The Feedback of Things
Today, while going back through old photo files, I came across an image I have no particular memory of taking. An offhand shot, experimental, discarded — my own hand caught in the frame. For some reason it stayed with me, and I found myself thinking about working with hands.
Breakfast these days is steamed vegetables — carrots, eggplant, broccoli. When I bring the knife down, there’s a faint tension in my fingertips, but what I notice more is the satisfaction of the cut, the rebound from the chopping board. Cooking is always a hand thing. And hands are remarkable in how completely they reinvent themselves. Gripping a knife, the hand becomes a solid handle. Pinching salt, it becomes a precision instrument. Washing rice, it turns into something like a large paddle. Whatever it touches, whatever resistance it meets, the hand reshapes itself instantly and gets on with it.
If you work at a computer, you might relate to this. Personally, I’ve never got on with a mouse. But typing — that I enjoy. Ten fingers finding their own keys, each movement slightly different from the last, and then the press: that bottoming-out, the small thud that comes back up through the fingertip. It reminds me of the chopping board. A mouse, by contrast, just slides. The hand barely has to think. It bores me.
On cameras: the old film cameras pushed back when you pressed the shutter. Mirror shock, it was called — the vibration from the mirror flipping up was strong enough to blur the shot if you weren’t careful. I miss that feeling. The weight of it, the definite thud returning into your hand. Smartphones give you nothing — a sound effect where the shutter used to be. Digital SLRs are moving the same way, electronic shutters becoming the norm, the physical response quietly disappearing.
I’m not looking to go back. I’m not reaching for the analogue out of some instinct to resist. But I do think there’s something in us that quietly wants to feel things push back — to know, through our hands, that we’ve actually touched something. Cooking, typing, taking photographs: usually I do all of it without thinking. That’s fine. That’s how it should be. But the smartphone gives you a world without friction — smooth, efficient, frictionless in every direction. Convenient, yes. And yet, as that feedback fades from our fingertips, something else fades too. Some sense of actually being here, of mattering to the moment. The sound of a knife on wood. The click of a key. The old thud of a mirror. These small resistances were, I think, what told us we were present.
In the flow of convenience, it slips past before you notice — the small friction under your hands. A hand that can become anything: that touches, reshapes, absorbs the push-back. I think I keep reaching for that feeling, without quite knowing I am.