Close Encounters

A counsellor I once had habitually used the concept of enfolding in your arms metaphorically, to mean “accept” and “deal with.” If I told her “I’m having trouble,” she might say “Embrace trouble!” But she never said, “Hug trouble!”

You’ll have a hard job finding the word “hug” either in the Bible or in Shakespeare – but the concept of putting your arms around somebody, or something, to express warm, friendly, perhaps loving, emotions, is part of a universal language. One of the strongest expressions of this idea comes in the wise advice Polonius gives to his son Laertes, in Act I of Hamlet:

“Those friends thou hast, and their
adoption tried, 
grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”

Those hoops of steel make a very vivid image. They always remind me of the metal rings around a barrel, keeping the wooden staves together and in place.

There are, of course, innumerable other usages in songs and poetry, of the hugging theme, from the sexual to the sublime. Holding someone you love seems to be one of the best things you can do with your arms.

And yet “arms” and related words, more often than not, refer to the opposite type of usage, having to do with weaponry and fighting, as in “Armaments,” “Arms – Race,” “Armor,” the call “To Arms!” and even “Armageddon.” (The latter derives from a real place called Megiddo, in what is now Israel, strategically located, and therefore often fought over.)

The Latin poet Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, was in many ways a glorification of armed conflict. Its legendary hero, Aeneas, originally a leader of the men of Troy, having been one of the few on his side who survived the long war in which that city was besieged by the Greeks, wanders for years adventurously around the Mediterranean (including a year-long affair with Dido, the Queen of Carthage) and finally settles in Italy, where he turns out to be the actual founder of Rome.

How do I know all this? Not, in this case, from Google. Part of my British education was a study of Latin, in which one of our “set books” was a section of The Aeneid. (My main purpose was to qualify for admission to Oxford or Cambridge, which in those days – mid-Twentieth Century – still required Latin.) I did fairly well at Latin, but still failed to get into either of those prestigious universities, and had to settle for the much lower-class University College, London. So, all I was left with was some knowledge of Latin, which however is often useful in understanding the derivation of many English words. (And also words in French, Spanish, or other Romance languages – the word “romance” itself deriving from “Roman.”)

But, getting back to the more affectionate uses of one’s arms, I am reminded of the poem, “Jabberwocky,” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (a sequel to Alice in Wonderland) which is full of made-up words. It climaxes with a passage in which an anxious father greets his son, who’s returning from a dangerous mission – his encounter with a ferocious monster:

“‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.”

Of course, nothing beats that truly loving hug to express joyful affection. And, as we are well aware, hugging is often only a prelude to kissing. But there is a prelude to hugging, called holding hands, whose sexual power was expressed by the Beatles, in their song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Speaking of hand-power, in the early days of experimentation with electricity – around the time of Benjamin Franklin’s tinkering with kites, keys, and lightning – it was found that a mild electric current could be transmitted between people holding hands – and this worked even with a long line of hand-linked persons. In fact, the length of the line seemed to make no difference, so long as it was unbroken. The “signal” reached from one end of the line to the other in no measurable time. But nobody then conceived the idea of actually sending messages this way. And it was another century before transmission along wires led to the beginnings of telegraphy.

This may help to explain the sparks of “static electricity” which are sometimes experienced between people, or between one person and an object, such as a carpet. So the “tingling” often said to be felt between lovers isn’t necessarily
pure poetry.