Please HANDLE with care.

I have funny-looking hands
They measure my water retention
Cutting paper dolls, scissor hands
Double-jointed funny-looking thumbs
My new series of artwork is all about my
Childhood spending hours cutting out paper dolls
My mother was never around (blame it all on the mother)
She would give me 100 Korean won as she left each day
And with that I would buy myself the paper dolls to play with all day
My lifeline is too short.

On the Other hand

So I ask Markand, "Do you think that your son will become a conductor?" and he replies, "I'll break his wrists before." With a bit of a silence there, I look at Markand, the only maestro of this kind who I know personally, a very gentle and composed man, saying such harsh words.

Incidentally, two very important people in my life have literally broken their wrists, and I found out in the later part of our discussion that Markand also broke his. On the one hand, I gather that wrist injury is common, most common in the sense that our common sense causes us to thrust our wrists to break a fall. On the other hand, I thought about what it must have meant for a music conductor to break his wrist, or an architect, or a writer to lose a hand. How about losing hands, losing grip of something? What does that mean? Why is it so important that one grips and has a grasp of something, a handle on things? How about being a master at something, something to do with using hands?

I love it when media theorist Sandy Stone asks, Where does Stephen Hawking end and his technological device begin? Certainly, Hawking does not grasp his knowledge in the palm of his hands.

Markand, however, was almost in denial about his wrist fracture; he mentioned it superfluously later, in another route of conversation, after he heard me tell story after story about the hand. I was curious why he would block that out. Was it too painful to remember or was it just another injury that healed so well that one has forgotten about it? Get over it, I tell myself.

What is it in the hand that one disconnects from the body, what is it in the hand that makes a person think that an entire body can be supported by it, and what does it mean for people who use their hands for creative means to fracture their instrument of creation? For some reason, people give a lot of attention to artisans using hands, as if the genius were born in the hands. My art students quickly revert to thinking that the more hand involvement in artwork, the better. There is desperation for believing in the hands-on effect during our electronic era. Hmmm, maybe we need to go back to Frankenstein and consider how light and electricity is portrayed as the source of life. But then creation and monstrosity are similar. Who are we to suppose that we can create, and create poetry and beauty at that? There is something fictive about using hands to create something that has such high esteem. Why try so hard, as if it is even possible, and who and what determines something to be art, or poetry? I don't even want to try to fake it.

In philosophy, the contemporary way of thinking about the hand is that the hand is the face of the Other. In Lévinasian and Derridean senses, there is no beginning and ending to the hand. There is no finite way of grasping. Hence, if there is nothing so special in the hand, it can't be severed, since hands are never truly vehicles of creation. Then why the drama when one loses the hand? Heidegger's hand was too powerful and perhaps romantic, and if art was created as such in the palm of those hands, then maybe we must call them art for his sake. But, what about giving someone else a hand?

If the grip is fractured, then how much of an artist are you when you can't hold a brush or a pen? If the grip is all it takes to be an artist, then how much of an artist is left when the grip is no longer there? How human are we when we face the Other? Amputation, phantom limbs, a blind person's painting, a deaf person's music-what are these monstrosities saying about our already monstrous existence? The dolls are interesting non-beings and a gift of my childhood when my hands were not big enough, strong enough, firm enough to hold scissors. Back then, I had no burden to pretend to make art; I was simply cutting.

This page is dedicated to a friend who gave me a hand; now I have three of them, which makes it no hands at all.

-Mina

It was a joke. Sometimes a joke is just a joke. This one was about the difficulty of music as a profession, and conducting in particular. But music can also offer the most intense rewards.

For Mina the goal of art is to inspire thinking-it is to connect the viewer more intensely to his or her everyday world. Certain programmatic music can do that too. But unlike other art forms, visual art and music can also have what Mina calls "artistic merit." They can bring you into yourself, away from the everyday world. If the artists have done their jobs supremely well, and if we open ourselves fully to the sounds (or the painting), we can "lose ourselves." We can lose the duality that exists in our dealings with the everyday world between the "me" here, and the "everything that is not me" out there. We can connect with the essential "me;" we can touch our souls.

So for me, and for the musicians in my orchestra, our hands are not objects of interest. They are simply tools that can create and shape sounds, which can provide a most magical, uplifting, exalting, life-affirming, transcendent experience.

-Markand