A Mere Gesture

By Crispin Sartwell

The new book A Field Guide to Gestures, which looks a lot like the Golden Guide to Birds, is presented as something practical. Covering a wide range of human gesticulations - from the abusive to the flirtatious - from the "up yours" to the "kiss kiss" - it could indeed have some actual uses, especially if you're caught trying to summon a waiter in Morocco, or interpret the bow of your Japanese host.

More likely, though, it will make you laugh a very particular laugh: the slightly embarrassed yet genuinely amused laughter of a person who suddenly becomes conscious of what they're doing, how they look, what they mean.

Consider the "hand purse": the tips of all four fingers and thumb come together at a point and are shaken as one," with the hand held vertically before you and the back of the thumb facing one's body. According to the Field Guide, "the hand purse is most often employed unknowingly to advance a fine point in an argument." Its habitat is as follows: "commonly seen throughout the world, but most often in Italy and areas of the United States where there are large communities of Italian-Americans, such as New York City and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania."

As this book makes clear, the semiotics of the gesture is rich: richer than we're usually aware. The hand purse, for example, which indeed "pushes the argument along" and is often accompanied by a very particular grimace, is not only part of argumentative rhetoric, but is a sign of cultural affiliation: you're from Philly; you're Italian; you're proud.

The key term in the Confucian philosophy of ancient China is "li": the rites. Confucius holds that the proper performance of ceremony is the key to social order and indeed to human happiness. So far, so good. But what he demands in the performance of li seems superhumanly difficult. You must execute the ceremony in exactly the correct way, but also with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity.

The vocabulary of gesture shows that all of that is definitely possible. The finger purse is an element of social cohesion, and it is at its most perfect - as are many human actions (the slam dunk, for instance) - when it is completely unconscious, when you do it without thinking about it. If you think about the finger purse, your gesture becomes somehow stilted, just behind the beat, and it looks wrong, like you're trying to be something or someone you're not.

To see this problem at its most severe, consider people who are trained to gesture in a certain way at media school. Watch Al Gore emphasize bullet points with his hand, or a newly-minted sportscaster try to do that two-armed chop as he describes a play. These are sad transgressions of the li of our culture.

Of course, there are also quite conscious gestures, especially ones of fairly recent vintage, such as "raise the roof" or the Spockish "live long and prosper." And there are ones that fall in between. When you decide to flip the bird, you're consciously insulting someone, and yet you probably give the gesture precisely the right scope and English because you took it in with your mother's milk, because it is a fundamental ceremony of our culture.

Consider the "blah blah blah," sometimes termed the "yap yap" in which the hand speaks in its fundamentally repetitive way. Or ponder the "throat slash," the "choke," the "gun to head," the "duh" wherein the heel of the hand strikes the forehead: shimmering, lovely, quasi-conscious things, packed with meaning. I only wish they were available in newspaper columns, though the emoticon bids fair to add gesture to the written language.

At any rate, the Field Guide to Gestures, with all its delights, is also not without its dangers. I find that I haven't gotten off a perfect gun to head since I cracked it. I'm thinking too much.

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Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of language and History."