The Age of Silence

A prelude to 'a conversation (with) touch'...

"The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from peoples hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labour of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making a sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it be a gesture, not all dissimilar, for Now I realise I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heart breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly.

Sometimes these misunderstanding were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of coarse I know I've always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking for forgiveness evolved into the simplest from. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy-nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco in 1903 by Argentine doctor named Antonio de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fist and finger trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom your feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - if your find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognise the foreignness of your own body - its because your hands remember a time when division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less.

It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood."

Written by Nicole Krauss in The History of Love.