Hand jive— By Ivars Balkits
War Monkey by Joseph Verrastro
Homo erectus, homo ergaster, homo sapiens: erect man to working man to wise man – a view of evolution still colored by faith, memes that reflect hierarchies of the temple. Ah, verticality at last!
only to provide labor for the sapient-because-wealthy, living unexamined lives on an unexamined planet.
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Twenty-six hands, left and right, wave from the cave walls. Thirty nine thousand nine hundred
years untouched in old South Sulawesi, Indonesia... prefiguring hand jive:
Bearded men in dresses, blue polka-dotted shifts over tattered brown jackets, red scarves, striped blue-and-white trousers, beribboned matted hair, soot-covered faces, streaming up hill, hats and cudgels held in an attitude of victory, burning the factory down.
And a flute player has left his instrument made of vulture bone.
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Hand jive:
work [powerful, knuckle-scraped], power [acknowledging dependents] [hands clenched in resistance; anger], hypnotism, finger flutter [boog-a-boo, radiating, puppetry], laying on of [healing, conduit of cosmic energy, mass hysteria], touch, holding on of [mother-father, friend-lover, sister-brother], clean fingernails [military, religious training], plebian [dishwashing, wood-chopping], soft [aristocratic, desk-job, maidenly], shake [greetings, tics], pained [arthritic, punished], signaling [given the finger, a-okay, direction].
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Tablet with proto-cuneiform pictographic characters, end of 4th millennium BCE, Uruk III. This is thought to be a list of slaves' names, the hand graphic in the upper left corner representing the owner.
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The children of Ned Ludd hated losing their trade to machines, but they despised even more the shoddy goods produced by assembly-line capitalism. Cheaper textiles and looser weavings and fuzzy leathers reflected poorly on their communities, threatened reputations garnered over hundreds of years for their particular craft. It had identified them. They saw it as the beginning of the end of a more personal, less alienated, connection to work.
Luddism. It did not need a name; people with the same complaint have been around since before Cro-Magnons.
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· show of hands
· hat in hand
· hired hand
· hand to mouth
· get out of hand
· fall into the wrong hands
· hands off!
· hands up!
· have the upper hand
· on one hand... on the other
· in good hands
· join hands
· sleight of hand
· all hands on deck
Is this thing still a machine? I really hate it. I hold myself responsible for its proliferation. I shouldn’t. I worked as an editor at a computer center in academia, before the wider web. It was happening without foresight. No Nature, said Gary Snyder. I know he has a shade of meaning there I've forgotten. Do I care, yes, but not enough at this moment, to get on the Internet and hyper-define my way through to an answer.
I could smell once. I could listen. I could feel.
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Looking over the tall grass of the savannah, our perpendicular ancestors could now forage in hotter temperatures, using less energy than the knuckle-draggers. Less skin exposed to the sun allowed more efficient regulation of internal temperature. Able to do more with less. Living sustainably.
Being upright gave us our hands. Our hands gave us our minds. Our minds gave us religion. Moral technology is the thing now that needs work and we should get on it right away. Programming our minds, automating our compassion, making us be good.
It is not enough to be bipedal; one must move forwardly, uprightly, speaking plainly.
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Things have moved ahead of themselves. You may think I’m old-timey to say that. That I am a stickler and a curmudgeon of quaintness to say that. That I am quaint as old-time machinery.
And I may be that.
We are overburdened with gadgetry and slaves to acquiring it, needless to say. I will say it. From where I sit, on earth, in grass, on the listing cabin porch, it looks like addiction. We justify the addiction to it in that it gets us what we need in terms of security and kicks and third-rate luxuries. It seems essential. Of course, it is not.
Technology and economic advancement and wage slavery and a diminishment of senses physical and commonality go along with it.
All hail the stocking frame.
A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives part of the year in Ohio but mostly in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published by Vernacular Journal, Meetinghouse Magazine, Mercurius Magazine, Pnyx (Ozymandias Project), Punt Volat, Otoliths, Sulφur Surrealist Jungle, and Seneca Review.