Aside form one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of 79 fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, and another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto be Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, you hands somestimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms—if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body—it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
The History of Love: “The Age of Silence”
