More Efficient Touch

Memories and Speculations

Me, in England

My hair grows in the fields, grows colors, my eyes clap up thunder purple, fingers cow-crease onion skin, boots lamb-warm lie down in spare grass, warmth stealing on me as a pheasant’s breast, my butt round as a bridge duct, body thick as a silo. I go headlong into a newspaper’s noise and the slipping fucking wave-lick lipped-green tuft-cunt sea, young chin spreading gnarled bristle flat out on the razor blue foam sky. My flaccid third thumb whines for a roundhouse. Fall, when my shoulders ache in a leaf-curve and my gut-hunk of beef lumbers and blathers and hunches up to work its kink out with blood and acid through winter-fearing limb vein in tunnel in fall forever. Checked dun my flesh this body shot up with cud and gossamer in exile at Hastings on the sea.

Emerson, Greenough, Berenson, Reinach, Adams

After meeting the artist Horatio Greenough, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Greenough wittily called my speculations masturbation; but the artist life seems to me intolerably thin and superficial. I feel the reasonableness of what the lawyer or merchant or laborer has to allege against readers & thinkers, until I look at their wretched industries, and find them without end or aim.”

Fifty years later, Berenson could not get interested enough in the lives of the painters whose paintings he loved and studied and marketed and wrote about to write, also, about their “loves and broken love affairs.”

“They shrieked at me,” he wrote in his journal, “when I came out with ‘tactile values,’” and then recorded the anecdote of his friend and patron, Salomon Reinach.

When Florentine Painters was published in 1896, the book in which Berenson introduced the phrase “tactile values,” Reinach, full of enthusiasm, took Mary Berenson aside and said to her, in French, “Tell me now, about these things which your husband has written—do you think one can explain them to little girls?”

But Berenson also liked to tell the anecdote of Henry Adams, who, having poured himself out in talk to a friend’s daughter, said to her: “Do you know, my child, why I talked? I was confident you would not understand a word of what I was saying.”

Berenson never seems to have thought of touch as other than “a desire for joining, love for the ‘thing in itself,’ of ‘itness,’ as I call it.” As a reader of Emerson, and even more as a connoisseur whose livelihood depended on making attributions, Berenson was bent on finding and making identifications between the paintings that touched him, which he could look at, and the painters who may have painted them, whom he could not see.

He understood that it wasn’t exactly the eye that troubled our responses to art.

Gillian

I walked into Tavistock Square, in the vicinity of University College London, where I was studying European history in 1979. I had seen it from inside the History library, and from the yellow door of the library, but I had never gone in. I picked a red leaf from a tree whose name I couldn’t remember, a red leaf for Gillian. I looked back into the library and saw the ladder I used to get up to the High Middles Ages section of books. I saw the fat head of the President of the History Society (I was a member of the Literary Society). I could see the blue door of the Linguistics department, a door by which I never saw anyone come in or go out. I wanted to use the yellow door and the blue door, but this was not, apparently, done. I picked two fat roses for Gillian. I watched two history students turning pages on the grass and making notes with blue pens. The black gangster cabs sped by, stopping always at the zebra crosswalks if anyone was near them.

I walked out of the garden gates and turned down the road Gillian lived on. Gillian had asked me to have coffee with her. I thought it meant she loved me and wanted to find out why. She liked the red leaf, thought the roses “extravagant.” I pretended to like the dusty coffee.

Weeks later, when I was very drunk on bitter and stout from The Sun on Lamb’s Conduit, I went to Gillian’s building on my way home and positioned myself below her window. I bellowed out a line from A Streetcar Named Desire, changing the name to suit the occasion.

She did not respond, and never spoke to me again.

A Visit to The Tactile Dome

Before you go into The Tactile Dome, you are told you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face—“which,” the woman says, “is a pretty weird thing.” She adds: “It’s always best the first time, even though the first time is a little creepy.” “Creepy” is a good touch-word.

The next thing out of her mouth: “There are no bugs, and there’s nothing squishy or slimy.” You can tell by the way she says this that she’s been asked a thousand times about bugs and other squishy, slimy things. First, total darkness; then, sticky things.

The realm of the tactile is yet again placed in a visual context, or the lack of one: if you can’t see, you don’t know where you are; if you don’t know where you are, you’re scared. If you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you’re lost.

The woman says one other thing before we go in: there’s nothing sharp among the textures we’ll be feeling our way along the surfaces of. We won’t get our eyes poked out, and we won’t cut ourselves.

It is our hands that will go before us. They’ll “tell” us things; they’ll get us out of the dark. Absence of sight, presence of touch: both are infantile states, marked by crawling, by bugs, squish, and slime. Feces and lipstick. Syrup.

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. Out of this grooming comes language—“grooming-at-a-distance.” Speech is more efficient touch.