What Is a Hug

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. Nothing is handed over
6. One squeeze, two readings
7. What it costs
8. An ordinary Tuesday

Dana has not seen her brother Tom for two years. He comes through the doors at arrivals with a bag on each shoulder, and she is already walking. He drops one bag. She steps in as he does, and for a few seconds the two of them stand with their arms around each other, his chin on her shoulder, her hand flat between his shoulder blades. When they let go, she laughs and says, “You nearly broke my ribs.” He says, “I barely held on.” Neither of them is lying, and neither of them is joking about what they felt.

A hug is the plainest thing people do for one another, and the plain picture of it is a good one. Hugs are given. Come here, I’ll give you a hug. A hug does something to the one who gets it: it comforts, it says what a sentence would only spoil, it warms. There is a giver and a getter. If the getter hugs back, the two have exchanged. More of it is better, and a tight one says more than a loose one.

Underneath is an object-like picture, and it has been good enough to run on. The hug is a thing that goes from the arms of one person into the person of another, like a coat handed across a table. What follows asks what is in the arms and what is in the person, and whether anything crosses between them.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam runs through the same place in all three. A thing handed over has one size, one giver, and a place it can be kept. In the first case there is no giver, in the second the size is two, and in the third there is no place. An act does none of these things. An act is made by a host, it ends when the host stops, and what it leaves is marks.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one.

What Is Revenge is the nearest, and I use it openly. It owns the reading by which the author of an act reads it against a denominator that already held it and the receiver against one that did not, so that one act carries two quotients and the author’s reads smaller. It owns the pairs who aim at even and climb, because each tests a return by the author’s feeling of matching. I apply its first construction and do not extend it. What differs is the shape of the case: there the acts take turns and the question is the size of a return, and here the acts are at two pairs of arms in the same moment and the question is what a hug is. I do not claim that two huggers climb, because a hug has no turns to climb across.

What Is a Witness owns the point that a witness is a mark in a living thing and not a window, and that two honest hosts at one act carry two marks of it. I rely on that for what is left in each of the two when the arms drop, and I add that in a hug the two hosts whose arms made it are among its witnesses, and that each is also the author of one of the acts. What Is Company owns a rate at which two ends revise each other, held across a stretch of time. A hug lasts seconds and I do not say it is company, or a piece of it. What Is Unmoved owns what a low surprise records, and I do not use it. What Is a Souvenir asked which act made a mark that stands in a kitchen; a hug is the opposite case, an act with no object at all between its hosts.

What the foundation holds

Five statements do the work, and I use them as the foundation states them. An act is a process, and it may or may not generate an artifact; an artifact is an imperfect historical mark, and history is the artifacts, present and surrounding. Records update expectation forward and never re-open (R2). The human experiences only the quotient, which is the actual divided by the expectation (R8), and the expectation comprises subconscious prediction and ideas (P4). Fifth, the foundation’s section on the host’s own act in its own denominator says that prediction is retrained by the record, that the host’s own acts are in its record, and so that the author of an act reads it against a prediction that already holds acts of that kind. The author’s reading is the smaller. That is a direction and not an amount: the foundation gives no size for the difference and no expression for how far two hosts’ denominators differ. The same section says what is made counts, and what is foreseen does not: an act done to a host lands as any actual does, however exactly it was expected.

The foundation reports one laboratory finding for the direction, and I repeat only that. Self-produced touch evoked less somatosensory response than the same touch applied from outside (Blakemore, Wolpert and Frith, Nature Neuroscience 1, 635, 1998). It is cited there as reported, and not as grounds, and I use it the same way.

Nothing is handed over

Take the arrivals door again and ask what is there in the second before and the second after. Before, there are two hosts with their arms down. After, there are two hosts with their arms down. In between there are two pairs of arms closing, and a pressure at each torso that lasts as long as the arms hold. Each of those pressures is the result of an act: Dana’s squeeze, made by Dana, and Tom’s squeeze, made by Tom. Dana’s lands on Tom, and Tom’s lands on Dana.

Heat also passes between the two bodies, both ways, and I leave it to physics. It is a fact about two bodies near one another and is not what give meant when it was said of a hug. What the word meant was a thing that comes to be in the other person and stays: a comfort, a message, a hold. Look for it after the arms drop. There are marks, and they are not it. A smell on a collar, a creased jacket, and in each of the two a trace in what they now hold of the day. Those are marks of the acts, made in living things, and the witness piece’s account of them applies. None of them is the hug. The hug was the acts, and the acts were processes, and the processes are over.

This is not a claim that a hug is nothing, or that it is cold. The acts are ordinary acts, and they leave marks in the two who made them. The claim is only about where the word has been pointing. It points at a hand-over, and there is no hand-over to point at.

One squeeze, two readings

Now ask how big the squeeze was. The picture of a thing handed over says it has a size, and that both the giver and the getter could read it off. The foundation says otherwise, and the case at the door fits it closely.

Dana’s squeeze is an act, and it lands in two places. In Dana, it meets a prediction that already holds her own hugging: the long record of how a hug of that kind feels from the inside, built from the hugs she has made. In Tom, it meets a prediction trained on the hugs he has made, which holds her squeeze only as a thing received. Under R8 each host experiences only its own quotient. Under the foundation’s section on the host’s own act, the author’s reads smaller. So Dana reads her own squeeze smaller than Tom reads it, and Tom reads his own smaller than Dana reads it. “You nearly broke my ribs” is Dana’s reading of Tom’s act. “I barely held on” is Tom’s reading of the same act. Both are accurate, and neither of them is the size of the squeeze, because the foundation gives that no reader.

Figure 01

Who reads which squeeze, at the arrivals door

The act	Made by	Lands on	What each reads, by the foundation’s direction
Dana’s squeeze	Dana	Tom	Dana reads it smaller than Tom does. Tom’s reading is the larger, and his own report of the squeeze he received.
Tom’s squeeze	Tom	Dana	Tom reads it smaller than Dana does. “I barely held on” is his; “you nearly broke my ribs” is hers.
Dana’s reading of her own, against Tom’s	—	—	Not comparable. They are two different acts, and the foundation says nothing about which was the larger.

The practical edge is the second sentence of the construction. A speaker can say “it was only a hug” and mean it, and the foundation says they would be reading their own act against the prediction their own acts trained. That is not a bias or a fault in the speaker. It is where the reading is made from. It also means the sentence carries no evidence about the other person. The only reader of how it landed is the one it landed on, and the only way to have their reading in hand is for them to say it.

What it costs

The first cost is the picture of the hug as a stock. People say they need one, are owed one, are saving one, have been starved of one. On this reading a hug is an act at a time, over when the arms drop, and it cannot be banked. Neither can it be owed. When Tom hugs back he is not repaying anything. His is a second act, and there is no ledger in which the first was a debt. Nothing here says anyone deserved a hug, or was owed one, or that one balances another; the ledger is not invoked.

The second is that “it was only a hug” stops working as a defence. It was a hug to the one who made it, and the foundation gives no way to say it was only that to the one it landed on. A speaker who means it can go on meaning it. It just does not close the question.

The third is smaller. An account like this makes a warm thing sound mechanical, and I do not think it is. The marks in the two of them, the day in which each carries the other’s arms, are theirs and they last. What the account takes away is the idea that the hug was a package, and the package was never the thing they were glad of.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Ask, in a way that can be answered no. The receiver’s reading is the only one that tells you how it landed, and your own reading of your own squeeze is the least informative one you have about it.
2. Hear “that was tight” as a report. It is the receiver’s quotient and it is accurate. Your “I barely held on” is accurate too. Neither settles the other, and neither needs to be argued down.
3. If you received it, say what you read. You do not have to prove it or put a number on it, and the foundation gives none to put.
4. Drop the question of who gave it. Two people who stepped in together did not take turns at a gift. Each made an act.
5. Read a sent hug for what it is. A line at the end of a message is a mark, made by an act of typing, and it is read by the one it reaches. It can be a good mark. It is not the arrivals door and does not need to be apologised for as if it were.
6. Do not keep count. A hug returned is a second act and not a payment of the first, so there is nothing to be behind on.