Hand, eyes - and mouths

Mark's comment about my last blog and my father makes me think some more on this topic of craft skill.
For me, the most beautiful features of the human body are the hands, the eyes - and the mouth (though I suppose I mean the lips).
Mark is right. My father 'thought with his hands'. With his eyes (and after years of experience) he could look at a wall, for example, and tell you it was an eighth of a inch - a couple of millimetres - out of vertical. With his eye and his hands, he could cut a piece of wood (when making a mortise and tenon joint, for instance) to a millimeter of accuracy without measuring it.
But what he was not, with me anyway, was physically affectionate. The men around me in my childhood (the 1930s and 40s) were like that. There was a cultural taboo on tenderness. I don't remember ever being hugged by my father, grandfathers, uncles, or any man. For tender physical affection you went to women. You went to men for vigorous action. One form of my father's physical affection was fights with rolled up newspapers. The game was to hit each other with the rolled up newspaper to see who could land the most blows. It ended sometimes with both of us in uncontrollable laughter (good) and sometimes with me in floods of tears (bad).
Two mistakes.
One: It's a mistake to suppose that men who 'think with their hands' do not think with their brains. My father never did more than draw a plan for something he was making, whether in wood or in his garden, than sketch it out roughly on a piece of paper. This was nothing more than an aide memoire for what he imagined in his head. The rest was down to the skill of hand and eye - and what he'd learned from experience. His garden was a masterpiece of design, colour, and understanding of how it would look in each season. Yet he always said he hated 'head work'. Who had taught him that craft skill wasn't head work as well as hand work? What he was not good at was talking about what he imagined. His mouth was used for eating and drinking and telling funny stories. That's why he liked pubs.
The second mistake is to think that what my father called 'head work' - writing a novel - has nothing to do with the hands or the mouth. I think with my hands as much as my father did. (What's the strongest of your five senses? Mine is my sense of touch and then my sight.) I think best - imagine best - when writing words with my hand. Just as my father was making things by cutting, planing, and joining wood, I am making novels by 'cutting' words (out of the lexicon in my mind), joining them together and refining them by their association with other words.
But I only know they are 'right' (what I imagined) by speaking them with my mouth.
The great Gertrude Stein, the first writer to compose modernist prose in the twentieth century, said that she felt words with her eyes. I know what she means. To me, words are tactile objects. I feel them with my eyes. Words in my mouth are like pebbles, shards of glass, leaves of trees, flowers, etc., and often feel 'of the air, airy'.
Nothing is real until it is imagined. Nothing imagined is real until it is made as a visual, tactile object. The visceral quality of music. The sensational quality of paint. The erotic potency of an actor speaking brilliantly orchestrated words on the physically sacred temenos of a stage.
'We are such stuff as dreams are made on,' says the great Master. But when that line is quoted, how many of us think of that word 'stuff' rather than the emphatic word in the line: 'dreams'. How many of us dwell after hearing 'dreams' on the word 'made'. (And this 'stuff' is 'made on', not 'made of' - a frequent misquotation.)
For me, all true art involves the maker's hands, eyes, and mouth in the employment of the imagination.
Selah to that sermon for today!