In tearing haste

In opening and closing frames of Spottiswooode's film (1993) of Randy Shilts' history of the gay men's health crisis, And the Band Played On (1987), a human hand clutches the wrist of Matthew Modine with clawing tenacity before he tears it away in fear. A woman in central Africa, the last of her village to be swept away by a fever whose virus isn't known; and a forty-ish man, taken away by a virus that is. Rodin saw this, and Valéry Lorenzo reminded us.

I borrow the fashionably apologetic closing of a dutiful correspondence - the title of a recent compilation, worthy of any library - to test these terrible waters, because the sculpture simply commands the recollection, and the phrase captures a truth of it. The holding on is a digging in; we were designed to do it.

The part of haste comes to us all, but not since the Middle Ages has a generation been so educated in its urgency. The prehensile hand is such a convenience, as we fumble in our thornproof for the car keys, or secure the lead of an English dog, that its genius for our service in emergency is seldom on our mind. We draw on it as we draw a beer from a tap, a tea infuser from a cup, a razor through our whiskers, an oar in its arc; and the resistances we meet, are familiar to us, sometimes even pleasing, as in the weight of a face we lift to our own. Except in the latter instance, we seldom sense that it is our truest gesture; even now, even not gripping a pen, we dabble at indentations.

How sleekly the blade dispenses with resis-tance, we seldom think of as we sweep it all aside in our processions through the day. Much poetry, so much religion celebrate the gift of letting go, that you'd think the calling of our life were to prepare an exit in good taste.

I admit, this fastidious disposition is not a touchstone of this page. We portray the education we were given, in the ways that strike us as truest to our mentors. The truth is, we are the resistance to our own education; it is how we acquire it. What we know is nothing we've over-come, but taken in. We have acquired something deeper than a taste to seize what holds.

Yet our gyre is the one which is not the acquisitive funnel of current fashion, a compulsion to possess. It is a compulsion to know, defined as one to give. Time and again an exemplary tenacity has dug itself beneath our gaze, sometimes into ourselves, a pure and powerful center, holding. What hauls us back to this well? Is the prehensile grasp a reflex, or a cause?


The closing, in tearing haste, relies on a grant of permission in the end, and treasures the bark of the vigorous tree.