Brilliant Thoughts by Ashleigh Brilliant Born London, 1933. Mother Canadian. Father a British civil servant. World War II childhood spent mostly in Toronto and Washington, D.C. Berkeley PhD. in American History, 1964. Living in Santa Barbara since 1973. No children. Best-known for his illustrated epigrams, called “Pot-Shots”, now a series of 10,000. Email ashleigh@west.net or visit www.ashleighbrilliant.com
Keep in Touch
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bought this for you,” I said. “It came in green and yellow, so you get first choice.” Pat opened the package and took out the hooded see-through Hefty-baglike poncho with the Waimea Valley logo on it that I had paid six bucks for. “Yellow,” she said… excitedly. She had suggested we spend her celebration day hiking to Waimea Falls, even though it was raining, and even though I had thoughtfully suggested instead looking for the “parrot guy” in Honolulu so we could get a cute portrait with large live birds standing on our heads. “How far to the falls?” I asked the ticket guy. “About thirty minutes,” he said. “Each way?” “Yup. Longer, if you take the side excursions to the Ku’ula fishing shrine, the agricultural terraces, and Kauhale site. Waimea is a wahi pana. Many generations of kahuna nui once lived here, including Hewahewa, high priest under Kamehameha.” “Ah, right…” He handed me a map and a bird identification guide. “Any cockatoos or large green parrots for photo ops?” “Nooo, but I have some good news.” He smiled. “You won’t be needing to slather yourselves in sunscreen today.”
It was a nice walk, albeit uphill. Pat, the historian, loved it. And I took photos of monkeypod trees, hibiscus, and grass-roofed huts between the raindrops. The 30-foot-tall falls themselves were roaring. Sometimes you can swim in the pool below the falls, but today it was muddy brown and moving really fast. It would have been fun to see someone getting tossed about like a slipper sock in the dryer, but no luck. Halfway back down the trail, a shuttle bus passed us. “They have a shuttle!” “Let’s go back to Waikiki,” Pat said, “and go to Duke’s on the beach for mai-tais.” “You got it! My treat.” “Perfect. Jon and Patrick are meeting us there.” I felt my wallet thinning, but hey it was better than going to the Honolulu Hallmark. After copious drinks and appetizers, and one of those Hawaiian sunsets with the large clouds, I paid the tab and we walked back through the International Marketplace toward our hotel. “So, was this one of the best B-Day/ V-Days ever?” I asked. “Depends,” Pat said. “Did you buy me any neon undergarments?” “Nope.” “Then yes,” she said. “It was per•MJ fect.”
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ne of my earliest memories was of somebody saying to me, in a kindly tone, “MUSTN’T TOUCH!” I don’t recall anything else about the incident – but those words – and even that tone of voice – have lingered with me as a mild rebuke whenever I’ve been tempted to put a finger someplace where I knew it shouldn’t be. All of our many “sense” words are connected with the idea of feeling. And you need not be a neurologist to know that of all our senses, the sense of touch is the most crucial to our survival as a species. After all, what would sex be without it? And those widely-distributed touch-sensitive nerves are, of course, our bodies’ primary means of contact with the external world. Nobody knows more about that than blind people. But what, after all, does this sense of touch tell us? The most important question it answers is: “Is anything there?” If there is, it can provide us with much information about size, shape, texture, temperature, moistness, sharpness, hardness, density, and pliability. But let’s not go too far here. Most of us have probably come upon the parable about the Blind Men and the Elephant. A group of blind men explore an elephant, having no advance idea what it is. One, feeling the trunk, thought it must be a thick snake. One, whose hand reached its ear, said it seemed like some kind of fan. A third, grasping its leg, thought the elephant was a pillar, like a treetrunk. Yet another, feeling its side said that the elephant must be a wall, and finally the blind man at the tail was sure that the elephant was a rope. This story, of course, is about much more than the limitations of our sense of touch. The elephant is cosmic reality, which we puny mortals can scarcely comprehend, except within the bounds of our own experience – which is bound to result in distortions and misapprehensions of the truth. “Keeping in touch” is our metaphor for maintaining contact, which is itself only another metaphor for the same concept. In fact our very word “tact,” with all its implications of sensitivity to persons, places, and situations, has its origins in the concept of touch. When Michelangelo, about five
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centuries ago, depicted God giving life to Adam (in his famous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) it was the sense of touch which was the dominant symbol, with two hands reaching out towards each other, two fingers not yet quite touching. One of my own early illustrated epigrams was only four words long. It said “I HOPE YOU’RE FEELING” – and as an illustration, I could think of nothing more appropriate than a close-up rendering of those same two hands. (It may interest you to know that when my very literal-minded father first saw this message, he couldn’t understand it. His comment was “feeling what?” In a way, I could sympathize with this reaction, because, conventionally, those four words were always followed by at least one more word, such as “better,” to complete the thought. But my contribution, by leaving “feeling” dangling, was to give it a whole new meaning of its own.) Which brings us back to the sense of Touch. Modern medicine and dentistry have developed means of de-sensitizing certain “local” areas of our body in order temporarily to deaden the sensation of pain. But it is not only pain which we cease to feel in those areas. They become totally numb, and the numbness can sometimes annoyingly take some time to wear off. Our word “anesthesia” does not mean, as you might think “without pain.” It means “without feeling.” “Esthetics” relates to the whole concept of personal feelings, particularly with regard to pleasurable responses to art and beauty. One of the first modern anesthetics – nitrous oxide – does indeed not only suppress pain, but can also create a sense of hilarity – hence its sobriquet of “Laughing Gas.” When properly used in a medical or dental setting, it can allow the patient to remain conscious, while still suffering no painful feelings. And then there is the handshake – an ancient form of greeting, with much symbolic value, beyond merely revealing the absence of a weapon. Today, however, with sanitation so potent an issue, we are unhappily conflicted between appreciating the warmth of a friendly grasp, and fearing possible contagion. Yes, it’s a touching dilemma. (Or, as the sport of fencing has taught us to say, •MJ “touché!”) MONTECITO JOURNAL
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