Touch and intimacy

Touch is the most intimate and the most elusive of the senses. Is it one sense or a group of senses?

Albert Camus, writing in the middle of war, said that the artist is freedom's witness, for it testifies not to the law but to the body. Later, in a different context, Roland Barthes, one of the greatest philosophers and critical thinkers of the 20th century, said that language is like a skin. It is as if I have words instead of fingers. My language trembles with desire. Often, in times of crisis, the body moves in to fill the gap left by language. At the same time, we can think of letters as words addressed to the absent body. There is a very intimate relationship between language and this most intimate of our senses.

The hands remain some of the most intimate and conscious points of our contact with the surrounding world. For example, Heidegger has this wonderful passage on the hand where he says that the hand creates. The hand gives. In many ways, what makes us human and differentiates us from animals is the versatility of our hands.

The wonderful modernist writer and artist David Jones once said: "Art insists on one thing. It insists on the infantryman's job. It insists on the tactile." I guess we realize that particularly in the First World War, because there the visual geography of everyday life was replaced by the tactile world of the trenches. Men would navigate distance not through the verticality of our body but often through the horizontality of the beast. The words that come up, the verbs that come up in the trench narratives are creep, worm, crawl, because this is how they would often move across the trenches. On one hand, there is this brutalization of the body during the First World War – they are wading through what I call slime scapes, this octopus of sucking clay, as Wilfred Owen once said.

This is a letter from Lance Corporal Fenton to the mother of a close friend, Jim, who had just been killed. He is writing to the mother: "I suddenly saw Jim reel to the left and fall with a choking sob. I did what I could for him, but its stout heart had already almost ceased to beat, and that must have been instantaneous. Yes, I held him in my arms to the end, and when his soul had departed, I kissed him twice. Where I knew you would have kissed him on the brow – once for his mother and once for myself."

Wilfred Owen is the central protagonist in this drama of touch and intimacy, and just a few weeks before his death, he writes to Siegfried Sassoon about his servant: "Jones, shot to the head, who lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder for half an hour." He continues: "Catalogue. Photograph. Can you photograph the crimson hot iron as it cools from smelting? This is what Jones's blood looked like and felt like. My senses are charred." What we have here is this moment of perilous intimacy – vulnerability, a certain visceral thrill, loneliness, affection – they are all fused and confused. It is a moment of non-genital tactile tenderness at a moment of extreme violence, and this is where we see some of the war writings at their most intense.

On the 21st of May, 2001, there was this extraordinary discovery by a team of French archaeologists of this mass grave near Arras in northern France; they found 11 bodies buried, and then one more just next to them at a slight distance, joined arm in arm. I do not think there has ever been discovery of a group burial like that. The conjecture is that they were all privates, and the officer was slightly separate. Again, we do not know. What is remarkable is that, when I look at it, I almost see the traces or shadows of these other hands who must have arranged the hands of the dead soldiers under fire as a testimony to their friendship.

Touch, being the most intimate of the senses, was also the most intimate frontier along which empire was policed. For example, in the First World War, there was this huge scandal, because this white nurse was touching the shoulder of this Indian soldier. 

One is reminded of one of the key moments during the AIDS epidemic. That is the photograph of 32-year-old David Kirby, the AIDS activist, as he lay dying. He is comforted by his father. A couple of feet away, there is his aunt comforting her daughter. The carer is seated on the other side. It is almost like the modern Pieta.

W.H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety said that in moments of crisis, even the smallest expression of affection takes on a profound dimension. During war – the First World War, Second World War…we are living at the moment through several wars – we have these pictures of people absolutely ravaged, destitute, dying, yet there are moments of touch and intimacy.

The problem with touch is that sexuality has hijacked the history of emotions, and it is very difficult, but also very important, for us to carve out a space for non-erotic touch – this world of hugs, pats and caresses that we are gradually losing in this excessively sanitized culture. Perhaps it is for a good reason, but I think it has its own dangers.