading. Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides this "advantage," that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same....”From Parmenides (1942-43), trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1992, 80-81 and 85-86.
Heidegger’s essay on the hand and the typewriter (1942-43) has arguments that conjure up the modern human being as an individual detached from Being. I walk with him till a point, but then the feet wander into another path; feet and syllables, that form a room - what we speak about as the stanza. Sensation is the unit of poetry. This is true of the quietest lines, the most rudimentary forms of words that have settled into shadow. Consider this:
A man tells his friend to teach him about sound. He asks for music as if it were a gift, not knowing its face, unsheathed as desire. The friends turns taut, as a red-hot wire would. In his eyes, a flaming bird has twisted into shape. The generator springs into the stealth of half-light.
The man sits on a low stool, and before his mind has time to become the shape of its container, the evening reverberates. The teacher sings Sa. Eyes close. Note trickles into the great melancholy-sea. It surrounds him.
A paper boat drenched in childhood’s gutter has been rescued from the city, and memory’s walls dissolve before this corrugated sheet of the body. The man sings. He speaks without words. The bird cajoled into day dream wakes up, and begins to flap its wings. I would like to learn from you, he says. I want to know this music. How it rises. How the students gather round this elephantine stump, as it grows slowly towards an impossible sky.
The movement of modernity’s muse - technology, whose purest form lives in the machine as tool – as homogenising force, is an argument I take with a little bit of weariness. I am aware of this capacity, but there is more. I cannot let this thought fester, for it would mean that all that is there in poetry, is language. If the typewriter removes the individualising force of being, what is left, but words? The shadow cannot be alive without its owner. The poet knows sensation before langue. Emotion is ‘double voiced’ as poetry. But then the poetic stanza is to academic writing as sensation is to emotion, as writing is to the typewritten.
Poetry is an act of communication. Spoken, it is a life-world coalesced into words, a culture in a turn of phrase (teri baaton mein khimaam ki khushboo hain). It is context without agent, story without muse. This is the world we must live in, not as characters, but as genre. We must slip into the voice, with the uncanniness of a thief stealing time in the dreaming city.
The cat comes to me. He has been waiting for everyone to leave. He has been waiting for me to be alone. He has been waiting for his ransom of attention. He comes to me with a single thought in his head. Touch. He wants to tell me “you”. So he comes there and becomes a liquid gesture – a butting head, a soft meow; like the crinkling of paper, the crumbling of shrewsberry biscuits.
Sometimes when we go to people, we want to make it right. We want to tell them “you”, we want to say “meow”. Sometimes we want to tell somebody we love them, without knowing how. We tell them “Such a beautiful nosering”. We kiss them on the neck. We hold their bag while they search for the keys. We listen attentively to their ranting. We tell them about the theory of ‘inconsistent flow’ that we have chanced upon in our research on colourblind poets. We say “Meow”.
This is how it is with language. Poetry slips out of the bag by mistake, as an afterthought. Once it is out, it is all there is, as testimony.
It is raining here, where I am, in May. A pleasant lull has fallen on the place. The thought glimmers for a moment before it comes to you as this text. I hope you are finding the time to write.
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Love ❤️
Hand, cat, meow, you.. beautiful ❤️🧡