Chimerical hands: Selection #9

I took this hand in mine; raising it to my lips, I suddenly noticed that it was transparent and that through it one could see the great garden where the most experienced divine creatures go to live. 

André Breton, Soluble Fish (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism,

trans. Richard Seaver, Helen R. Lane (University of Michigan Press, 1969), 90

From this upper landing of the Teide, where the eye sees no slight blade of grass, where everything might appear so frozen and so dark, I contemplate to the point of dizziness your hands opened above the fire of twigs which we just kindled and which is now raging, your enchanting hands, your transparent hands hovering over the fire of my life. 

André Breton, Mad Love, Translated by Mary Ann Caws 

University of Nebraska Press, 1987

In surrealist photography, the cut off hand is a symbol of the liberated psyche, destabilising all logical meaning. In fact, the First Manifesto of Surrealism states that, ‘It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins’. The glove is a surrealist attribute and poetic subject that conceals at the same time as it dresses. For Germaine Krull and Jean Moral it is both body and object. 

From the very first day, I admired your hand. It hovered about everything intellectual I had tried to construct, as if to render it inane. What a mad thing this hand is, and how I pity those who have never had the chance to place it, like a star, on the loveliest page of a book. 

André Breton, Mad Love, Translated by Mary Ann Caws 

University of Nebraska Press, 1987

Those who have not seen his pencil set on paper –without the slighest hesitation and with an astonishing speed– those amazing poetic equations, and have not ascertained, as I have, that they could not have been prepared a long time before, even if they are capable of appreciating their technical perfection and of judging their wonderful loftiness, cannot conceive of everything involved in their creation at the time, of the absolutely oracular value they assumed.

André Breton, Nadja, 1960, Grove Press, p. 31

The hand’s duality that makes it the ultimate photographic subject. A portrait of a hand doubles it, prolonging the mirror effect already produced by the pair of hands that are symmetrically positioned. Pierre Boucher recreates this duality through reflections, and André Steiner evokes an ambiguous reading through echo and differing scales. 

A woman's hand, your hand in its starry paleness only to help you walk downstairs, refracts its beam into my own. Its slightest touch branches out inside me and in a moment will trace above us those delicate canopies where the inverted sky stirs its blue leaves with misty aspen or willow.

André Breton, Arcanum 17, 1945