For some reason impressed with this brief Tennessee Williams description (from Night of the Iguana):
She held out her hand and drew her slender fingers into a chalice that closed.
What is the precise hand gesture that’s been described? I view it as the archetypal Macbeth “is this a dagger I see before me” type hand gesture, the archetypal Italian Capice? type hand gesture… [Or near relative.] Maybe what is interesting is that it calls attention to the suggestive powers of the hand: that it can be a hand at one moment and then represent something (a chalice) the next.
To make one’s fingers into a chalice then to close up the chalice…. This is to show the power of representation [that fingers can make us think of a hard substantial specific thing like a chalice] in one moment, then in the next return to being unrepresentative, to being mere fingers, no longer pretending, having a physical not metaphorical power — chalices cannot, like fingers, close.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 