WHAT ROGER Antill called his ‘philosophy’ cannot be taken seriously. Unlike his brother he had not spent years in study or sustained thinking on the subject; aside from Wesley’s drafts in blue ink he had hardly read a single sentence on a philosophical subject. Roger was a plain-thinking pastoralist running thousands of acres of merino sheep. He had dirt under his fingernails. Even the way his ‘philosophy’ came to him out of the blue has an amateur ring to it. Driving with Erica into town, Roger slowed and stopped in the shade under a tree. For a moment he rested his hands over the steering wheel and said nothing (gathering his thoughts). Dirt road, nobody for miles. With her big-city experience, Erica expected the sudden clammy-hand moment. He did – in an unexpected way. He reached across and took Erica’s hand in order, he said, to demonstrate what he considered to be, not just a philosophy, a practical philosophy.
He had noticed that the hand, everybody’s hand, followed the wishes of the mind, that is, thoughts, theories, moral positions, the passions et cetera. The hand carries out the wishes of a decision; it is the practical rendition of a philosophy. The hand wields the sword, squeezes the trigger, does the strangling, signals the execution; both are raised in surrender. It waves goodbye. Any theory of the passions is eventually performed by the hand – hands and fingers wandering over the other body. How many bones in the hand? Twenty-seven. All at work in the service of a thought, a philosophical position. We shake hands. We work with our hands. Roger Antill didn’t include agriculture, believing it is not philosophical enough. The pen is held in a hand. Philosophy depends for its creation on the hand. (Dreams and psychoanalysis do not! – Sophie.) Logic via medicine, the surgeon’s hand. And music – the composing and conducting of it, and the playing, or holding the microphone. How is the camera aimed, clicked or rolled? Counting on fingers – I bet it was the source of arithmetic. Signing of documents, applying to the face ideals of beauty; zipping up our bloody trousers. The hands of the clock. Hands cut off as punishment.
Erica on the broad seat of the truck didn’t know whether to listen politely or laugh or nod encouragement – or come in early, and demolish his idea, shoot it down in flames, even if it was tentative, for this theory of hands, or whatever it was, had no philosophical basis. It was little more than detailing the obvious. (In Sophie’s opinion, Roger’s theory revealed a condition of obsessive disorder. Please go find a therapist, now.) But at the moment when Roger took her hand, and she allowed it to rest in his, a small warm bird, Erica, for all her training and devotion to logic, which over time encouraged a certain severity, her remote and masculine side, softened, and she proceeded to listen. He went on listing examples of hand-movements. She felt different. Something was going on. And through the windscreen and at the side remained the landscape, warm, golden and still, which she hadn’t until then seen before.