José Saramago
Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting or a sculpture, or for a piece of music or literature, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen. Having sent an order to the hands and fingers, it believes, or pretends to believe, that the task will then be completed, once the extremities of the arms have done their work. The brain has never been curious enough to ask itself why the end result of this manipulative process, which is complex even in its simplest forms, bears so little resemblance to what the brain had imagined before it issued instructions to the hands to make an engraving, for example. It should be noted that the fingers are not born with brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see. For although the eyes themselves are, of course, important, equally important is what lies hidden in what they see. That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed. Anything in the brain-in-our-head that appears to have an instinctive, magical or supernatural quality - whatever that may mean - is taught to it by the small brains in our fingers. In order for the brain-in-the-head to know what a stone is, the fingers first have to touch it, to feel its rough surface, its weight and density, to cut themselves on it. Only long afterwards does the brain realise that from a fragment of that rock one could make something which the brain will call a knife or something it will call an idol. The brain-in-the-head has always lagged behind the hands, and even now, when it seems to have overtaken them, the fingers still have to summarise for it the results of their tactile investigations, the shiver that runs across the epidermis when it touches a metal tool, the lacerating sharpness of the graver, the acid biting into the plate, the faint vibration of a piece of paper laid flat, the orography of textures, the crosshatching of fibres, the alphabet of the world in relief. And then there are colours. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colours that one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from what one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colours it calls elementary and complementary, but is immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the ineffable, the incommunicable, for the still nascent colour which, with the eyes' often bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does - a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the colour and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of a wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or golden or grey or any other shade in between, but then along come the fingers and with one discreet, ancient gesture, a gesture of gathering in, they pluck from the sand all the colours of the world. What seems unique is plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colours that have already been named, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experienced in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is, as we know, an archaeology of humanity. What these engravings hide and show is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Text from the catalogue from David de Almeida exhibition at Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2002 [original 1999]