A book may be the palpable exhaustion of an author’s effort to touch, to

make contact—or to keep from being known.

Materialists and material scientists these days are trafficking in brands,
licenses, and deal structures, things you can’t touch, hold, see, smell, taste,
eat——things that have no luxury in them, none of the “bright, milky, soft, and
rosy” textures that Keats liked. According to the Progress and Freedom
Foundation, “the central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter .
. . the powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.”
This sentence, from the Foundation’s Magna Carta, could have been written in the
thirteenth century, or the seventeenth, or the nineteenth (​Nation​ 2/5/96). The
authors who quote it interpret it otherwise: what the statement means, they say, is
that the “idea of durable goods” has been overthrown. Planned obsolescence has
been embedded with a vengeance in the soft- and hardware world, the world of
data-com. American businesspeople, in particular, are holding nothing fast but the
bottom line.
But touch has always been abstract, has always dwelt on the bottom and at
the top of any hierarchy it’s part of; has always had an intimate relation with
thought and speech, with mind and voice. If thought is clutching-at-the-distance, if
speech evolved from the grooming activities of monkeys—a kind of interactive
autism or stimming—it should come as no surprise that touch has had as much to
do with idealism and mysticism, with the farthest reaches of intangibility and
invisibility, as with the back of your hand (which I bet you don’t know), or the face
you touch from 200 to 500 times a day—with rubbing, scratching, picking, wiping,
and holding. We denigrate our bodies and disparage touch as a mode of knowing;
we celebrate our bodies and praise touch as an ideal form of communication. Or
we blame our failure to maintain the contacts we make on life itself. Emerson
spoke for all of us when he did so in 1842, in his essay on “Experience”: “I take
this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our
fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our
condition.”
For Aristotle there were really four senses. He collapsed taste and touch,
saying both depended on contact. But he did not collapse touch into taste. Touch
was the larger, more distinctive sense. Aristotle followed Plato in ranking the
senses: sight was the highest and touch the lowest. Hearing took second, smell
third, taste––when given its innings––fourth. Taste and touch are lowest because
they involve contact of bodies. Sight is identified with mind and intellect. It can
perform action at a distance and without mediation.
 The Neoplatonists of the Renaissance perpetuate this hierarchy. In their
Banquets of the Senses, touching is the last thing to happen before the banquet
ends in nudity and sex. The eye and the ear have to do with beauty, and so with
love––as in Plato's ​Symposium​. The other senses begin the descent into the
demoralizing world of the body.

To see, to speak, to touch, to kiss, to die

With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

In George Chapman's 1594 “Banquet of Sense,” Ovid is the host. Chapman

imagines that Ovid wrote his ​Art of Love​ for the sake of Touch,

the engine that love’s bow doth bend,

The sense wherewith he feels him deified,
The object whereto all his actions tend,
In all his blindness his most pleasing guide

The moral condemnation of touch went hand in hand with the praise of it. It had to
be featured to be exposed––an old paradox. The analogy is with theater as a house
of misrule, a place where virtue was scorned as vices were ostensibly being
exposed and satirized, corrected. There is an anti-theatrical prejudice and there is
an anti-tactile prejudice too. They are often found within the same discourse,
within the same person.
Ficino in 1474 sets it down that Sight and Hearing nourish the soul, along
with reason, which he also calls a sense, while touch, taste, and smell nourish the
body. The one leads upward to heavenly Love and the other downward to bestial
love.
On Bonnie Raitt’s ​Nick of Time​ (1990) there is a song called “Love Letter”
by Bonnie Davis (I don’t think this last name is right). The conceit here follows the
bestial pattern, what the Neoplatonists called the ports or points or lines of love:
see, speak, kiss, touch, fuck. The woman is writing, looking, listening,
smoking––but the lover hasn't kissed her yet, she says––and implies that if he or
she does, it will come to love––”touch will come to love.” The song is already a
love song, though, and she's using the speech of touch already. She's imagining,
that is, that love has to do with intimacy and intimacy with contact, and contact
with touch––that the bodies have to be involved.
Speech of touch is hard to use sparingly if you’re writing argumentative
prose, running for office, satirizing; if you’re writing lyric or novel: you want to
touch, you want to get under someone's skin. Frost and Dickinson wanted poetry to
give them wounds. Touch is held to be inferior to thought as a mode of knowing,
yet often the best praise given to a work of art or thought is that it touched
someone or offended someone––got some visceral thing going. The metaphors
here come from a long memory of touch.
If passion ultimately trumps reason, touch finally trumps sight. I might say
that the penis and the eyes can be ranged with reason while the vagina and the
hands can be ranged with passion. “Woman has sex organs just about everywhere,”
says Luce Irigaray. “She experiences pleasure almost everywhere . . . In her
statements––ate least when she dares to speak out––woman retouches herself
constantly.”

All our knowledge is drenched in flesh and blood and skin. Think of how the
hierarchy of the senses has been reversed in favor of the body when it comes to the
healing arts. In 1920, John Jay Chapman was talking about the physiologist/crank
named Alexander who said that all bad functionings, stuttering, colds, hysteria,
twitichings––though they show at the extremities, are really due to a kink in the
bowels. Chapman thought of the Jews in the Old Testament, how they are always
talking about their bowels. “They yearned with their bowels––not their heart, they
loved and feared and mourned and fought and repented with their bowels. It was
the Latins who brought in the heart. The Greeks used to talk about the liver as the
seat of the passions––Prometheus's liver, etc. The profounder natures of Israel
located the seat of everything correctly—by sensation of course.”

As in T.H. Ferril's “Always Begin Where You Are”:

Always begin right here where you are

And work out from here:
If adrift, feel the feel of the oar in the oarlock first,
If saddling a horse let your right knee slug
the belly of the horse like an uppercut,
then cinch his suck,
then mount and ride away
to any dream deserving the sensible world.

But it’s hard to stay in touch. It’s hard to with yourself, it’s hard to with others. If
we meant touch when we said this it would be harder still. Much of the time our
hands are empty or are between grasping and letting go, tightening and relaxing.
Few people know much about the backs of their hands. Touch is as intermittent as
faith. It’s fragmented and it fragments. Read Joyce’s ​Portrait​ when Stephen is
trying to mortify his sense of touch: the least valorized sense is also capable of the
most offense and abuse; it thus requires the most imaginative effort for its
mortification.

“You will find the distance that separates you from them by joining them.”
––Antonio Porchia

Emerson’s “Experience”: “Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose

hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor.” “I take this evanescence and
lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we
clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.”

To make the word flesh––ah, yes, but how? Especially if we’ve been taught
to keep our hands to ourselves? The tragedy of hands is that we never use them
according to our praise of them. They are always better in word than in fact, and
touch itself may be more availably an affair of the eyes going after what the hands,
or the lips, can’t reach.

Who touches this, touches a man––(Montaigne)

This will touch a bishop and a farmer––(Cooke)

Speculation as masturbation––Emerson and Greenough, e.g., thin and

superficial.

Tactile is infantile, demoralizing—touch is dangerous for the works of art,

punishable by law, finally useless—touch is fashionable, a vehicle of expression, a
way of getting attention—touch is a mode of knowing, healing––

Touch is sexual––fucking––about enjoyment, pleasure––tickling––it is the

reality sense—I must have the illusion of being able to touch the figure before I'll
take it as real––tactile values––Berenson––pornography––

The body proper––heroic, active, political––can be lost in action.

The body as flesh––sexual, horizontal, passive, libidinal––can be lost in
desire.
Touch brings distance, separation, and desire to life––isolation. Its form is
the interval as well as the connection. T.S. Eliot gave strong expression to the idea
that no contact between flesh and flesh could allay the fever of the bone in his
“Whispers of Immortality.” On the other hand, for D.H. Lawrence, Millay, and
Cummings, the kiss and the hands and the hug were fundamental gestures that
could and did allay the fever, bring the sexual healing.
The New Testament––John––is being very Greek when it calls those blessed
who have not seen and yet have believed. In one book the empiricists of the late
Renaissance are called, after Doubting Thomas, “the hand-in-the-wound-school.”
And think of Lady Macbeth and Pilate and Midas––the hands propose a dilemma.
In fact, our two-handedness has provided writers with a transitional phrase by
which they can appear to be telling, if not the whole story, at least a more complete
one. Truman wanted a one-handed economist.

Touch tells me that discourse is always in a field, always coming home to

someone, always going toward others.

But who knows? Only bodies can touch and be touched. This is what
Lucretius said in ​de rerum natura​. By bodies he meant what Bishop Berkeley
would mean in the early 18th century: hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and
resistance, and all of these more or less either as to quantity or degree. The human
body was one body among others, but it happened to be the one that did the
perceiving of bodies through its sense of touch––or bodies to the extent that these
qualities became apparent. Lucretius and Berkeley and Plato and Aristotle would
not say that touch perceives the significance of materiality––as Bernard Berenson
would around the turn of the last century. Touch perceived the pre-significant
things, things material, base, vile––the favorite words of the Church Fathers,
Tertullian and company. In the ​Banquet of the Senses​, touch was last and last; that
is, lowest and last to appear before the doors closed. When touch appeared, fucking
was not far behind. Ovid knew this, and the Ovidian writers of the Italian and
Elizabethan renaissance took on Ovid whenever they wanted to court misrule and
titillate their audience.
Just the other night on the news there was a story about sex education in the
secondary schools in the wake of Magic Johnson’s having tested positive for the
HIV virus. A young girl was interviewed. She was asked to give the catechism: she
said she was told there were four stages to sex: touching, kissing, the underwear
region, and copulation. She said she was told about abstinence, that it was easier in
the first two stages, but became hard to attain once the underwear were reached.
The Elizabethans would have called all of this touching––all four stages. Any
contact of flesh to flesh was touching, and all touch, will come to love.
We speak still of eye contact. We speak of getting in touch and staying
there, and we almost never mean by skin or by hand. Discourse––talk––replaces
touch or refines it, sublimates it. I think I saw the eating scene in ​Tom Jones​, and I
think it's famous because everyone can tell that eating is not really the point of it.
The mouth and the hands are the point––living from hand to mouth in love and lust
is the point. It is a banquet of the senses, and touch primarily.
I have been gathering things over the years about hands and touch, and I
have found that the hands and the sense of touch are being asked to do a lot more
than philosophers might have required in former times. Hands do more than
perceive hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance. They stand for the
poet. They stand for voice. They stand for the earth. They stand for urban life.
They rarely tend goal or play volleyball or basketball. Quincy Troupe has a poem
on Magic Johnson in which the hands are hardly mentioned, the great hands.
Masturbation and sex.

Am I a seeing eye or a helping hand?

I touch/ active.
I am touched/ passive.
I touch myself/ reflexive.

How did I become interested in touch? What happened as a result? Am I into

touching? Isn't it an embarrassing topic?

People who are in touch with themselves––they are balanced and clear; they may
also be onanistic and self–absorbed.
Tight butt––that’s retinal impressions given tactile values.
The birth canal as a car-window rolled down three or four inches.
Ann Sexton: she said she grew up among upper-middle class
people––“people who seldom touched––though touch is all.”
We denigrate and elevate our bodies in the same way that we put down
touch as a mode of knowing and praise it as an ideal form of communication.
The hand and the mind––Achilles and Ulysses. The hand is instrumental to
the eye, the mind. Servant to the master. The servant’s hand.
Into being out of touch––a life out of hand

Touch is really an affair of the eyes going after what the hands, or the lips,
can’t reach.
Up periscope; up lipstick. Across the bottom lip, then the top; then the
pressing together of the lips. Then the retraction of the stick, with its mountainous
slope, and the capping. Click.
My mother’s lipstick. I watched her put it on in her bedroom, standing with
her bra and stockings on, getting ready to go to a cocktail party (the babysitter was
on her way), or to have one at home. I loved to watch her put it on. I want to eat
lipsticks when I see them now. They smelled, on my mother, like geranium. Over
time, each time, through touch, the lipstick’s made beautiful as the lips. The first
touch: lips to lipstick, lipstick to lips. The kiss.
But I don’t remember the first time. I don’t remember my mother giving me
a bath. I know she didn’t nurse me or my brothers. I don’t remember falling asleep
in her lap. (I remember the laps of my babysitters: Becky Brown, Sara Steel, Abby
Steel, Hillary Weed, Missy Dowden, Bridget Jacober, Sue Snyder, Barry
MacDowell, Diana Dodge, Sally Dodge.) My mother kept a record of each of her
son’s first seven years—or she started to. Like most records, it is riddled by
incompletion.

My father puts a cold washcloth on my face. He tells me to get up. “And

don’t come down to breakfast until you’ve washed your face and combed your
hair.”
I get two new mitts, a catcher’s glove and a first baseman’s glove. I bought
the catcher’s mitt with my own money, my allowance for taking out the trash,
picking up twigs, pulling weeds, helping to mow the lawn, shoveling snow,
sweeping the patio. My father tells me how to soften them, to break them in. We
get linseed oil. I rub it on with a cloth. The smell is delicious, and so is the leather
as it soaks up the oil and darkens, especially on the catcher’s mitt, which was
bay-colored to begin with. I smell the saddle soap Katie and Libby used on their
tack. The leather seems to come alive under the rubbing, like a horse’s barrel after
a ride. My father says to let the oil soak in overnight. The next night, he tells me to
put a baseball in each mit. Then he ties a string tight around each glove. “Put them
under your mattress before you go to sleep.”
I loved those gloves. I liked the sound of the ball hitting the sweet spot, even
the slight sting in my hand, the hugeness of my hand in the stubby, thick catcher’s
mitt, the long claw of the first baseman’s glove. I was Boog Powell, I was Johnny
Bench—stretched out or crouched and protected. “Jeff Torborg talked about his
left hand, the hand that caught most of Nolan Ryan's booming fastballs in 1973
when the two players were with the California Angels. `The index finger of the left
hand, right where the joint meets the palm, is much thicker to this day.'“
“I used to like to catch with old rag gloves,” Alan Ashby said, “and Nolan
hated them. He was like most fastball pitchers. He wanted you to use new leather
so that there was a louder pop to his pitches. He’d say, ‘Aw, c’mon, make it at least
sound​ right.’ That’s a big part of the psychology of pitching. A bigger poom! can
scare hitters. Everybody sitting in the dugout looks at each other and says, ‘Jeez,
he’s throwin’ good tonight.’”
My father reminded me the other night that I liked the way Bob Doering
shined his shoes. I had forgotten Bob Doering. Slowly he came back, his shiny
head first, his flat suits, his handsome shoes. Shoes that made me want to touch
them, shined and flat at the same time. Handsome: that’s the word. Mrs. Boucher’s
word was “fetching,” Mrs. Dodge’s “fond.” Mrs. Dodge was “fond” of people;
Mrs. Boucher thought a man looked “fetching” in a hat. Everything handsome’s
fetching, fond of the hand.
I don’t believe I ever saw Bob Doering shine his shoes; that couldn’t be
what my father meant. I’d watch my father shine his shoes. His closet floor seemed
jammed with shoes. I didn’t know how he could need all those shoes. It was his
hands among his shoes, though, working the shoe-trees, applying the polish, the
toothbrush in the seams, the shoebrush over the top, across the edges of the sole. It
was his work before work, or before he went to a party. I never came before him in
dress shoes when he didn’t say they needed polish. My father must’ve found Bob
Doering handsome, too, and admired the shine on his shoes.
My parents’ hands are thick and strong. The veins show. I look at my hands
and see my father’s and my mother’s: my fingers have her length and his strength.
My father liked to play catch with us, and pepper. He liked to throw the football to
us. He threw me a bullet once and it broke my little finger. He said it would be all
right. The knuckle looks like a bunion on a foot. It never did heal. My father has a
little finger just like it: broken, but functional.

I have no carnal memory of the first touch. Now, at thirty-six, and age I
didn’t think I’d reach, I find myself interested in touching my feces, touching
things with that consistency; or the clear skin of a woman’s face or arm, or the
back and chest of a hairless man, or the legs of bicycle racers—I want to touch
them. I want to rub things hard. I masturbate frequently. My dick shows the wear.
It is ugly in amazing ways, and bent to the left.
Cotton seems to irritate the skin on my stomach, but not on my back. I
noticed how immediate goosebumps are last night; I seem to have them
permanently on the back of my upper arms. Rough skin offends my eye and my
fingers. My right index finger roughened, and my sense of touch was disturbed by
this. I was thrown off by it. I couldn’t stop rubbing the rough spot with my other
fingers. The place seemed dead to me, numb. It was as preoccupying as a tongue
burnt by hot food, an imperfection in the texture of cloth or wood or plastic.

Most of the things I’m saying about touch are hyperbolic, metaphorical, inaccurate.
Touch goes bail for what’s real, but it also stands in for what’s unreal, or
imperceptible. People talk about things that are “complex and substantive.” I think
touch is, touch as an activity, as experience. But one wants to say “substantial.”
Touch alone is substantial, like a book. I read that one of the favorite terms of
booksellers in 18th-century France was “solid” (Robert Darnton’s translation). We
have this from an Enlightenment publisher: “You should not promise more butter
than bread, nor believe anything that you can’t see with your own eyes, nor count
on anything that you can’t hold in your hands with all four fingers and the thumb.”
That is said against authors, against trusting their plans and proposals. Only the
book is real. Nothing solider than a full bookcase; nothing suggests contact better
than a shelf replete with books. Most people will not abide talk of “texts,” but most
people will know immediately what you mean by “textures.”

Why, in music, should the bass seem any more substantial than the violin? Does it
push more air? Does it impinge on more skin? A violin can be more grating, can
set the teeth on edge. The bass has no edge. The bass is a low cumulous cloud. It
rumbles, it nudges, it rolls, it beats. Books and music alone are real.

But what is real? One wants to crush something with both hands. We know what
someone wants to do with one hand and with two. “I can’t put my hand on it just
now”; “I’d like to get my hands on that.” Both of those on’s are in’s or around’s.
We put our hands over a fire; a madman thrusts his hand into the fire. There is a
world of touch inside the body and a world of touch external to the body. We say
that blood “courses” in our veins, but all sorts of other things are coursing inside
our bodies at all times. The digestive tract. The listener’s tract. The throat. The
bones. The twenty-eight major organs. Cartlelege. Socket. Cuticle. Fingerprint.
Gums. Cavities. Joints. Furrow. Ridge. Nostril. Crack. Folicle. Root. Pore. Orifice.
Bud. Dimple. Crease. Wrinkle. All of these are tactile spaces, touch-points, fields
of feeling. Most of the time, if we are healthy, we don’t feel them, we notice
nothing about them. On the other hand, the feelings of ingestion, digestion,
urination, and defecation are numerous and varied. When Emerson speaks of
yearning for a clean utterance, there’s no reason to suppose he isn’t talking out of
his ass, what Bacon called the “mouth of the stomach.”

You want to touch a puppy, not a software program. Inside the software and the
hardware, things are brought into a proximity approximating touch, but only to the
point of touchlessness: no touching is allowed.

I grabbed her thigh like a football, my hand like a baseball; my face between her
hands like a melon; we modeled each other.
The lips are a surface. The teeth are a surface. Over the teeth after brushing the
cleanness is another surface. On that surface the tongue meets another surface, a
tension that slips. Outside the mouth, the tongue nervously wets a few hairs and
makes a tiny foam. The sun, meeting that surface, makes of this lover you’ve just
kissed, a former lover.

Piercing, tattooing, deep-tissue massaging, acupuncture.

Last night, she massaged me, I massaged her. Hand lotion won’t do. It isn’t viscous
enough, and the friction wears it down. Our vision dismisses words, and not only
our vision. Our daily contact with each other precludes more words than it admits.
If the book is real, so are the words in it. So we might think into touch, since its
dumbness and its ability to get along without words sets it apart. Or does it? Touch
pervades language, sight, intellect; all that is highest is lowest also: without touch,
no tact, no luxury, no product; without touch, nothing barbarous or crude, no
wretched of the earth. Touch is earth.

We can with touch test some of these proclamations: all things will be ranged,
rallied, scaled, and placed in and on an analogy whose other term is touch. Days
pass without energy or matter obtruding their fundamental equality. The language
of touch is added to and touched on by all fields; dichotomies between things are
efficient only, not sufficient or final. Languaged by touch, we know less about it
than it knows about us.

It struck me as odd that there should be writing about hands; now it strikes me as
odd that all I seem to know about hands is what I’ve read about them. They
weren’t interesting to me until I read about them. You can’t see it, but that doesn’t
mean it isn’t there; you can touch it, but that doesn’t mean it is. Touch can counter
intuition. Berenson didn’t connect his looking at hands in paintings with the
invisible sensations he had when he looked at paintings. Why should he have? In
making attributions, Berenson sunk his involvement in the tactile imagination. He
took for granted a connection that might have made his aesthetic practice cohere
with his business practice. Berenson was not the aesthete he made himself out to
be, nor the businessman. His hands were pleasured hands.

Vison is really an affair of the eyes going after what the hands, or the lips, can’t
reach.
With touch some of these declarations can be tested: all things will be ranged,
rallied, scaled, and placed in an analogy whose other term is touch. Days pass
without energy or matter obtruding their fundamental equality. The language of
touch is added to and touched on by all fields; dichotomies between things are
efficient only, not sufficient or final. Languaged by touch, we know less about it
than it knows about us.

● Aetna Life spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to advertise during the

Masters Golf Tournament. What is their message? That all of us want
something we can “hold on to.”
● Don DeLillo writes ​Libra.​ He says it’s a novel about someone who can’t
hold onto anything, who’s lost his grip; that it’s about a world gotten out of
hand.
● T.S. Eliot, nearer the beginning of this century, quotes a line from Flaubert’s
unfinished novel, ​Beauvard and Pecuchet,​ about how the world was falling
apart in their hands.
● William James in 1907 says that the world stands really malleable, waiting
for its finishing touches from our hands.
● Fifty years earlier, Whitman would claim that the hand of God was the
promise of his own hand.
● Between Whitman and James, Gerard Manley Hopkins would shudder with
horror at the thought of men and women replacing the hand of God with
their own hands.

In ​The Fever​, Wallace Shawn defined a human being as “an unprotected little
wriggling creature, a little raw creature without a shell or a hide or even any fur,
just thrown out on to the earth like an eye that’s been pulled from its socket, liked a
shucked oyster that’s trying to crawl along the ground. We need to build our own
shells—yes, shoes, chairs, walls, floors, and for God’s sake, yes, a little solace, a
little consolation” (67).
Shawn features our sense of touch, our vulnerabilities. He imagines us
without skin, as one of the Goncourt brothers did over a century ago. As such,
skinless, we are nervous systems. We are raw; we wriggle, we quiver. The eyeball
is that which none of us would have touched. We would have our genitals touched
before we would let someone touch our eyeball. We cannot keep ourselves from
protecting that moist little mass—and Shawn says that we are that eyeball, not
touched, but gouged out like Gloucester’s eyes and chucked onto the earth. In the
other image, that of the shucked oyster, our every motion, our least quiver, register
as pain.
 Unhoused, unhinged, unmoored. In Shawn’s imagination, the human being
happens to be reduced to a single sense: touch. Such a being’s reactions, and
actions, are limited to what you do when someone tries to poke you in the eye: you
retract, you withdraw. You rely on your reagibility. You are the soft part of the
turtle, but you have no shell.
To Shawn, the world exists to abrade us, and life is a process of ossification,
enduration, hardening. Our feet are soft and need protection; our rear-ends are soft
and need protection; our torsos are soft and need protection; our skin is thin. In
Shawn’s feverish imagination, a human being is bound to be tortured, and that
torture is bound to be registered on the skin—an immense organ that Shawn fails to
mention directly. Nor does he make a distinction between skin and flesh. This
preference for the hard over the soft Leslie Heywood calls ​Dedication to Hunger:
The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture​ (1996).
For Shawn, the world is abrasive and the person in it is always being
abraded. Shawn had said as much in ​My Dinner with Andre.​ And he and Andre
agree that what scares us in life is “the moment of contact” between ourself and
another. ​Contact​ was the name of William Carlos Williams’s short-lived journal.
Williams was a doctor, someone pointed out, so it made sense that he would lay
stress on contact, and that his poetry would reflect the same sort of empirical,
non-theistic bent that his work as a doctor required. But it is Williams who
celebrates being alone in “Dance Russe,” alone in a Thoreauvian solitude with
Thoreau’s pusillanimous question: “What is a man, that I should touch him?” Or
Emerson, in his essay on “Experience,” saying that he would pay “the costly price
of sons and lovers” if he could, beforehand, be guaranteed contact with reality.

We talk of avoiding contact, shrinking from contact. We can also puff up through
contact; we can begin to itch. If we have too much contact with ourselves, we can
become smug. We are smug, most of the time. By which I mean, we keep to
ourselves largely because we prefer our selves to other selves, our bodies to other
bodies. We must; otherwise we wouldn’t apologize for bumping into someone,
brushing up against someone; we wouldn’t resent contact with another, however
incidental and unintended. Maybe we can never see touch as incidental or
unintended. It always seems a declaration of intention, which is what an
anthropologist has recently interpreted grooming in monkeys as. Further, he says
that this grooming stands at the origins of human language, which he calls
“grooming-at-a-distance.” Language is more efficient touch. A book may be the
palpable exhaustion of an author’s effort to touch, to make contact—or to keep
from being known. Whitman, often celebrated as the poet of democracy, can say to
his readers, or handlers, both, “Who touches this, touches a man,” and, “Whoever
you are holding me now in hand, I am not what you think I am, but far different.”

I am trying to write the history of two sentences, two impulses. The first is
Montaigne’s, as translated by Donald Frame: “My book and I go hand in hand;
who touches the one, touches the other.” The second is Francis Bacon’s: “Speech
of touch towards others should be sparingly used; for discourse ought to be as a
field, without coming home to any man.”

Midas, Tantalus, Pilate, Doubting Thomas, and Lady Macbeth.

Most people sentimentalize touch, even some intellectuals. For them,

language replaces, when it does not merely supplement, touch; and this form of
touch is more often aggressive than not. It vituperates, abrades, satirizes, cuts. It is
more efficient than cutting someone, to make a cutting remark. Or is it? In
Shakespeare, the best revenge, like the best love, is the coupling of a word and a
blow. To someone like Jack Abbot, the murderer Norman Mailer championed,
words and blows are never coupled; writing truly is a relief from violence. “I have
never come into bodily contact with another human being in almost twenty years,”
Abbot writes, “except in combat; in acts of struggle, of violence.” For someone
like Oscar Wilde, whose life was almost entirely free of physical violence, writing
was an exploration of combat. Wilde knew it; he had Dorian Gray say to Henry
Wotton, “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.” Witty exchanges have long
been described in terms drawn from swordplay—thrust, parry, riposte, repartee,
touché. In the one instance, language is the weapon; in the other, it is the body.
When Emerson, characterizing Montaigne’s writing, says, “Cut these sentences
and they would bleed,” his figure is different from Wilde’s, or Bacon’s, where the
premise is that language is designed to cut, to touch—to be proprietary,
competitive, decisive, incisive. In the one, language makes the body; in the other, it
mars it. In all three, language incurs, appropriates, decides. But for as long, or
longer, and more systematically, the nature of thought has been described in terms
drawn from the sense of touch, the sense of hearing, and the sense of sight. “The
De Anima​, which contains Aristotle’s fullest account of the process of thinking . . .
rests fundamentally upon an analogy between thought and touch” (Rosen 119,
121).

We know that names can hurt; we know that sticks and stones can follow from
hurtful names, and that both therefore produce or occasion broken bones. Farther
back—and the practice continues, as most effective practices do—hateful speech
formed part of a community’s legal system, its common law. There were roles for
the curser and the curse. You could cause boils to rise on the skin of another; you
could damn someone’s eyes; you could wither someone’s appendage with a
remark. These things were done, or believed to be done. Hate speech was
legitimate speech, and censure, backbiting, and detraction differed only by degree.
George Herbert included a chapter in his book for priests on the art of censure.
Legal strictures against such speech have always been attempted. If the emphasis
on diss-ing is any indication, perhaps a code of honor like the one shakily in place
during Francis Bacon’s early tenure as Attorney General, when he made his
remarks against dueling (1614), has been restored.

As much as the lover’s words seek to touch, the hater’s words seek to touch. The
object is the same: the body. It feels good to utter a curse; it feels bad to be the
object of one. Perhaps masturbatory touch falls somewhere in between. When
Horatio Greenough sought to wound Emerson by remarking that his essays were
masturbations, Emerson took pleasure in the remark. That pleasure took the form
of an entry in the journal Emerson kept: he could repeat Greenough’s remark in the
precincts of his journal, and formulate a reply (the entry implies that he didn’t have
one ready at the time). That reply took the form of an attack: Greenough’s life, like
the life of artists generally, seemed to Emerson intolerably thin and superficial.
Greenough didn’t have a leg to stand on. As Emerson put it, he was “content to be
‘screwed’”—if he could get a few more sentences out of it for one of his essays.

As Hazlitt pointed out in his essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” “The spirit of
malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. . . . We give up the external
demonstration, the ​brute​ violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of
hostility” (Lopate 189). So with touch: we may part with using our hands to
manage ourselves and other people, but we cannot part with the language of touch,
its diction, its vocabulary, its lexicon.

Here are some entries for a dictionary of speech of touch, intellectual violence, all
taken from Hazlitt’s essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”:

Prejudice, shyness, venom, antipathy, weakness, malice, hankering,

perversity, indifference, disgust, torment, hatred, nuisance, harm, spleen,
bile, spite, pride, envy, censoriousness, intolerance, ingratitude, hostility,
loathing, feud, havoc, dismay, heartburn, animosity, disappointment,
anguish, weariness, contempt, dissatisfaction, sore, wound, irritation,
violence, disrespect, quarrel, fault, tongue, defect, pedantry, egotism,
 affectation, sentimentality, mockery, bigotry, hypocrisy, servility,
selfishness, folly, impudence, meanness, cowardice, infamy—so much for
nouns.

Hapless, heedless, awkward, straggling, stranded, brute, barbarous, pitiful,

stagnant, insipid, bitter, vindictive, headstrong, bigoted, penal, monstrous,
rankling, narrow, jealous, inquisitorial, virulent, distinguished, distasteful,
relentless, cold, intolerable, obnoxious, mawkish, ignorant,
indiscriminate—so much for adjectives.

Hate, seize, shudder, hanker after, torment, worry, kill, exult, set upon, bait,
harm, vent, persecute, frighten, abhor, burn, hoot, buffet, mistreat, feud,
revenge, vex, hurt, hurl, wreak, execute, wrangle, quarrel, tear, shoot,
discover, resent, impel, betray, revenge, cut, despise, envy, mortify,
embarrass, impose, criticize, shrink, condole, whine, dislike, scorn, flinch,
hack, wound—so much for verbs.

Margaret Atwood, “Nothing”:

Nothing like love to put blood

back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and chards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone & liquid fishegg, desert
& saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softeneing pebbles as around skin. The sky’s
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches
you is what you touch.

In the comment by the ​New York Times​ editor—“Short, propulsive poem. Margaret
Atwood’s poems have an impetuous clarity. They almost fling their lines in your
face”—there is nothing about weight, temperature, texture, durability, transience,
make, heft, feel, bearing. Almost nothing in the poem has to do with clarity.
“Propulsive” and “impetuous” begin to get at the tactile/kinaesthetic base of
Atwood’s carriage and imagery. The editor is blinded by his sight; his thinking is
almost entirely visual, and you could say he likes the poem because he cannot
describe it adequately. He doesn’t realize where it’s registering with him. What he
admits, in fact, is that the poem isn’t clear to him; Atwood has flung it in his face,
got it in his eyes—but still somehow he finds it refreshing.

Like this editor, Rick Perlstein betrays an anti-tactile prejudice in his treatment of
David Foster Wallace’s ​Infinite Jest.​ His final terms are compulsion, on the one
hand, art, on the other. Atwood is impetuous and propulsive; Wallace is brilliant
and daring, but compulsive. Perlstein doesn’t want to be pushed; he turns from the
pulse, the beat, the body—the featuring of touch. How would this reviewer be
touched? We all seem to agree that art should touch us, but how? There are many
ways of touching, just as there are many ways of flowing. The task is to describe
them as accurately as possible, and this cannot be done until we begin to recognize
that touch has gotten a bad rap, just as comedy and theatricality have, until
recently. About a hundred years ago, Benjamin Jowett could write: “I sometimes
think that we Platonists and Idealists are not half so industrious as those repulsive
people who only ‘believe what they can hold in their hands.’” It is time to look
away from sight and its denigration; it is time to look at touch and its celebration.

Touch registers more than heat and cold, hard and soft, motion and resistance.
What about pain? Or what Rossini called the four acts of the human comedy:
eating, loving, singing, digesting? Stress, anxiety, nerves? Pressure. Attention.
Weight. Buckminster Fuller is a tactile architect: he wanted to know how much
things weighed. Touch has more to do with more things than surfaces and bodies,
the surfaces of bodies. “Nothing but body can touch or be touched,” said
Lucretius—but we know differently.

I’m talking about touch in terms of, or in relation to, a kind of visionary
empiricism, a skeptical vision. In Margaret Atwood’s poem, the erotic, sensual,
pleasing language of touch is in the ascendant. In Gregory Spatz’s story, as in the
satirical and erotic poems of the 1590s in England, the two impulses and
vocabularies are melded. As Thomas Mann wrote in ​The Magic Mountain​, “Love
is always simply itself . . . love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly
lustful embrace of what is destined to decay.” In his ​Disturbing the Universe​, the
physicist Freeman Dyson calls the impulse behind Mann’s definition—though he
doesn’t quote Mann—”the cult of evanescence,” and he finds that cult thriving in
writers like Olaf Stapledon, Dylan Thomas, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Certainly
Keats’s sensibility belongs here, with his living hand still “warm and capable/Of
earnest grasping.”

As a feeling will outlast an act, so a technique will outlast the philosophy that
prompted it. For example, according to the astrophysicist Charles Mizner, it is
easier to pretend that the sun revolves around the earth—for the purposes of
measuring—than to act on the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun.
Mathematicians use calculus without using the metaphysics of Newton or Leibnitz.
In the case of Bernard Berenson, and Giovanni Morelli before him—Freud liked to
read Morelli, and his declaration in the Three Essays on Sexuality that seeing is
based on touching smacks of Morelli and Berenson—the hands and the skin are
less for touching than for looking. What Berenson called tactile values are not for
touching; they’re for seeing more vividly, for warranting the reality of an illusion.
Berenson is ten times more interested in seeing than in touching, though the
phrasing of his aesthetic suggests otherwise. Yet Berenson would have agreed with
the sign in the Uffizi which commanded visitors not to touch the paintings, and
gave three reasons: it is dangerous to the works, it is punishable by law, and,
finally, it is useless. The last is the painful one. The basest sense, the most useful,
proves useless when most desired. It cannot give us access to what we want in the
painting, to what we see or feel. For Berenson, the compensation was a heightened
receptivity and susceptibility, a poetic irritability.

We have to go to Tactile Domes where it’s pitch black to see what it’s like to be
reduced to touch alone. “You won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face,”
the woman says to us, “which is kind of weird.” Weirder, I thought, was how you
never felt like standing up. You wanted to crouch or kneel or crawl, so as not to hit
your face, your head—so as not to put your eyes out. Nobody ever said, “You can
break your fingers doing that.” It was always our eyes we were being warned
about. The Tactile Dome isn’t very hard on your touch. You keep going through,
head first. You grope and reach, but you never have to finesse anything; you never
have to make decisions about what texture you’re feeling. “That wasn’t very hard,”
said a young boy on coming out, as if it were a race. It’s more about losing your
eyes than depending on your touch. Nor are your hands really quite the same as
your sense of touch.

The gist of it is, we do more talking in terms of touch than we do touching. John
Meynard Keynes kept his hands inside his silk sleeves when he greeted his guests,
but the first things he looked at were their hands. If he approved, he asked to make
casts of the hands, and he kept in his mind’s eye a repertoire of hands as others
might keep in theirs a repertoire of faces.

In an article on the Internet, a writer asks, “Who needs real human contact?” Touch
is a metonym for the real; it’s a synonym for authenticity, actuality. For the
philosopher Levinas, according to Edith Wyschograd, “touch is not a sense at all; it
is in fact a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon
subjectivity” (Jay 557-58). it is so for many more than Levinas. I think it is
especially so for modern writers, artists, and thinkers, a key to the understanding of
which is a reading of how this impingement happens. It happens one way for
Wallace Shawn and another for Oscar Wilde; one way for Rilke and another for
Woolf; one way for Silko and another for Thylias Moss. A reader can attempt to
describe this tactile imagination, and in so doing arrive at a central interpretation of
a writer’s sensibility vis-a-vis “the real,” both the social and the personal real.

Sherry Turkle, author of ​Life on the Screen,​ is asked if most people don’t think
“that social life has something to do with physical interaction.” To Edwin Diamond
and Stephen Bates, on-line enthusiasts and “cyberhipsters” are nothing but
“onanists.” Diamond and Bates use the image of self-touch or self-dealing or
autoeroticism when they want to get mean. Another writer speaks of the discourse
of cyberhipsters as “interactive autism” when he wants to moralize about
selfishness or self-interest or self-involvement.

When Elizabeth Hardwick writes of Berenson in Italy, she anatomizes her own
tactile imagination in describing his. She portrays him as an adolescent, essentially,
one she is tempted to hold, even to embrace, but one she must finally hold off
almost coldly. Hardwick, firmly inside the “very skin of life,” insults Berenson,
that “injured lover”: “He lived with the silky regularity and pleasurable
concentration of energies that are at once opulent and sacrificial—the prudence of
the sensual” (207). Prudence—or thrift, or economy, or efficiency. Berenson didn’t
touch, didn’t enter into the confusion of touch. Hardwick tells us that “No one was
easier to see than Berenson,” but that “one was never tempted to think it was ennui
or triviality that produced this state of addiction; the absorbing inclination seemed
to be a simple fear of missing someone, almost as if these countless visitors had
had a secret the exile pitifully wished to discover.” Hardwick continues:

The expatriate sometimes suffers painfully from the dread of losing

touch with the world he has left but towards which he looks back with
longings and significant emotions, with guilt and resentment, with all
 the tart ambivalence of the injured lover. It is, after all, the fickle,
abandoned country for which the exile writes his books, for which his
possessions are ultimately designated; money and citizenship, nieces
and nephews, language and memory—the very skin of life—remain in
their old place (208).

Finally, Berenson has lost an early suppleness, and Hardwick misses it. Her tactile
imagination registers the loss. Berenson, she wants to say, grew stubborn,
defensive, rigid. “A hardening and narrowing, repetition of positions taken long
ago, obstinate rejections disguised pain and fear of obsolesence” (211).

Speech of touch distances speaker and listener. It says that discourse is rarely if
ever a field that comes home to no one, that no one owns or has a claim on. Speech
of touch is not free speech, speech that is at liberty or confers liberty; rather, it
takes liberties. It is proprietary; it is always ​ad hominem​. In speech of touch, one
cannot say that such and such a thing passed. Nothing is disinterested. Names will
be named; words are actionable.

This is the kind of discourse Harold Pinter’s characters are trapped in. In Pinter, as
more infrequently in Chekov and Ibsen, guests become intruders; they are hosts,
hostile strangers, casual enemies. “You’re not my guest, you’re an intruder,” Bill
says to James in ​The Collection​. And James has no sooner been named than he
proceeds to mar the cocktail hour with a game, a mock duel, which quickly segues
into knife-play when James says: “I get a bit tired of words sometimes, don’t you”
(74)? What he’s tired of is the “collection” referred to in the play’s title, a
Shakespearean word from ​Hamlet​ meaning, essentially, interpretation, the act of
interpreting the meaning of an utterance. James has been listening to his wife and
Bill discussing something that happened between them in Leeds; and, like the
hearers of Ophelia’s speech, James botches up Stella’s and Bill’s words to fit his
own thoughts. But James cannot let anything show. As he says, “First one who’s
touched is a sissy.” Pinter is seeing just how deep manners run, just how
implacable the English can be. He’s either investigating the ruthlessness manners
mask, or treating ruth—pity, sympathy, fellow-feeling—ironically.

What James suspects—or collects—is that his wife, Stella, and Bill have had
contact. Bill raises his hand to show James that there is no evidence that Stella
scratched him “a little.” James counters by throwing a knife at Bill’s face. The
words have now crossed with blows. Bill’s unscarred hand is now scarred. Speech
of touch has now come home to Bill. James, like Teddy in ​The Homecoming,​ can
see things “both ways, three ways, all ways . . . every way.” For them, discourse is
as a field still.

sex
contact
pleasure
feeling
pain
tact
surface
plush
warm
touchstone
home
control
management
violence
loneliness
safety
crime
honor
intimacy
fluidity
mobility
proof
core

From Simone:

Definitions for an ambivalent lover: I

to hold: to embrace; ​or,​ to contain

to hold in: to restrain expression, to bottle up

to hold on: to retain one’s claim; ​or,​ to cling past usefulness

to hold back: to hang reluctant, to resist participation

to hold up: to prevent timely progress

holdover: a past configuration that lingers

no holds barred: limitless

to hold out: to refrain, hoping for a better deal

to hold still: to keep oneself or someone else from motion

to hold down: to pin to a surface, to squelch in the effort to define

to hold dear: to apprehend and cherish, to feel pleased to nourish the one
valued

I know men who have never worked out a day in their lives. They eat fast, they’re
heavy in the middle, and they seem to have energy to spare. I’ve never caught them
when they’re tired. Men who’ve smoked all their lives, too, seem to have enormous
reserves—as long as they do the same things day after day. They look trim and fit
in their chairs, in their kitchens and living rooms. Men who work out all the time,
though, seem harassed. They look unhealthy and tense, especially runners.
Weight-lifters, bodybuilders: there ought to be a new category of ugliness for them,
with their massive torsos stuffed into waists no bigger than flank steaks, held up by
misproportioned legs, hard, fat thighs, useless calves. I’ve seen cows with better
calves, and newborn calves steadier on their feet.

A friend of mine thinks that people are doing all this working out because they hate
their bodies. They feel as Thoreau felt about his body in the Kataadn section of ​The
Maine Woods.​ Nothing but his body seemed foreign and incomprehensible to him.
“What is a man,” he says in ​Walden​, “that I should touch him?” His friend
Emerson said much the same thing in his essay on “Friendship”: “Leave this
touching and clawing.” But if you can’t touch and claw your friend, or yourself,
who can you touch and claw?
Imagine that you had no skin. There you have an image of a nervous wreck.
The dust would settle on us faster than shrivel on a tomato. We would separate as
we dried out like the layers of an onion, but smell far worse. We must love our
skin. It’s probably the flesh underneath it that seems so burdensome.
We hardly know ourselves as bodies, or as body. Maybe we know ourselves
as all sorts of little bodies sealed up in skin and hung on bone. It’s the sense of
touch as it functions beneath the skin that causes the problems, like itches you
can’t get at to scratch. I have a recurring pain in my left side, at the bottom of my
rib-cage, just back in up under, that I can’t get at. Barium enemas can’t get at it, to
light it up for an x-ray. Palpation turns nothing up. Weeks and months go by when
I’m entirely unaware of it. And then it strikes. But strike isn’t the feeling.
I’ve been asked to describe the pain. Well, it isn’t pain, quite. It isn’t dull or
sharp or blunt, but it is like an object. Don’t people get hit anymore with anything
other than blunt objects? The weapon seems always to be a blunt object, the pain a
dull pain, or a sharp, piercing pain. Not a sensation: sensations must always be
burning, as the skin must always be irritated. (Try saying burning sensation without
thinking of a penis or a vagina.) These nouns and adjectives go together like
Lincoln and the Civil War, or Caesar and the Rubicon, or Antony and Cleopatra.
They are touch describing itself. Dull pain. You have no way of checking that,
except by sensing it, and no way to sense it, except by touching it (but you can’t:
it’s touching you). It is no joke when the doctor touches you there. The doctor
doesn’t feel the pain, but activates it. You feel it. You can’t get outside of it. Touch
is being touched. Take the skin off and try it. Beneath our skin a deep ocean heaves
with rip tides and coral reefs and shelves and false bottoms and strange fish, and
something down there is crossing the bar, its heavy hull thudding and scraping.