The hand that can’t be told

Recall a verse from a song from childhood, what used to be called a « negro » spiritual:
He’s got the whole world in his hand…
And then of course there’s the grain of sand in the palm of, and the universe, and I wanna hold your…, and Maradona’s Hand of God, etc.

Tonight, in images on the wall before my desk, the hands of: James Joyce (twice), Giacometti (three times), Louise Bourgeois, Patti Smith, Man Ray, Paul Eluard and Nusch, Janis Joplin and Tina Turner in 1969, a meditator and a woman tending the fire in a Rembrandt painting, a naked woman in a Lucien Freud painting, a naked woman in a Picasso painting, a naked woman in an unidentified painting on a Louvre ad, two bonobos making love, an analyst and his patient in a cartoon, a model in a Man Ray photo, Barack Obama, two naked women and one not in an Ecole de Fontainebleau painting.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?
You can tell us now or you can tell us downtown, two detectives tell the proverbial sage on the mountaintop in a New Yorker cartoon.
No, I imagine the proverbial sage responding, I can never tell you.