By The Landlord
“These fingers of mine, they got brains in 'em. You don't tell them what to do - they do it.” – Jerry Lee Lewis
“If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.” – Robert Schumann
“You treat the air as a canvas and the paint is the chords that come through your fingers, out of the keyboard.” – Pharrell Williams
“Music lets my fingers talk with a voice of their very own.” – Anthony T. Hincks
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov
“My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist.” – Bette Davis
“It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.” – Andy Warhol
“The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.” – Marc Chagall
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” – Seamus Heaney, Digging
“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.” – Louis Nizer
“There might be 1 finger on the trigger, but there will be 15 fingers on the safety catch.” – Harold MacMillan
“The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.” – William Hazlitt
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth
We use them constantly, and take them for granted, but what miracles of evolution they are, these bony, bendable, grasping, poking, stroking, vertebrate, prehensile extremities with knuckles, unique skin markings, and cleverly dexterous, distal, intermediate and proximal phalanges.
I really got to grips (or didn’t as I’ll explain) with how much we need fingers and thumbs last Saturday night. I was at a full-on medieval-themed fancy dress party with DJs and live bands, and decided, for no particular reason than for a laugh, to go dressed as the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Complete with the various paraphernalia - helmet, sword, etc, my left arm was tucked away, hidden inside my garment for the whole evening, with just some red cloth and strips of red crepe paper spilling out in its place, representative of comedy blood. It was quite a commitment, and I’m relieved I didn’t go for a look involving any further missing limbs. It was bad enough missing half of my available digits, and made everything very difficult, from paying for drinks, to toilet trips, to filming anything on my phone.
But we very much live in a thumb-swiping, finger-oriented world, one made essential by that opposable digit with particularly share with apes, and has helped us create and manipulate so much of our daily existence. It’s ironic, and yet also appropriate then that to “be all fingers and thumbs” also means to be clumsily out of control.
So then, this week our theme is lyrically all these articulate tools of the hand. Hands, then, yes, is a topic that’s come up before, as are feet (while toes can be a separate topic again), all referring to those in other and general ways, yet this time we’re going more specific to the five/ten digits, as central as possible to theme, whether in literal, metaphorical or idiomatic senses.
Evolved from our lobe-finned fish ancestors who first crawled on land, we still share fingers with a variety of other creatures who long since went different ways in the world, from lizards to frogs or squirrels, but it is with various monkey species, and particularly the great apes, who also have fingernails and finger prints, that we of course still share very similar hands of four fingers and an opposable thumb, with skin that’s the most touch sensitive of the body aside from the genitals.
Handy comparisons: Apes and humans, squirrels, frogs and the aye-aye, with especially long fingers for delving …
Musicians rely heavily on their fingers, and whether you play an instrument or simply use fingers on a computer keyboard, there is a strange, subconscious magic at play moving between thought and action when they are in use.
They can do most anything – from making and breaking to typing and writing, to playing instruments, the whole spectrum of tenderness or violence, and a whole variety of forms of conscious or subconscious communication, from friendly to hostile body language, including an entire other lexicon of sign language with our thumb, index, middle, ring and little finger (or pinky as they call in the US).
Sign language
Churchill and Cocker: two sides the two-finger gesture
We gesture constantly with our hands and fingers and such finger use might also come up in song suggestions. The V-sign for example can indicate a sense of triumph or victory when the palm is faced outwards, but is an aggressive or (sometimes amusingly) aggressive one when faced the other way, one emanating from medieval times, when English archers around the time of the Battle of Agincourt would display their arrow-release fingers to the French, who in turn would cut off those belonging to a prisoner, and in turn show them the single finger in return.
And here’s a different sort of finger communication on the knuckles, in sequence again from one of my favourite films, 1955’s Night Of The Hunter (recently referred to in the lakes topic) in which Robert Mitchum’s dubious preacher talks about the battle between love and hate. Yet contrary to his gospel, his secret agenda, of course, is sinister …
The Simpsons series constantly uses film references, and the charmingly odd but evil character Sideshow Bob, who variously attempts to enact revenge or even murder Bart, recreates such a scene (also referencing Cape Fear), with his own knuckle tattoos, but the joke being that because cartoon characters invariable have only three fingers because they are complicated to draw, he has to limit the words to LUV and HAT.
The Simpsons Sideshow Bob showing his digital drawbacks
But from one Bart to another, let’s close this finger-prompt introduction to another extraordinary film of the same decade, 1953’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., a musical fantasy film about a boy, Bart Collins, bored with being forced to practice scales by his piano teacher, enters a dream world in which an evil character enslaves him and other children to practice piano forever around a huge, endlessly curving keyboard while they wear finger-displaying caps. It is the only non-documentary feature film written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), who wrote the story, screenplay, and lyrics. Click you finger or thumb here of some of these musical sequences …
Practise, practise, practise! 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Dr Seuss
So then, it’s time put yours in various musical pies, pull out, put on, and much and fingers crossed, the download will be digital in all sorts of ways. This week’s Dr T who’s practice will no doubt be far more welcome than that of the character in the above film, and is the ambidextrously artfully and adept ajostu! Please place your fingers and thumbs songs in comments below, for deadline at 11pm on Monday (UK time), for playlists published next week. Let your fingers do the talking …
Good luck
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