The Traces by Mairead Small Staid

Author:Mairead Small Staid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

“It is the motion of the hands,” says Goethe, the hands that distinguish Leonardo’s greatest work, such gestures a “resource … obvious to an Italian.” In other pages, the Italian Marco Polo has grown fluent in the language of the Great Khan, able to describe every detail of the places he has visited, and yet: “[W]hen Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures,” writes Calvino, “holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow.”

This gesticulation is innate, embedded in our (human, not Italian) circuitry: just as specialized neurons in our brains interpret facial expressions, reading sorrow or joy or deceit in them, others have evolved to interpret the movements of hands, a holdover from the preverbal communication of our distant ancestors. We can read each other’s gesti like so many skimmed pages. “It is the most literary of all great pictures,” says Clark of The Last Supper, recognizing the full sentences written in the disciples’ uplifted hands.

But Clark argues that our focus on the fingers might stem from the fact that the saints’ faces—where our brains’ dancing neurons might otherwise find the emotions they seek—have been so badly damaged over the centuries: their visages bear the brunt of past restorers’ ineptitude. “Had the original heads been there, with all their pathos and dramatic intensity, the gestures,” he writes, could have resumed “a subsidiary role.” Instead, we rely on the hands to tell the story. Under such weight, says Clark, their weakness is revealed. “The whole force of gesture, as an expression of emotion, lies in its spontaneity,” he writes, “and the gestures in The Last Supper are not spontaneous.” No, they are not. Among Leonardo’s notes, we find these descriptions: “Another twisting the fingers of his hands, turns with stern brows to his companions. Another with his hands spread shows the palms, and shrugs his shoulders up to his ears, making a mouth of astonishment.” And another, and another. A good painter must paint both man and the intention of his soul, remember? Our hands most readily hold those intentions, and give them away.

But I find in Leonardo’s hands, in Polo’s sign language, in Z.’s ready gestures—a constant of these weeks and months—a turning away not from the face’s expression but from the words that would pour forth from it. “There is something indecent in words,” says one of Cesare Pavese’s narrators. “Sometimes I wished I were more ashamed of using them.” (I read this line aloud to Z., who tosses one hand up and out in agreement.) Should I be more ashamed—or wish to be—of these thousands upon thousands of words? “There is no language without deceit,” says Calvino, or one of his characters, but the revelations of another city argue yet another side: “Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”

An alternative is at work in the body’s expressions, both facial and gestural—the pointing finger and the smile.

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