Xeriology, My Friend!

Neomission in the old-school classic…

Xeriology, The Study of the Hand

A Manual Science of Neoteric Manumission

My search through 22 years of formal education has brought me back to neoteric manumission – sending forth from the hand, freeing from slavery with what’s handmade – as solipsistic epistemology intended. More poignantly, I’m addressing the need for xeriology, manuology or chereology, all of which don’t exist as true studies of the hand, though chereology and cheremes, the linguistic units of sign language, are established to say the least.

My path to such a discipline of scientific study began when I was listing the areas of academia I feel safe calling myself an expert on. With a little hard work and review, I can participate in any veridical discussion at any level within these fields.

My fields of expertise include psychology, anthropology, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, ethology, sociology and art. I aim to understand the mind and behavior of humans and nonhumans who form groups and symbols using body functions and nerves. To be more specific and because of my experience with such sub-areas, I’ll focus on cognition, linguistics, audition, perception, ethics and manual arts.

It was when I reached ‘manual arts’ in my list of sub-areas I truly felt I was on to something passionate. After a long, treacherous path of unknown steps, I raised my eyes from shoe-gazing and looked to the hands. No one has of yet used the areas described above to give a full account of the hand. Frank Wilson, a neurologist, has written a book called The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language and human culture, but I’m coming at this from the right hemisphere. Not only with manual dexterity, but also manual sinisterity. We’ll get back to the distinction the further we weave through the story or you can go back to one of my earlier works.

To take on something as obvious as the hand seems useless, for it’s one of the most readily used human body parts. We walk less in order for us to drive more and the entire time we’re grasping a circular piece of rubber, flipping a plastic handle up and down, maybe even grabbing a metal shaft and never letting go until we’ve pulled into our driveways. We sit and use a tenth of the length of our hands to type words about the same length as the anatomy used to design coherent language about fingertips. But these descriptions are the obvious functions.

What isn’t obvious are the connections the human hand has to other manually dexterous animals, the art crafted by all these colorful and variant groups, how that art retains a symbolic social status, and how the integration of hand physiology, intra-specific art, social dexterity and an audible manual presentation led to the development of a multidisciplinary study of the hand. Hands aren’t truly Homo sapiens when neurologically somatosensed to the point of antiquating traditional differentiation. The depth of a hand’s being molds many meanings.

With such prosodic fluff, it’s safe to return to neoteric manumission. Years ago, my brother and I developed a theory to free our minds from the intellectual slavery arranged within our nervous systems through years of schooling. It was a framework solution to the questions surrounding our personal searches. Neomission took us in different directions, but we both started with the premise all it took for one to be free, to escape the confines of a cognitive slavery, was to use the hands and send forth a message. The end result of this daunting task, shall I ever finish it, will be a model application for revolution. To see the value and force of manual action.

After assuming this two-handed venture was the passion my heart needed to be held within, I started to see hands everywhere. I’m anarchist and one of my primary influences is represented by a single, sprawling hand. Reach out and grab it, someone will be there to clasp. My father relies on his hands as an electrician. My mother uses her hands as a cosmetologist. They use their hands constantly and tediously. Not to type, not to gesture, not to hold a static object, but to craft a function – either utilitarian or aesthetic. Hence, I aim to join the utilitarian-aesthetic anarchist as xeriology or manuology.

It does depend on where I choose to begin. Do the Greeks or the Romans have grasp of the historical and symbolic importance of the hand? Do the Indians assume balance based on ritual henna? What of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, those adept toolmakers and firestarters not yet Homo sapiens in mind, yet beyond dexterous in body? Is it even reasonable to go back to the Oldowan Chopper? If that’s the case, maybe a more appropriate name should be given to the area of study such as mkonology, a Swahili word representing ‘hand’ from the Tanzanian location where the Leakey’s found Oldowan tools.

The historical basis is too far too fast. One behavior to always remember is the hands are much slower than the brain, though integratively, their speed can conjure hundreds of words a minute, note after note of piano composition, rows of weaved cotton or strand upon strand of twisted noodle. To think and travel distances, from Greece and Italy to Indian and the Near East, then on to Africa, asks for an overwhelming amount of manual space. I recruit long-dead cultures and long-dead anthropologists to fulfill what the hands can’t tell us and shouldn’t be trying to. The point above all else within this ingenious whittle is to not carve away the true form and beauty of the original structure, for we can sure craft amazing works, tools, machines, messages and cures, but it’s to idealize the actual essence of what was destroyed to make something useful or not before it becomes callused.

With an aimed-at target asking for steady control, this isn’t about shooting straight. The description of the hand is about the emotion invoked with each touch, each tactile sensation stirring all the conceptions of stimulation. What is it about our feeling which takes our brains on a journey only our hands have experienced? Why is there such a disconnect between the actuality of the material we maneuver and the fantastical representations we smother in headspace? Is there a a clear and decisive audible language substantive enough to provide the liberty and justice manual dexterity calls for? Can we call it manual sinisterity?

The answers will be written.

Dialectica Rhizoma

Written Actions of Why I’m Me and You’re You

They’re all intellectual riddles. Zeno’s paradoxes. They ask you to attune to many levels at once, so confounded by rhizomatic renderings, Laing would consider them anti-anti-anti. A trilogy of dialectic syllogisms for your bicameral pleasure. The world of Dialectica Rhizoma, where the emotion portrays a bricklayer’s keystone uprooted to reveal a network of underground wits.

Imagine such a space – dark and moist, where life is brewing new plans to unseat the hierarchy of tomorrow’s knowledge before we know what knowledge is. Under the red brick aggregates toppled by the easy shakes, the addicts aren’t allowed. This tunnel is funnel for wormholed delights. You can’t get to the next dimension in space, you’re in space! How does that work? You eat the worms in their holes as they slither like snakes headed for abandonment.

In this place, the funnel tunnel of dependency, words are the playthings of an asker who ignores. We ignore what we know so we can recreate what we do. We do so we can feel the novelty of tasked survival. If we feel something new, we are once again. To be sure is to free a thinker, and once accomplished, Dialectica Rhizoma sprouts from the cracks.

As obvious as an underground residency, there isn’t a locale we aren’t. Raining from the tons of water trapped in our towering cumulonimbi castles, the electric charge will drip an E-bomb into every mass transit circuit containing global consciousness. With a secondary-source medium, second-order, second-degree existence is runner-up. But you can’t run up to our clouds.

The second you jump from the plane of chance, you fall down. Disassembled by the amalgamated synthesis securing your drop. Ouch! Had you been underground or cumulonimbi, the terse surface of cultural admixture wouldn’t be adding blood, bile, skin, hair and other proteinic mutations to its recipe.

No, the moist dark moss topping off our natural forebearance cuddles us into submission. We’re protected by the haunting spires of vertical vortical basilica branches shooting through the brush’s caress. One tree united as its arms sliver a view of the future-saccading success scanning us toward oblivion.

Each ecology becomes a room for open air to wind into and out of. The claustrophobia concretizes caustic cases, the ones inhaling faulty flatulence from spherical sphincters. Too much goes in and too much comes out, but that ain’t hot air you’re breathing. No, that comes from your dirty little mouths! Our mouths are shut until dioxin is dioxide and carbon kills cancer.

It’s a simple homage. I path from title to title, opting for creation while only tapping the source with a fingertip, not until it’s dry. There’s a rhythm and pattern, but the solution is only found when my diffusion spectrum cytoarchitecture is mapped and color sequenced with fractal geometry. Chaos and a pure desire for no rule admonishes the silly little children paid to raise their hand!

There’s militancy and tenacity in Dialectica Rhizoma. We have enough headstrong aptitude that our leaps of metaphor and mutuality feel a hell of a lot like reason and rage. In this together, at a cohesive level of tangentiality, the clouds and roots converge to our will. We will together! All of it! Not our will, but we will!

Self-Manumission

I see my self but am freed by the hand…