Hypermnesia
On the island of monstrosities, they found a home from home. After doldrums and diminishing rations, after one god-cursed mishap after the next it seemed like the promised land. A blessed place of over-abundance, ripe for over-indulgence, for rest and recuperation after their endeavours, to assuage their anxieties, tranquillise the traumas of their arduous voyage, and take the edge off the flashbacks to the trampling of Troy, the unbridled gory fury they’d unleashed after ten years of the siege. This fertile island was a balm to their returning terrors, transferences, and projections, which went flitting between silver birches and loitered at the thresholds of caves. The lack of strife unspooled the best of them, and their worst found the flames of hatred could no longer keep them whole. There they began to remember how they had once been men, their reflections in the lagoon when they stooped to drink wept for their shouldered losses, and left them snorting, grunting, snuffling, grubbing, whining for the selves they had put to the sword and torch. Some dug burrows to bury themselves from shame, some trailed their displacements into the wild forest thinking to tame it, gathering dropped mother of pearl, coral, amber and ebony along the way, and were never seen again. One by one they were reduced, until only their leader, he who bears the greatest grudge, remained. And of course, he blamed her for the loss of his crew, Bitch! Cow! Vixen! Cougar! Sow! - his mates all gone to ground, as if it was by the power of her own hand, or the withered fist strung on a chain around her neck that had commanded their transformation and not their own undoing, poor lambs. He went wandering the shoreline, spirit-levelling the horizon with eyes like washed up jellyfish. It took him a month to empty himself into the breakers before he came crawling back to her stone house like a pale moon grub to be scooped up in her palm and stroked into knowing.
The Hand in Renaissance Painting
Sometimes the hand is placed upon the chest, or else the hand rests on the flank, otherwise the hand points upward to the sky or downward to the earth as if in blessing, or perhaps the hand is shown grasping an object or holding a person. Aside from these common positions there are times when it is seemingly caught mid-gesture, curiously contorted as if surreptitiously photographed rather than painstakingly painted, enacting a secret sign possibly conveying esoteric meanings. The unnatural hand position is likely an artistic device or a symbolic hallmark rather than a pathologic depiction of syndactyly which appears in hundreds of paintings by artists such as Titian, Bronzino, El Greco, Parmigianino, François Clouet, Hans Memling, Anton Raphael Mengs and Luis el Divino Morales, whose subjects adopt this awkward position. Some scholars speculate that the gesture was a physical sign conveying satanic connections, membership to masonic guilds, cryptic cults, sibylline sects or to the society of the Illuminati. The hand forms a well-known shape in which the thumb with the second and third fingers are held touching each other and separated from the fourth and the fifth fingers, conceiving a fan of sorts, not dissimilar to the Kohanic Benediction. Others have pointed out that it resembles a gesture recommended by Saint Ignacio de Loyola, the first Superior General of the Jesuits’ Order, to be carried out as part of believer’s spiritual devotions while adhering to the motto perinde ac cadaver – "as if a dead body".
Main de Gloire
Now open, lock!
To the Dead Man's knock!
Fly, bolt, and bar, and band!
Nor move, nor swerve,
Joint, muscle, or nerve…
Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Manor,
‘The Nurses’ Story: The Hand of Glory’, The Ingoldsby Legends, 1837.
Among the wintering trees of Pannett Park, overlooking the cobbled quay and light daubed harbour, pier and breakwater, where Mudlark hands grubbed and squelched in a low tide’s silt with the Abbey stones across the Esk laid bare to the hag-moon’s glare, that tippy-toes across terracotta roof-tiles in earshot of the seafoam's gurning chorus at the cliff’s boulder-littered base, stands Whitby Museum, run by The Literary and Philosophical Society, a learned society and registered charity, established in 1823. The crone moon rides upon strips of cloud, splashes through frosting puddles. She has a whale-bone crook for the tapping on doors, rapping upon window shutters as she goes. Sometimes she enters a home to unspool a dream: a clown in a Cadillac, the dead come home from the storm, bipolar amphetamine spirals on the waltzers. These morsels she shoves in her pockets for later. She limps up the stairs to the doors of the building opened in 1931, passes through them light as a draught, past the kiosk and into ramshackle galleries, into the heavily hoarded silence of fossilised prehistory, curios of Victorian invention, the Zeplin III dark matter detector, Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator that employs leeches to predict the coming of storms. Granny Moon’s quicksilver sheen is reflected in the glass-eyes of stuffed creatures fixed in poses of Bacchanal abandon. Time here is a mongrel bitch on heat, anxious, clingy, fidgety, nervous, oestrogen levels rising in anticipation of the release of eggs. And there, laid out, behind the glass of a display case, resting like a shrunken workman’s discarded latex-coated gripper glove is the heinous, horrid, hell-spawned hand of disputed occult origin. The crone shuffles closer. The hand is said to weep on certain nights, the darkest and most dreary, it is said to weep from a single eye that opens in its palm, it weeps for all the world, a world of woe, strife, wounded pride. The moon cradles the hand, rocks it, coos to it, Let go, let it go, collects each sorrow one by one in her own withered palm, carries them like gemstones back through the night, out of the park, across the river bridge, climbs the ninety-nine steps to Caedmon’s Cross and hurls them out across the sky as starlight. Then she’ll step off the cliff-top to fall and sink into the surge, taking all of her stories and all of her secrets into the bone-numbing sea. Ssshh!
Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough. He has published numerous collections of poetry and several pamphlets, most recently: When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021) And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur (The Black Light Engine Press 2020), Civil Insolencies (Smokestack 2019).
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