The moment my hands touch and reach at something, my fingertips understanding its language through minute abbreviations in an otherwise smooth surface, I begin to form a story. It is not as if stories don’t spend their time circling in my head that I almost feel dizzy with it, it is just that my hands anchor these stories in the tactility of the now. These moments of clarity within what feels like a haze of monotonous day to day, jump into being and reverberate through my living world.
Objects and their ability to store memory and evoke stories, connect the worlds of visual seeing and haptic knowing. I don’t know if I know a person alive who doesn’t have a small object that reminds them of home. Whether it is a bear they used to hug close at night, an old teapot of their mothers, or a blanket they can wrap themselves in. In this way, as you hold home close to you, the non tangible and the tangible world ebbs and flows into a meshwork of memories and stories. The power of an object and our hands greeting it is a concept that has been understood by human beings for thousands of years. “This is why a lot of cultural objects have special significance in Aboriginal societies – knowledge is encoded into them in a creation process that is sacred.” Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. This ancient narrational path from hand to thought weaves its way through the city of stories to create meaning and importance in our day to day.
Suburbs of meaning with their neatness and shiny new doors don’t need you to come knocking. It’s the children on the outskirts and the land far beyond you’ll find wrapped up between paper held gently in your hands. And when you carefully move its cheeks from one palm to the other, studying it carefully, you are lying on the pebbles and can hear the rush of the tide. You are looking at your grandmother into weathered and laughing eyes, and beginning to remember the story. Beginning is perhaps the wrong word as the story rushes to you like a river after heavy rainfall. First come the smells and the sounds in big gulps until you are so filled up with it that the story leaches over and out of you to mingle with the world. And as it does this, you pass that precious thing that you have been holding to your chest, over to the rest to learn and listen.
As the trees move into collaboration, the healthy trees supporting the sick, so do we pass on our stories in order to energise and excite those around us. In that moment on that specific peace of land, we make together with out stories and our hands, a medicine of memory. Coming back to this place and brushing my hand over the saline rocks, I remember these stories and feel well again.
The reach of my hands brings into being my world of memory and with it all the stories that dwell there. Within this hand-centred near space I come to know the outside world as an extension of my body, its emotional language like that of a dear friend, hugging me. The yearning I have to understand the world through its tactility urges me into movement. Because only with walking does the far space become the near space and in such understood as home. Hands and objects in turn inspire haptic thinking, the familiarity of the object helping to encode knowledge and impart a deep sense of knowing. I have come to see through my hands to the world and in doing so feel an intrinsic part of the flowing web of stories that make up what I call home.
