A Ball of Hands
By David Bernstein
8 July 2020
These are drawings made while in quarantine, while I was at home feeling the overwhelming reality of the coronavirus take its toll on humanity.
It already feels like a long time ago. Now people are back in the bars, and hopefully the murderers of George Floyd will be behind bars. We are shaken out of our hibernation to be reminded with a fury of the never-ending systems of oppression. And we are confronted with a complex need for solidarity. It makes me think about Bill Withers’s song, ‘lean on me’:
Just call on me brother, when you need a hand,
we all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’ll understand,
we all need somebody to lean on
Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on...
For it won't be long, till I'm gonna need somebody to lean on
Giving a hand has always been symbolic and an almost sacred ritual. It makes me think that perhaps corona is just trying to give us a hand as well, it’s just a big ball of hands reaching out to touch the whole world. In Buddhism, there is an important bodhisattva called Avalokiteśvara or Guanyin in Chinese. They (sometimes female and sometimes male) embody the compassion of all Buddhas and listen to the cries of humanity.
That song came out in the early 1970s when the world was just as crazy as it is now. These days we have been needing each other to lean on, needing a hand, but unable to grasp it because of our need to stop the spread of this deadly disease.
After struggling to deal with the needs of so many, Guanyin’s head split into 11 heads, and their arms shattered into a thousand arms as a way to try and aid the suffering multitude. It’s as if corona became the inverse of Guanyin. We stand in awe of this great wrath and how it reveals our interconnected multitude.
But even with our distance, we still need to connect to each other and we must find other ways to do that. Most have used the technology of the internet as the obvious answer, but there are also ancient technologies that we often forget. I recently stumbled upon a yellow hat, shaped like a flying saucer with an antenna sticking out of the middle. This hat is called a ‘Judenhut’ and it was worn by European Jews in the middle ages from the 11th century until the end of the 15th century.
From the 12th century it became required by law as a way to distinguish Jews and mark them as others in public. But what the authorities didn’t realize, was that this hat actually enabled a telecommunication between Jewish people and the heavens. The Judenhut gave Jews the ability to speak to God and maintain resilience. Do you think it’s just a coincidence that UFO alien spaceships look like this hat? Even till this day, many Jews (including myself at synagogue) wear yarmulkes - a minimal inverted satellite dish - as a technological device to connect the top of the head (the brains) with the holy transcendental world.
UFOs are all about a connection beyond. The Slovak artist Július Koller created many conceptual artworks beginning in the 1970s about UFOs. It was a symbol for him that criticized the oppressive socialist regime that he was trapped in. With the UFO, Koller could communicate outwards to the rest of the world and to the cosmos.
At the same time as Koller, Sun Ra, the famous Afrofuturist jazz musician was becoming famous around the world for his incredible music and for his outer space mythical-mystical equations. Sun ra prophesized that through music, humanity could be liberated beyond our current earthbound state. Sun Ra saw the oppression of black people by white supremacy and said that we are all just pawns of a greater force, wondering when we will wake up to realize it. In his song, Children of The Sun, he sings, “no matter if you’re good, or bad, if you’re wise or wicked, the sun shines on everyone.”
We are interconnected, we are interdependent. Corona is the manifestation of that. It’s the manifestation of our love for each other, and it’s also the great revealer of our collective failures. It shows how we care for each other and how we don’t. Corona is the technology of contradiction, the song that says to lean on me, but don’t touch. It’s the ultimate equation, the great communicator between this world and the world beyond our grasp. We are corona and corona is us.
