The inanimate is animated by our contact, by our need to contact it.
We live in an age where anonymity creeps into the process of meeting so many of our basic needs via an interconnected economy of global supply chains. I am struck by the plain fact that it all relies on touching. The particular touching of particular surfaces and objects, by particular bodies.
Before reaching for every door handle and railing outside of our little cloisters in these days of the coronavirus, we might wish for a biography of its recent use. Every package that is delivered invites speculation into the chain of custody that ushered it to one’s door. Did everyone who negotiated this item through physical space wear uncontaminated gloves? Did they, perhaps, out of reflex of deep habit, raise their gloved hand to their mouth to cover a cough, or stifle a yawn? How many boxes did they touch between changes of gloves?
We are all experiencing separation now. We have that much in common.
For those who live alone, it can feel like profound isolation. I went more than two weeks without touching another human, until I and another person each agreed to hazard contact, applying doubled doses of sanitizer, then shaking hands. We lingered in that greeting well beyond the usual length. It was something like putting out a fire, or grounding a dangerous electrical current.
Others who are quarantined with family, roommates, or partners, are held in proximity of unrelenting contact. Their separation is from those moments of domestic solitude, quiet, and autonomy, which normally might grant a sense of balance between their individual lives and those of their cohabitants.
We are all experiencing separation from many of the accustomed activities we engage in outside the home.
On a recent, and increasingly rare, shopping trip to the Beachwood Market, I pulled a jar of imported French black cherry preserves off the shelf. I wanted to look at its label and read its ingredients, in order to make an informed purchase. After a minute of consideration, I decided to put it back and started to replace it on the shelf. Then I thought, I ought to take this. I have touched it with an ungloved hand, and I haven’t had a test to know if I’m contagious or not.
In so many areas of our lives, casualness has become a casualty.
So, we are being invited into a new awareness of bodies and their touching, the lingering signature of our own actions, at the granular level of hands and face, even of the breath.
If this moment is laying bare to us the potency of our touch, how might we welcome this awareness? For that matter, how can we accept a greater measure of responsibility for all that issues forth in our wake?
The invisible threads that bind together the world of human social relations—our communication, our laughter, our expressions of love, beauty, or anger—are also particular, and have specific effects on the particular people who receive or encounter them.
It is extraordinarily easy to forget how impactful we are in the lives of others, however the last few weeks have made it starkly clear just how much we need each other. So, when we rejoin the fold and come together again, how can we be with one another in ways that are supportive and considerate of each other’s particular being?
Photo by McKenna Phillips on Unsplash
