Touch

In Morocco I sat down on a rug and wept.

Not for any reason I could have given you at the time. The shop was warm. The man was patient in the way of people whose profession is patience. He had unrolled a dozen of them across the floor, one over another, building a stack of colour and weight, and I had made appreciative noises at each one because that is what you do. And then I sat down. And my palms went flat against the pile, and something in my chest broke open, and I sat there on a stranger's floor and cried.

He did not comment. He knew exactly what had happened. That is how he knew he had sold it.

It cost more than I had. I want to be honest about that, because the tidy version of this story leaves it out. I could not afford that rug. I bought it anyway, on a payment plan, in a foreign country, in a season of my life when the arithmetic did not work — and the promise I made to myself as I signed was not that I would enjoy it. The promise was that I would become the woman who has this rug. As if the rug were a destination. As if I had to earn my way up to a floor covering.

It is still rolled up. Years later. I have never put it down in a room.

I have always known things through my hands. Before I knew anything else, I knew textiles — the difference between linen that has been washed a hundred times and linen that is pretending, the particular cool of silk against the inside of a wrist, the way a good wool receives your weight rather than resisting it. I know floors through my feet. I know a room before I have looked at it. This is not a charming quirk. It is my primary instrument, and it has been since I was a child in a rock garden, running my fingers over surfaces and sorting them by feel.

What most people do not know — because it does not fit the shape they have decided I am — is the other side of it. I am a certified somatic bodyworker. I have been trained to put my hands on people. And I can tell you that when you do, the body speaks first. It speaks long before the person does, and it does not lie, and it does not care what story the mouth is preparing.

The body knows before the mind does. It always has. The mind is the one that arrives late, out of breath, with an explanation.

A shoulder held a half inch too high tells me what a woman is bracing against before she has told me her name. A jaw. A held breath. The particular tightness of a person who has been the one who copes. I have felt histories in bodies that their owners had stopped being able to remember. This is not mysticism. It is the plainest thing in the world. Tissue keeps records.

Here is the complication I live inside.

I am a person informed by her senses. That is my ease, my fluency, my way in — I understand the world by feel, and I always have. And I am equally a person with the mind of an engineer. As a child you could put me in a rock garden and I would be perfectly happy for hours, because I was sorting: textures, patterns, systems, how the pieces sat against each other, what held and what gave. Both things were happening at once. The hand that wanted to feel the stone and the mind that wanted to know why the stack did not fall.

I have never found a room that wanted both.

You are permitted, in this economy, to be the sensory one or the structural one. The artist or the operator. The woman who feels things or the woman who builds things. Multiplicity is tolerated as a bio line and punished as a practice, because multiplicity is slow — it requires that you hold two ways of knowing at the same time and let them argue, and nothing in the way we work now has any patience for the argument.

Efficiency short-circuits it. That is the honest word. Not evil, not conspiracy — just efficiency, doing what efficiency does, which is to look at any process containing a pause and identify the pause as waste.

But the pause was never waste. The pause was where the knowing happened.

Every tradition worth anything is built out of pauses. The rug on that floor took months. Someone's hands did that — sat with it, held the tension, made ten thousand small decisions no machine would have made. The perfumer waits weeks while a formula macerates, because the thing is not finished when the ingredients are combined; it is finished when they have had time to become one another. Cure the meat. Rest the dough. Stir the drink for forty seconds and do not lose your nerve at twenty.

And then we take these forms — every one of them built out of patience — and we bring them to market, where the only question is how fast, and how much, and can it scale. I feel that split constantly. I live on both sides of it. I am the person who knows what the slow way gives you, and I am also the person who has to make payroll.

So I have stopped asking whether we should slow down, because that question is useless and slightly obscene.

Here is the real one.

Because slowness is not a virtue evenly distributed. It is a resource, and it is allocated, and the allocation is not an accident. There are people for whom stillness is a birthright and people for whom it is a risk. The woman who cannot stop moving is not less enlightened than the woman on the retreat. She is differently exposed. She has correctly assessed that the moment she stops, something will be taken.

I know this because I have been both women, and I am, on any given Tuesday, still both.

And this is what makes touch the most political of the senses, though nobody ever says so. To be touched, you have to stop. You have to let something reach you. You have to be, for a moment, unable to run — and a body that has learned it cannot afford to be caught will not let you anywhere near it, no matter how much it is aching to be held.

That is not resistance to pleasure. That is intelligence. That is a body doing its job.

The work is not to override it. The work is to build the conditions under which it agrees to stand down — which takes far longer than anyone tells you, and cannot be rushed, and is itself a slow practice available mostly to people who already have some safety. I am aware of the cruelty of that. I do not have an answer for it. I only know that the first thing I ever did with that rug was cry, and the second thing I did was tell myself I would deserve it later.

Later has been a very long time.