Kamay ni Franzen

Dahil sa kanyang Parkinson’s, dramatikong naipapakita sa kondisyon ni Alfred Lambert (sa The Corrections/2001 ni Jonathan Franzen) ang intrinsikong kaugnayan ng graspen/hold-grip at comprehendere/grasp-know—samakatwid, ng ‘isip-unawa/panabot‘ at ‘kamay/kamot‘—sa penomenolohiya ng Euro-Amerikanong kabihasnan, kung hindi man ng Homo sapiens sapiens sa kabuuan. Sa kaso ni Alfred, nagkaroon ng radikal na split ang kamay at isip: tila nagkaroon ng sariling-isip ang magalaw na kamay nito. Tolstoy-sa-presisyon ang deskripsyon dito ni Franzen sa karaniwang-buhay ng isang may Parkinson’s:

His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.

Kaya, mula sa isang di-makontrol na kamay ay naging tila pilosopikal ang paglalarawan: ang ‘problema ng pag-iral’ (problem of existence) at ang graspen/comprehendere sa dayalektika ng isip-at-kamay.

Masdan ang ilang beses na pagbanggit dito sa katagang grasp/ungrasp: para kay Alfred, ang buong pag-iral/mundo ay naka-kompres sa simpleng problematiks/metodolohiya ng ‘paghawak (sa mga bagay)’:

But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catchup, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.

Tingnang-muli: Basyong-kamay ni Godard sa lumang post.