I have a big head and a small body. This makes me look strangely asymmetrical, an impression that’s enhanced by a more general physical asymmetry. One ear higher than the other, a damaged twisted nose, one eye larger than the other, one shoulder pulled permanently lower than the other . . . experience and age will bend you.
As I type this, I notice that after several years of retirement my hands became more slender. I’ve always had small hands to go with the small body, but now they look more like what I’d call office-hands, if you don’t peer closely enough to see the hammer-split thumbnails, the scars, and the deformed left index finger from a job accident that nearly took it off.
I still regularly scuff, puncture, burn, and cut my hands because I cook a good deal and I fish. Their still very vascular hands, but I’ve always had ropey veins. They look like office hands because I can remember when I was doing very physical labor for a few years after I’d finished my Army career — landscaping, cutting stone, and deconstruction (taking houses down by hand to re-use materials). My hands then were more “bitten” and thicker, so thick sometimes that I could barely close them in the morning.
Hands are muscles, and gripping tools all day, yanking, pulling, digging, and such, thicken those muscles. When you look at migrant workers’ hands, no matter their size, they’re hands that could pop a tennis ball. I remember when I was quite young — in the 1950s — that this was the norm among most of the men I knew and a fair number of the women. On the other hand — and you can look at old photos to confirm this — very few men and hardly any women had the inflated gym-assisted musculature that’s become common now. The arms that went with the hands weren’t rounded-up into show-muscles, even if they were wiry and vascular with work.
Now what I see is the reverse. Inflated arms tipped with soft, de-muscularized office-hands.
History is marked out on bodies. A manager has more opportunity to build a gym-body than a migrant worker. Work and strength have been, in some sense, separated. The body — for those with the space and time — becomes a project, a hobby, a sexual display.
I’ve used gyms. At some point, they always throw me off. It’s the mirrors, I think, and the presence of so many human beings who pretend the rest of the human beings aren’t there while they relate to the mirrors.
I’m an over-thinker. The hamster wheel won’t stop, one reason I’ve struggled with insomnia most of my life. And I found myself looking at this arm-hand anomaly, wondering what it meant, or why I couldn’t take my mind off it. It seemed somehow fraudulent, though that had more to do with my own unfortunate habit of judging people than whatever mysterious reasons drove these people to pump up. I’ve often judged myself a fraud, so . . .
I’ve traveled a lot, especially when I was in the Army, to places abroad that don’t attract tourists. An acquaintance of mine from our Special Forces days said, “We had the world’s worst travel agent.” It gives one the chance to see — and remember somehow— what humans, human bodies, actually look like “in the wild.” The strong hands and smaller arms are the norm. The only place I’d ever see gym-bodies— with a very few genetic exceptions — was in the cities, and then among the affluent. I saw lots of hard bodies, work bodies, endurance bodies, tough bodies . . . but not the stylized bodies of body-obsessed projects.
They embarrassed me at times. They also called me back, chastening me with a “memory” of something before my time.
What is it telling me, this imbalance I feel when I see the massive arms tapering into what seems in comparison impossibly narrow wrists and office-hands? Am I wrong in looking through this image and seeing something epochal? Something sinister and machinic? Am I over-thinking?
Marvelous observation --- the city bodies are designed -- for show but not for use.
I have a similar reaction to obvious instances of cosmetic procedures in women.