Fingerpainting

My brain cannot communicate without my fingers. My fingers are the actual voice of my brain. It is they that relate my thoughts in full. My brain thinks these thoughts in an amorphous sort of form, the thoughts rattle around for a while, and then proceed to my shoulders and down my arms, thence to the hands and finally to the fingers, which then press the proper keys on a typewriter or a laptop or a piano or whatever medium is required for expression. 

Without my fingers, I cannot think. Without the interpretation that happens in the fingers the result of my cogitation is clunky, homely, half-baked, repulsive. 

Writing is like using a Ouija board. You set your fingers on the disc at the center and you wait for words to appear. 

Writing is like fishing. You cannot generally see what is beneath the surface of the lake, but you know that it is there. Your hands, your fingers do all of the work, for it is they which hold the fishing pole and feed out the line. 

The trouble is, my fingers don't work anymore. The fingers on my right hand are consistently arthritic, curled in toward the palm. They no longer think. They are mere dumb appendages. And my left hand is, in the first place, only a left hand after all, and secondly often numb. I use voice type now. And that's what I'm saying. I am saying that this, that everything, is not what I meant to say. It is a stillborn version of what I meant to say, or rather of what my fingers would have said had I still their use at my disposal.

Long ago, in my first couple years of college, I was a music major and my instrument was the piano. I was never very good at reading music. Its translation from the printed notes on the sheet of music to the keys of the piano was painstakingly slow. And yet once the information had traveled in full from my head to my fingers, it was thereafter imprinted in the memory of my fingers. They would play the piece automatically, no longer requiring my eyes upon the page of music. In fact, I did not look at the printed page at all once the information had been stored in my fingertips.

At the end of every term, we would have to perform a piece on our chosen instrument for the department head. I remember approaching the piano on these occasions with nervous trepidation, thinking I don't know this piece, I cannot read the music if I get stuck in the middle. And yet, my fingers had no need of my brain, or of my eyes. Astoundingly, they performed the piece without me. Empty-headed, I merely watched, and thought My goodness, how marvelous. 

Gosh I miss my fingers. I miss the things they used to say.