A Long Story with a Straight Line

Painted in permanence across cave walls at the base of a cliff in deep Patagonia, hands, hands, thousands of hands ten thousand years old, one after another. The hands and the surrounding scene tell a long story that gets longer as archaeologists and anthropologists continue to translate. For example, we know how the handprints were made – hunter-gatherers filled bone pipes, found scattered in the dirt, with mineral paints, dusts of crimson, white, purple, and ochre, blew into the tool, and sprayed color at the back of their hands and the surrounding wall – when they lifted their hands, a hand remained stained onto the stone. We know ten thousand years because those bone-pipes, sculpted from the leg-bones of large rodents and small deer which wandered what were then wide beige grasslands, could be taken into laboratories, observed by machines that count radioactive isotopes of carbon and spit out dates. We know for certain that there are eight-hundred-and-twenty-seven left hands and thirty-one right hands, meaning most of the artists were right-handed, feeling more comfortable with the ingenious device in their dominant right hand. We know some of the hands are missing fingers, but we can only guess why – maybe from infection or amputation, or, as some of the more daring anthropologists have offered, these hands are performing a lost form of sign language and thus sending a message we, even with all our data-eating machines, will never translate. When I was a not much bigger than two hands and crying, my mother would pick me up and hold me in one of her thin arms, switching to the other arm when one got sore, and would twist slightly at her hips and shoulders over and over softly to create a gentle swaying motion, partly, maybe, because she was a young mother and nervous, feeling powerless at the sound of her only child wailing, partly, maybe, because she was tired, tired from working her late shifts before her early shifts before her late shifts, the type of tired that surpasses physical status into emotion, tiredness not bound in her arms and legs but inside her skull, behind her eyes and pushing out and partly because after a while, sometimes a very long while, this rocking motion seemed to help, and I would quiet into steady breath, my eyes not so much closing but floating shut in that slow wind only a tired mother can produce, and sleep again. Of course, I don’t remember any of this. My mother smirked as she recounted this little ritual fifteen years later and early in the desert morning, both of us cold as I stood before the front door to leave for school in a beanie and oversized backpack, when she saw that I was just sort of swaying, idle, swaying on my own, turning myself at my awkward hips and broadening shoulders, slowly, slowly. From layers of findings from layers of projections of past touches touching, perhaps the most remarkable finding is that some of the handprints highest on the cave walls belong to the smallest hands. As I said, this is a long story. It keeps getting longer. Here. Sit down with me. If you know it, sing. If you don’t, listen. Once you know it, please, sing.