My housemate and I rarely touch, just accidentally or a pat on the back. I think of family members with whom I’ve only shaken hands yet love, and strangers with whom I’ve danced or been in crowded places with. I think and write about touch every day, both professionally and personally. I’m worried I’m becoming a theorist of touch rather than a practitioner.
Writer Anna Tsing says disturbances are always in the middle of things, never emerging from a harmonious pre-disturbed state. Social Distancing feels like yet another chapter in a wider move towards ever greater social and physical distancing. As we stay further away I find I’m making more eye contact with strangers, especially when we’re in masks. A book on body language says proximity and eye contact can be felt as aggressive, as well as connective. Maybe in crowded London we finally have the space to look one another in the eye.
I do more twitching, shaking and falling in my movement training, anything to experience not moving my body myself. Apparently “touch” in humans, in our nervous systems, divides into touch, heat, pressure, itch, very light touch, pain, stretch and movement across the skin.
There are biting insects around now.
I think about the things that receiving social touch can mean for me, confirmation of my physical and social existence, appropriate levels of hygiene and approachability, attractiveness.
Not everyone is into touch. Not all touch is a positive experience. I think about those who in some contexts may very much appreciate two meters of space, may appreciate greater sensitivity around who and how to touch. Anna Tsing again; “Disturbance can renew ecologies as well as destroy them”.
I weed my vegetables, carefully maintaining a circle of dark soil around each.
I remember that hugs and handshakes symbolically leave you physically vulnerable to the other; empty hand and exposed back. Trust through touch! I think of the solidarity of not touching, us all showing our care for others and ourselves, our common aims, through staying apart. How can we reconcile this with our old cultural symbols: sports teams hugging, protestors linking arms, friends squeezed on sofas, the political handshake photo, the romantic handhold?
I think of touches-yet-to-happen. I walk barefoot. Even alone we swim in touch; our clothes, air, the ground, ourselves.