There is a small bone in our wrists, the size of a marble, that dictates what it is we are to accomplish with our hands. In primates, the brothers and sisters of our opposable thumbs, the bone is pyramidal, shaped to give grasping strength to the wrist. In humans, the bone is round, allowing us to not only grasp, but to use our digits for intricate movements: to button a shirt, to hold and use complex tools.
This difference in bone shape, a single bone in the center of our wrist, might seem a trivial evolutionary sidenote. But it is in this bone that we are faced with the ethics of how we are to live; the bone propounds life and offers us the possibility of infinite creativity.
And it is with this bone and its variable uses that the body should be worked more than the mind. The body should know sweat and sacrifice through pain and pleasure. The body is the interaction of the spiritual being in all of us with the earthly reality of death and rebirth. But in our age the body has become a burden; if it is not making us money than what good is it? The body has become simply the transport for the mind to and from a location in which we exploit the intricate delicacy the mind gives to this world. We have become creatures not of habit, reacting in a specific way to specific situations, but creatures of sloth and idleness, all because of the was we have collectively decided to use a small bone in the wrist. With the infinitely possible maneuverings of our fingers we created machines to do the work for us, we compounded, and at the cost of the earth and our health, a complex array of steel and wire.
Why are the maladies of our age that of sedentariness? Diseases of the body are all but ghosts. We get synthetic joints not because we wear then out, but because we refuse to use them,. They rot in our bodies, or what we can collectively call our bodies. We have created a culture in which we use our minds to avoid the use of our bodies. In offices and buildings, we sit, for hours on end…
And then here I am. Surrounded by dirt and earth, apple trees and rye. I find that small round bone in my wrist haven't failed me yet. My hand knows contours of soil, of a muscle movement repeated and repeated and repeated. And I know then that all that we have created is naught forgot on the steel and wire, but is inherent in the way we must conform our movements so that we get from the earth what it is that the earth wants to give. Nothing will come free of sacrifice. Nothing will provide without sweat and body. And nothing that comes so easy is not worth it's weight in sand.
My hands are bloodied and blistered, rough as alligator skin, cracked and dry, and with every movement they remind me of this. Why is it that I have chosen this for my hands? Why the sacrifice of a structure millions of years in the making only to break it down day after day, movement after movement?
Marx elucidates that value is never inherent, rather, it can only be transferred. The blacksmith transfers value to steel by the way she molds it, the farmer transfers value to the field by planting specific crops, the mechanic the machine, the author the paper. Value then can never be created, only transferred, as in following the basic condition of matter in this universe. And yet value is not universal. A piano has more value to someone who understands the keys than to someone who does not.
There is nothing wrong with using the mind, for after all we are creative and intelligent creatures, but it should never be held in exaltedness over the body. For those of us who have separated ourselves from the physical toils of existence—the use of our hands to create that which feeds and heals us—has separated themselves from the understanding of creation, the glory and power of a single bone in the wrist. It is because of this bone that we have become the culture we are. It is because of this bone that we can choose to better ourselves, or deny it the respect it deserves and watch ourselves, and our land, become ghosts.
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