"One has a pair of hands and they obey. How are one's order's transmitted to one's hands?
I had made a discovery that horrified me: my hands were numb. My hands were dead. Probably they had been numb a long time and I had not noticed it. The pity was that I had noticed it, had raised the question. That was serious.
Lashed by the wind, the wings of the plane had been dragging and jerking at the cables by which they were controlled from the wheel, and the wheel in my hands had not ceased jerking a single second. I had been gripping the wheel with all my might for forty minutes, fearful lest the strain snap the cables. So desperate had been my grip that now I could not feel my hands.
What a discovery! My hands were not my own. I looked at them and decided to lift a finger: it obeyed me. I looked away and issued the same order: now I could not feel whether the finger had obeyed or not. No message had reached me. I thought, 'Suppose my hands were to open: how would I know it?' I swung my head round and looked again: my hands were still locked round the wheel. Nevertheless, I was afraid. How can a man tell the difference between the sight of a hand opening and the decision to open that hand, when there is no longer an exchange of sensations between the hand and the brain? How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of will? Better stop thinking the picture of open hands. Hands have a life of their own. Better not offer them this monstrous temptation. And I began to chant a silly litany which went on uninterrupted until this flight was over. A single thought. A single image. A single phrase tirelessly chanted over and over agin: 'I shut my hands. I shut my hands. I shut my hands.' All of me was condensed into that phrase and for me the white sea, the whirling eddies, the sawtoothed range ceased to exist. There was only 'I shut my hands.' There was no danger, no cyclone, no lands unattained. Somewhere there was a pair of rubber hands which, once they let go the wheel, could not possibly come alive in time to recover from the tumbling drop into the sea."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
The passage above is taken from a chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars in which Antoine describes piloting his mail plane through a cyclone over the Andes. I know it's a little bit long, but I think it does a really good job at tackling those strange distinctions between "I," "me," "my mind," and "my body."
Here are two of my favorite Man Ray pieces from the wonderful Man Ray-Lee Miller exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, it left on December 4th, but the art and the story are definitely still worth looking into.
I had made a discovery that horrified me: my hands were numb. My hands were dead. Probably they had been numb a long time and I had not noticed it. The pity was that I had noticed it, had raised the question. That was serious.
Lashed by the wind, the wings of the plane had been dragging and jerking at the cables by which they were controlled from the wheel, and the wheel in my hands had not ceased jerking a single second. I had been gripping the wheel with all my might for forty minutes, fearful lest the strain snap the cables. So desperate had been my grip that now I could not feel my hands.
What a discovery! My hands were not my own. I looked at them and decided to lift a finger: it obeyed me. I looked away and issued the same order: now I could not feel whether the finger had obeyed or not. No message had reached me. I thought, 'Suppose my hands were to open: how would I know it?' I swung my head round and looked again: my hands were still locked round the wheel. Nevertheless, I was afraid. How can a man tell the difference between the sight of a hand opening and the decision to open that hand, when there is no longer an exchange of sensations between the hand and the brain? How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of will? Better stop thinking the picture of open hands. Hands have a life of their own. Better not offer them this monstrous temptation. And I began to chant a silly litany which went on uninterrupted until this flight was over. A single thought. A single image. A single phrase tirelessly chanted over and over agin: 'I shut my hands. I shut my hands. I shut my hands.' All of me was condensed into that phrase and for me the white sea, the whirling eddies, the sawtoothed range ceased to exist. There was only 'I shut my hands.' There was no danger, no cyclone, no lands unattained. Somewhere there was a pair of rubber hands which, once they let go the wheel, could not possibly come alive in time to recover from the tumbling drop into the sea."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
The passage above is taken from a chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars in which Antoine describes piloting his mail plane through a cyclone over the Andes. I know it's a little bit long, but I think it does a really good job at tackling those strange distinctions between "I," "me," "my mind," and "my body."
Here are two of my favorite Man Ray pieces from the wonderful Man Ray-Lee Miller exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, it left on December 4th, but the art and the story are definitely still worth looking into.
I wish that this photo could convey the wonderful color that this painting, Lips (Heure de l'Observatoire), has irl. It's so morosely decadent!
On its own, Object to Be Destroyed is, eh, another piece of surrealist sculpture. But the backstory - oh the backstory! - so interesting.
Kind of sounds a knell for anthropocentrism, don't you think?
(Or at least starts to).
