Just before I went off to summer camp, which is what fourteen-year-old girls in suburban Pennsylvania did to mark time, my boyfriend, whom my parents did not approve of (wrong religion) and had forbidden me to see, used to walk five miles across town each evening, and climb in through my bedroom window just to kiss me. These were not open-mouthed “French” kisses, which we didn’t know about, and they weren’t accompanied by groping. They were just earth-stopping, soulful, on-the-ledge-of-adolescence kissing, when you press your lips together and yearn so hard you feel faint. We wrote letters while I was away, but when school started again in the fall the affair seemed to fade of its own accord. I still remember those summer nights, how my boyfriend would hide in my closet if my parents or brother chanced in, and then kiss me for an hour or so and head back home before dark, and I marvel at his determination and the power of a kiss.
A kiss seems the smallest movement of the lips, yet it can capture emotions wild as kindling, or be a contract, or dash a mystery. Some cultures just don’t do much kissing. In The Kiss and Its History, Dr. Christopher Nyrop refers to Finnish tribes “which bathe together in a state of complete nudity,” but regard kissing “as something indecent.” Certain African tribes, whose lips are decorated, mutilated, stretched or in other ways deformed, don’t kiss. But they are unusual. Most people on the planet greet one another face to face; their greeting may take many forms, but it usually includes kissing, nose-kissing, or nose-saluting. There are many theories about how kissing began. Some authorities, as noted, believe it evolved from the act of smelling someone’s face, inhaling them out of friendship or love in order to gauge their mood and well-being. There are cultures today in which people greet one another by putting their heads together and inhaling the other’s essence. Some sniff each other’s hands. The mucous membranes of the lips are exquisitely sensitive, and we often use the mouth to taste texture while using the nose to smell flavor. Animals frequently lick their masters or their young with relish, savoring the taste of a favorite’s identity.* So we may indeed have begun kissing as a way to taste-and-smell someone. According to the Bible account, when Isaac grew old and lost his sight, he called his son Esau to kiss him and receive a blessing, but Jacob put on Esau’s clothing and, because he smelled like Esau to his blind father, received the kiss instead. In Mongolia, a father does not kiss his son; he smells his son’s head. Some cultures prefer just to rub noses (Inuits, Maoris, Polynesians, and others), while in some Malay tribes the word for “smell” means the same as “salute.” Here is how Charles Darwin describes the Malay nose-rubbing kiss: “The women squatted with their faces upturned; my attendants stood leaning over theirs, and commenced rubbing. It lasted somewhat longer than a hearty handshake with us. During this process they uttered a grunt of satisfaction.”
Some cultures kiss chastely, some kiss extravagantly, and some kiss more savagely, biting and sucking each other’s lips. In The Customs of the Swahili People, edited by J. W. T. Allen, it is reported that a Swahili husband and wife kiss on the lips if they are indoors, and will freely kiss young children. However, boys over the age of seven usually are not kissed by mother, aunt, sister-in-law, or sister. The father may kiss a son, but a brother or father shouldn’t kiss a girl. Furthermore,
When his grandmother or his aunt or another woman comes, a child one or two years old is told to show his love for his aunt, and he goes to her. Then she tells him to kiss her, and he does so. Then he is told by his mother to show his aunt his tobacco, and he lifts his clothes and shows her his penis. She tweaks the penis and sniffs and sneezes and says: “O, very strong tobacco.” Then she says, “Hide your tobacco.” If there are four or five women, they all sniff and are pleased and laugh a lot.
How did mouth-kissing begin? To primitive peoples, the hot air wafting from their mouths may have seemed a magical embodiment of the soul, and a kiss a way to fuse two souls. Desmond Morris, who has been observing people with a keen zoologist’s eye for quite a while, is one of a number of authorities who claim this fascinating and, to me, plausible origin for French kissing:
In early human societies, before commercial baby-food was invented, mothers weaned their children by chewing up their food and then passing it into the infantile mouth by lip-to-lip contact—which naturally involved a considerable amount of tonguing and mutual mouth-pressure. This almost bird-like system of parental care seems strange and alien to us today, but our species probably practiced it for a million years or more, and adult erotic kissing today is almost certainly a Relic Gesture stemming from these origins.… Whether it has been handed down to us from generation to generation … or whether we have an inborn predisposition towards it, we cannot say. But, whichever is the case, it looks rather as though, with the deep kissing and tonguing of modern lovers, we are back again at the infantile mouth-feeding stage of the far-distant past.… If the young lovers exploring each other’s mouths with their tongues feel the ancient comfort of parental mouth-feeding, this may help them to increase their mutual trust and thereby their pair-bonding.
Our lips are deliciously soft and responsive. Their touch sensations are represented by a large part of the brain, and what a boon that is to kissing. We don’t just kiss romantically, of course; we also kiss dice before we roll them, kiss our own hurt finger or that of a loved one, kiss a religious symbol or statue, kiss the flag of our homeland or the ground itself, kiss a good-luck charm, kiss a photograph, kiss the king’s or bishop’s ring, kiss our own fingers to signal farewell to someone. The ancient Romans used to deliver the “last kiss,” which custom had it would capture a dying person’s soul.* In America, we “kiss off” someone when we dump them, and they yell “Kiss my ass!” when angry. Young women press lipsticked mouths to the backs of envelopes so all the tiny lines will carry like fingerprint kisses to their sweethearts. We even refer to billiard balls as “kissing” when they touch delicately and glance away. Hershey sells small foil-wrapped candy “kisses,” so we can give love to ourselves or others with each morsel. Christian worship includes a “kiss of peace,” whether of a holy object—a relic or a cross—or of fellow worshippers, translated by some Christians into a rather more restrained handshake. William S. Walsh’s 1897 book, Curiosities of Popular Customs, quotes a Dean Stanley, writing in Christian Institutions, as reporting travelers who “have had their faces stroked and been kissed by the Coptic priest in the cathedral at Cairo, while at the same moment everybody else was kissing everybody throughout the church.” In ancient Egypt, the Orient, Rome, and Greece, honor used to dictate kissing the hem or feet or hands of important persons. Mary Magdalen kissed the feet of Jesus. A sultan often required subjects of varying ranks to kiss varying parts of his royal body: High officials might kiss the toe, others merely the fringe of his scarf. The riffraff just bowed to the ground. Drawing a row of XXXXXs at the bottom of a letter to represent kisses began in the Middle Ages, when so many people were illiterate that a cross was acceptable as a signature on a legal document. The cross did not represent the Crucifixion, nor was it an arbitrary scrawl; it stood for “St. Andrew’s mark,” and people vowed to be honest in his sacred name. To pledge their sincerity, they would kiss their signature. In time, the “X” became associated with the kiss alone.†
Perhaps the most famous kiss in the world is Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss, in which two lovers, sitting on a rocky ledge or outcropping, embrace tenderly with radiant energy, and kiss forever. Her left hand wrapped around his neck, she seems almost to be swooning, or to be singing into his mouth. As he rests his open right hand on her thigh, a thigh he knows well and adores, he seems to be ready to play her leg as if it were a musical instrument. Enveloped in each other, glued together by touch at the shoulder, hand, leg, hip, and chest, they seal their fate and close it with the stoppers of their mouths. His calves and knees are beautiful, her ankles are strong and firmly feminine, and her buttocks, waist, and breasts are all heavily fleshed and curvy. Ecstasy pours off every inch of them. Touching in only a few places, they
seem to be touching in every cell. Above all, they are oblivious to us, the sculptor, or anything on earth outside of themselves. It is as if they have fallen down the well of each other; they are not only self-absorbed, but actually absorbing one another. Rodin, who often took secret sketch notes of the irrelevant motions made by his models, has given these lovers a vitality and thrill that bronze can rarely capture in its fundamental calm. Only the fluent, abstracted stroking and pressing of live lovers actually kissing could capture it. Rilke notes how Rodin was able to fill his sculptures “with this deep inner vitality, with the rich and amazing restlessness of life. Even the tranquility, where there was tranquility, was composed of hundreds upon hundreds of moments of motion keeping each other in equilibrium.… Here was desire immeasurable, thirst so great that all the waters of the world dried in it like a single drop.”
According to anthropologists, the lips remind us of the labia, because they flush red and swell when they’re aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick. Today the bee-stung look is popular; models draw even larger and more hospitable lips, almost always in shades of pink and red, and then apply a further gloss to make them look shiny and moist. So, anthropologically at least, a kiss on the mouth, especially with all the plunging of tongues and the exchanging of saliva, is another form of intercourse, and it’s not surprising that it should make the mind and body surge with gorgeous sensations.
THE HAND
1988: Summer in upstate New York passes in a slow, humid embrace. The big event this week is a convention of psychics meeting at the Ramada Inn downtown, to tell fortunes and swap stories. Classes and special events take place in nearby rooms, but for a small fee the general public can enter the main ballroom, and choose to visit one of the many booths arcing around the walls in a horseshoe, or browse through the parapsychology books laid out on bridge tables in the center of the room. There are palm-readers, numerologists, telekinesis and UFO specialists, as well as men and women perched over crystal balls and Tarot cards. One tall thin woman wearing a tie-dyed muumuu works at a large easel with pastels. Not only does she do “past-life regressions,” she draws the incarnations, complete with “past-life guides,” as she talks about them. Watching for a while at a polite distance, I notice that many of the local people seem to have Indian guides whose names consist mainly of consonants.
Finally I decide on a palm-reader with a serious face and a bouffant, country-and-western hairdo, whose literature recounts her cavalcade of solved crimes and timely predictions. Giving her husband-manager twenty-five dollars for a short reading, I sit down across from her at a small bistro table against the wall. She is a middle-aged woman wearing a rabbit-skin bolero vest and a full skirt. What I’m really wondering is why notices were posted and invitations sent out at all: If it’s a psychics’ convention, shouldn’t everyone just know where and when to meet?
Taking my hand, she rakes it lightly with her spread fingers, then lifts it up close to her face as if zeroing in on a splinter.
“You drive a red car,” she says in a solemn voice.
“No, a blue one …,” I say, hating to disappoint her.
“Well you will drive a red car in the future sometime, and you must be very careful,” she warns. “I see a lot of money for you in December, but someone you work with will betray you, and you must watch out.… You’re close to someone named Mary?”
I shake my head no.
“Margaret? Melissa? Monica?”
“I have a mother named Marcia,” I offer.
“Ah, that’s it, and you’re very concerned about her, but she’ll be all right, you don’t have to worry.” Now she presses the fleshy side of my palm and folds back the thumb, separates the fingers and peers closely at them. The hand is “the visible part of the brain,” Immanuel Kant once said. She searches the flexure lines (creases made by moving the hand), tension lines (wrinkles that grow with age the way facial lines do), and papillary ridges (fingerprints), traces my head line, heart line, life line and fate line. Among our near neighbors, the apes, the heart and head lines are the same, but so mobile and powerful are our forefingers that they tend to separate the lines on most people. My hands are cool and dry. Palms sweat when we’re agitated, in tribute to a time deep in our past when stress meant physical danger and our body wanted us ready to fight or flee. A tiny discoloration at the base of my second finger brings a nod of interest from the palm-reader. It’s only a scar left from a rose thorn, nothing like stigmata, marks some Roman Catholics claim appear spontaneously on their feet and palms and bleed, reproducing the wounds Christ suffered on the cross.
“You know someone who had an abortion?” the palm-reader asks.
Throughout history, palm-readers have chosen the hand as their symbolic link to the psyche and soul, as their raft through time. After all, the hand is action, it digs roads and builds cities, it throws spears and diapers babies. Even its small dramas—dialing a phone number, pushing a button—can change the course of nations or launch atomic bombs. When we are distressed, we allow our hands to console each other by wringing, stroking, fidgeting, and caressing them as if they were separate people. At the outset of a romance, the first touch people share is usually the taking of each other’s hand, while couples of long standing, moving through the world on their daily rounds, often hold hands as a tender bridge. Holding the hand of someone ill or elderly soothes them and gives them an emotional lifeline. Experiments show that just touching someone’s hand or arm lowers their blood pressure. In many cultures, people fiddle obsessively with worry beads, polished stones, and other objects, and the brain-wave patterns this produces are those of a mind made calm by repeated touch stimulation.
In these days of mass-produced objects, we treasure things that are “handmade.” We think of manual laborers as working harder than desk jockeys, though it might not always be the case. Sometimes working hands seem to perform with a cunning and sensitivity that defies explanation. Lorraine Miller, though totally blind, works as a hair stylist at a beauty salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A mother of five, Ms. Miller had always wanted to be a beautician, but the rigors of raising a family never allowed time for it. Later in life, blinded by disease, she decided to pursue her lifelong ambition. A hair salon in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, trained her to cut hair by touch, carefully feeling the shape of the head and the layers of hair as she cut them. In time, she touch-cut so well that they hired her.
The tiny ridges in our fingertips, whose roughness makes it easier for us to grasp objects, are randomly formed, resulting in the unique swirling weather systems we call “fingerprints.” The swirls run through a few basic patterns of whorls, loops, and arches, but combine in endlessly different ways. Not even identical twins have the same fingerprints, which makes guilt a lot easier to establish when it is necessary to do so. The idea of one’s fingerprints being the ultimate personal signature isn’t new. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese used the imprint of a finger as a way of signing a contract. When the FBI searches for fingerprints on a holdup note, they use a laser. The oily residue absorbs laser light and re-emits it at a longer wavelength. Forensic experts wearing amber goggles then filter out the laser light and see the fingerprints—always a distinctive signature.
A hand moves with a complex precision that’s irreplaceable, feels with a delicate intuition that’s indefinable, as designers of robotic hands are discovering. Because we use our hands so often for so many purposes, flexing, bending, gripping, pointing, stretching them millions of times, University of Utah Research Institute engineers have invented a glove to wear over a hand that has lost the sense of touch—through the use of electronics and sound waves, it gives the wearer a sense of pressure, which is essential to being able to grasp. A wire leads from the glove to a tiny piston that is connected to a part of the body where feeling hasn’t been lost, and the wearer feels hand sensations (in his wrist or forearm, for example) and learns to translate them into hand res
ponses.
The sensitivity of the fingertips reveals itself in the use of Braille, which now appears everywhere, from elevator panels to the faces of Italian coins. Braille can be read quickly, and people are always looking for better ways to use it. A recent study reported in Education of the Visually Handicapped suggests that Braille can be read more accurately and efficiently if the readers move their fingers vertically over the dots rather than horizontally, because the fingertip’s touch receptors are more sensitive when used in that way.
Handclasps and handshakes have served throughout history to prove the lack of a weapon and to pledge one’s good faith, although shaking hands as a common greeting didn’t really come into practice until the Industrial Revolution in England, when businessmen were so busy making deals and shaking hands on them that the gesture lost its special purpose and entered casual social life. A handshake is still a watered-down contract that says: Let’s at least pretend that we’ll deal honorably with each other. The hand has been symbolic of the whole body for some time, as in “I’ll give you a hand,” or referring to a worker as a “hired hand.”
Think of all the ways in which we touch ourselves (I don’t just mean masturbation—from manustuprare, “to defile with the hand”), but how we wrap our hands around our shoulders and rock as if we were a mother comforting a child; how we hide our face in our open palms to be alone to pray, or that they may receive our tears; how we run our hands briskly up and down our arms as we pace; how, with wide eyes, we press an open palm to one cheek when we’re startled. Touch is so important in emotional situations that we’re driven to touch ourselves in the way we’d like someone else to comfort us. Hands are messengers of emotion. And few have understood their intricate duty as well as Rodin. Here is how Rilke describes Rodin’s artistry: