Touch is a universe all to itself.
Hold out your hand and touch the night. Can the hand touch the darkness? You would have to try it yourself if you want to know. Or some will insist that it is only the cold you are feeling. And you do not need the hand to feel that. The cold can be felt just as surely with one’s forehead as with one’s bare ass sitting as it would on canvas folding chairs in the middle of the California desert after midnight while the stars glowed bright in the dark moonless night.
But there is a difference between a forehead feeling the cold and the hand outstretched and feeling the night. The difference is palpable. You might say the difference is only imagined. That granted, it is palpable still. And the brain interprets that difference, issues forth its own interpretation, and reassures the remainder of the body and mind. Yes, you can feel the night. It feels this way. The night feels like a slight wind blowing across the universe. It is devoid of malice, devoid of lies, devoid of promises. It is not subject to all these ridiculous laws we establish between ourselves so our lives would be condemned to the eternal damnation of irresolvable complexity. The real world is more simple than that. It is more beautiful. And you can touch it. But first you must learn to touch like a baby who has not yet mastered the sense of seeing nor learned to practice it in the sense of craft.
Can you touch sound? Stretch out your hand. A coyote howls in the distance. There is also a soft rustle in the bushes. It is perhaps a bird or a snake or a little mouse. In the silence of the desert these are sounds that carry in the wind as it envelops your fingers, the skin of your arms, the tufts of hair that grow there. The priest laughed to himself. It must be that strange root in the coffee taking effect. He had not ever felt this way before.
How does a hand feel? Here there is a callous where the thumb holds the pen. At its opposite, on the side of the pointing finger another one. The tips are slightly rougher than the rest of the finger. The palms of the hand are a thick layer of skin. There is a perceptible travel of electricity from this surface. They move to the brain producing a complex of feeling and sensibility. One might perceive the wetness on the surface, the temperature difference. Does her hand feel warm or cold? How does one read this temperature difference? How does one interpret it? Is it acceptance? Denial? Fear?
Touch gave the priest a sense of comfort, innocent and giving. Theirs were hands that had gone through the rough of life. They had healed, forgave, saved, blessed, loved, made signs that others took or received for whatever they needed those signs for. Seldom did they ever touch for themselves, until now in the early-morning cold of the desert before all the stars had gone away, for all they knew, home to their beds wherever those would be.
They stayed in their folding chairs, eyes closed, each to their own loneliness. They only had their hands between them, her left hand, his right. They stayed this way for the longest most silent time, bathing in the comfort of it, neither remembering who reached out first. They might have moved together reaching out across the space that divided them. Until their hands touched slightly at first and then held each other until there was no fear left between them, nothing left that needed to be said.
He might have said, “This might be all that will ever be between us.”
And she might have answered, “I know. We have vows to keep.”
Or he might have repeated Plato, pointing to the unintelligibility of beauty and truth. And then whisper, “This is the only true reality there is, mute, wordless.”
And then she might have answered, “It is more than enough.” But there was only a strange beautiful silence between them as they fell softly into the world of dreams.