Hands

I am watching my left hand draw while I write with my right. It is fascinating in a 'last moments before the truck hits you' kind of way. Over the years, I've accumulated many readings on mind/body dualism, the place of spirit and soul, stuff like that. But when I watch my left hand draw (apparently without conscious connivance), while my right hand types with full obeisance to my conscious mind, I am enthralled, disturbed and vaguely pleased.

I had two ambidextrous grandfathers and so far every single test of my 'hemisphericity' – that odd left-brain vs right-brain concept – shows that I am neither. But perhaps, it is not 'neither', but 'both'. Perhaps my left and right hands really do not know what the other is doing, save through the apperception of my divided brain. Does the left half of my brain talk to my right half much? Or is it merely some kind of sinister dexterity at work?

I am reminded of that famous Escher print which shows two hands apparently drawing each other on some kind of paper manifold. I am also reminded of Castrovalva, the Escher print which shows a universe collapsing into itself without its inhabitants realising it. And when I am reminded of such things, I realise that most cities of light and darkness are illusions, with the clearest and most potent being models of Yeats's passionate intensity – Babels in potential – and the most umbral and sinister being models of the system of the world. And that is it for the world; its right hand is order, its left hand is chaos, and all of it is secularity, all of it on both hands.

So what of the new Jerusalem? Is it built with hands or works or the feet of them who come bearing the gospel of peace? No, it descends, as the Jacobean translators had it, "out of Heaven from God, having the glory of God." And of course, in the middle of it is the Tree of Life, once denied to Adam and Eve and their descendants – but not forever and ever.