About the Hand, II: The Fist

From Hand to Fist

   Since we are all owners, just about everyone knows what hands are like; I have had two of them throughout a very long life. But that doesn’t make it easy to give an account of their structure. Which is complicated, with lips and tongue the most complicated human body-part, at least of the visible part of the body.
   Let me start out by noting that a hand has a front and a back. (It is both much more difficult but also revealing to provide descriptions without using pictures.) The palm, here just called “the front,” is the hand’s working surface; just about all of the hand’s actions revolve around that palm. The thumb has two joints working in the palm’s direction, while the other four fingers have three each. When all sixteen of these joints are as bent as much as they can be, the hand becomes a fist.

   If we consider the fact that hands are attached to arms, three additional joints must be accounted for to describe what has happened to the front legs of our answers. From the bottom up, they are the wrist, a most complicated joint, by which the hand is attached to the arm, then the elbow which more or less bisects the arm and moves only in one direction and finally, that portion of the shoulder, directionally very versatile, by which the arm is attached to the body.

   In these three short paragraphs we have fully described one of the most important pieces of physical equipment that distinguishes us as human beings. In the next sections I want to begin giving an overview of what hands-at-the-end-of arms can do. But will close this one with some comments about the stage when this apparatus is least a hand, namely when all the joints of the fingers are pressed into the palm. When that is done, the hand is made into a fist. (The literature refers to clenched fists; though I confess that I don’t know what a fist would be that is not clenched.
   Boxing, fair or foul, is the fist’s best known function. The oomph is produced by the arms and the fist is essentially passive, as is a hammer that is used to drive in a nail. Arms, in both cases, do the work. Fists are thus surely important, but their repertory is certainly limited. Banging on a door to be heard, using a fist to open something or shut it and more such. Fists, as agents of percussion, play a role in music, if only a marginal one.

   But there are significant symbolic functions of the fist—from the raised fist of the communist salute to that of the fist more extensively raised and thereby denoting Black Power. There is much on the internet on this symbolic subject, always identified as clenched fists. OK, although I note again, unclenched fists are not fists at all. So now I return to the subject of hands.