Nicl Barbro - Lauren Keeley - Hannes Mussner - Merlin Reichart - Benjamin Slinger - Manuel Stehli - Anna Stüdeli

<   Hands Down   >

A BEGINNING

1.

The hands come from the sea, inside the front fins they waited, the right and the left hand, right and wrong, good and evil; they had been there all along with their blood vessels, ligaments, nerves, bones, muscles, and tendons. Just beneath the water surface, close to the shoreline, they moved among oysters, mussels, crustaceans, and aquatic plants.

Long before there was will, the hands were already there; unfinished and free, they could have become anything, but they didn’t know that, because they knew nothing, not even that they were hands, they just did what they did, which wasn’t very much.

The hands sat on the undersides of meter-long bodies, which had flat heads at the front, with no room for any thoughts, but at least they had eyes to see with. The heads could neither move upward, downward, nor turn sideways, so the only direction the eyes could look was forward, and forward was also where the hands drove the bodies.

Forward could have been in any direction, so they might have moved along the coast, or out toward the open sea, but they didn’t, because the bodies were turned toward land, and so it was land they saw and the things that grew closest to the water, ferns and some kind of grass perhaps, it’s hard to say, but probably some sort of mangrove-like vegetation, and that was where they were heading, the hands, even if it went slowly, because they had to keep starting over again, swimming and dragging themselves across the slippery bottom, but time and again they lost their grip and slid back out from the shoreline.

2.

There were still no arms to reinforce the power of movement, and what had not yet become hands bent their joints slowly forward and let the body they were attached to sink down toward the bottom. They dug into it, searching for resistance, but they found no hold in the soft mud, so as quickly as they could they pushed upward, forward, before the body had gotten stuck, embedded in the mud, becoming bottom itself. They stirred up the boundary between water and bottom so that everything became one and the same, and the eyes, which were always open, could no longer see, but the body still moved forward, closer to land, lifting toward the surface. The body sank again, the joints bent forward, and what would become hands were embedded once more in the soft, cold mud, moving forward, and the body did not become bottom, it heaved itself up and moved forward again, toward shallower water, toward land, toward new bodies, toward treetops, savannas, and language. Never before had it been this close to land, and the unfinished hands began flailing frenetically, back and forth, until the body spun around; several times it rotated at the water’s surface and was then carried off by the currents, out toward the open sea.

3.

The hands splashed in the water. As things looked, one would never believe that the bodies they were attached to could ever make it forward.

4.

If the human being is in the middle of herself, then the hands and feet are the body parts that are farthest from her. She both begins and ends there, and therefore they don’t only belong to her, but also to the ground she walks on and the world she grasps, everything she shapes, consumes, and destroys. Hands and feet are boundaries, which can be crossed at any moment, the world enters there and the human being exits there. But unlike the feet, which only run, walk, or stand, and have never wanted anything else, since they have no will, the hands are never really satisfied; they are constantly changing things, entirely regardless of what we truly want.

5.

All the hands ever wanted was change. As soon as they came into being, yes, even before they became what they are, before the fingers were complete, they began dragging themselves towards land, and even though it was essentially impossible, they eventually managed to get up on land, because hands are such that they never give up. Once on land, they wanted to climb up into the trees that grew here and there, maybe ginkgo trees, and even though this too was fundamentally impossible, they eventually climbed up into the treetops, though how it happened is hard to say, since it was impossible. And once they had come up, they immediately wanted to go down again, to reach all the places they had seen from up there, and once they had been to all those places, they began to reshape them, because such are hands—they cannot stand it when nothing happens.

Jens Soneryd, September 10, 2025