The Sound of Two Stumps Clapping

Once I traveled with a retinue of journals and diaries, dedicated companions retaining the inscriptions of years of observations, some through coke-bottle filters of theory and emo, others with a fearsome clarity. Now these documents, once the bedrock on which the rest of my work rests, are gone, and I have no one to blame but myself for this crime. Worse yet, part of me has gone missing in the process.

It all started with the decision that I no longer needed these old archives; they did not define my experience, and my living space is chronically undersized, so I opted for the space. Space in which to work, to stretch, to breathe: this was my desire, and these old journals were part of the obstacle. So I chose to have them destroyed.

This was a part of the reorganizational project of this past summer, a way to clear the path for my new life as the Graduate Student - or so I had told myself. I started with Artist's-Way styled "morning pages" written in the mid-1990's, through the journals I had kept through my undergraduate studies at Pasadena and UCLA, even the archives of a blog I had published under another name not so long ago. What I could not erase with the stroke of a key, I loosed from ring binders, slashed from spines, freed from the embraces of manila envelopes and red-rope file pockets. I delivered these sturdier records into boxes and, in turn, to a shredding company, dispatching them with the ritual tapping of dust from my hands and my sandals, and a song in my heart.

It seemed the best thing at the time, an enactment of a psychic "leave no trace" traveling philosophy that I thought the erstwhile undergrad needed to break camp. All this while secretly recognizing its irrelevance for a base camp set up for so many returns, staring at the deep blue nothing beyond the nodding shreds of prayer flags.

So there's no denying the hostility. If I had local laws on my side, I would have taken a match to the whole damn pile. For within this collection was no end of insults and embarassments, burrs of rage and pathos, needles of guilt, resiny secrets that surely would ooze through their rough skins and onto the latex gloves of some disinterested archaeologist. Some collector and cataloguer of my moment's remnants, carefully dusting off, labeling, preparing these artifacts for the historical gaze, uncaring of the pathogenic effect on the tendrils growing in my soil and curling into neighboring trellises.

A commercial shredder certainly seems ecologically friendlier. What the AQMD doesn't know is that it can't write a rule to close this loophole on P.J.'s scorched-earth solution, fueled by shame, low relative humidity and a certain fallacy of periodicity (the periodical fallacy?); offering, perhaps, a sweet savour unto the LORD, but from here, reeking of all the charm of the exhaust from an engine down one cylinder. Even more damning is odorless carbon monoxide within. Moreover, among evolution's cruel jokes is the idiocy of the hemoglobin that prefers the CO to oxygen. Does god have a nose for CO, and if it does, how must it smell, as these smoke signals rise and evaporate, late signifiers of a pile of ashes itself swirling into fresh breezes?

The remains of the heart within this heap might suggest to the credulous yet more evidence of spontaneous human combustion. Heart is there, yes, it was on every last page, but I still feel a pulse in my chest. My head is splitting and I want to puke. Yet the pulse remains.

What I appear to have lost in the blaze, though, are my hands.

Hands which held pen and pad, drawing the words that looped and meandered the width of the page and the length of my thoughts. Or which rested at a keyboard, at frenzied moments beating a tattoo of tiny keys tinged with a bassoon's deep, reedy tone, serenading to a screen challenging my wits with its blank stare; conquering it with a flurry of notations within staves of darkness in a neat one-inch-wide frame; polishing the results, trimming the goofs and dead spots, reducing the noise, adding an occasional effect for shits and giggles.

Among all these mixed metaphors rests the fact of my hands - tools with a prior survival function, just like my lungs, my larynx, my teeth - another embodiment of my language, my best survival mechanism. I could tell stories of the too-small palms betraying the otherwise too-long fingers; the callus built up over decades around the ever-present pen; the scar defining a fingertip and its bone underneath reminding me of its presence as it presses into the fretboard of my guitar.

I could tell these stories - if I had my hands. The hands which I must have lopped off in my slash-and-burn project. Hands which I too late discover adhere to the words of my hands, the pages, the keyboard, the ink, the graphite, reflections of light in thousands of colors, the million gems too little valued and too easily lost, leaving blanks, blanks. Without my hands, so little remediates between my brain and the smooth surfaces of pages and disks. My voice fails.

If I had my hands, instead of whispering from the bottom of a well, my voice would wend into the script and emerge to fearlessly fill its own space, trusting in the handiwork of the tapestry suspended below. No thread? I'd weave with cardboard strips. No paper? I'd sign what I can't write, knitting the atmosphere, directing my words to those who won't be bothered with odd sounds.

If I had my hands, right now I would be lost in the music of compositions anticipated by eager audiences who won't exchange their tickets for a later performance.

I certainly would not be mourning their absence on a blog. I would not be reduced to confessing this sin to the priesthood of the bored and distracted, waiting in vain for the penance which, however insufficient to the deed, will cost more than my life.


Still... I know my own penchant for disorder, and no organizational project goes unfinished under my supervision. Perhaps I should spend time among the odd piles saved from the shredder and search. On an outside chance, I may have outsmarted myself and hid my hands from myself in the consuming fury that destroyed the witnesses whose testimony I now crave.

No host of witnesses can define a person, but they add to the chorus - the cacaphony - of me. They make the physical and psychological field of me that persists, demands, expresses, and I realize now that I have always needed their voices, however ancient, however awkward, to produce the voice that speaks now, that answers and interrogates anew.

If I ever find my hands again, I will be lucky to survive with the curse of the remaining silence, the close reminder of the void into which that expression of me is permanently lost.

At my own hands.