A mark forms a letter, a word, written down in the palm of a hand. A young language that not many might understand. These words start to merge one into another, obscuring each other. A letter that cannot be read, will easily wash away. 

For many centuries the palm of our hand was a view into our future, one which only a mystic could read and decipher. Each line would represent a piece of the narrative and each palm would have its own story. This act of storytelling is, as Ben Okri describes: “Homo Fabula: we are storytelling beings...We are part human, part stories” (Okri, 2014: 92) and it is through these stories that we understand ourselves and our world a little bit better. 

Our search for finding and reaching into the future is still only possible through fables and our imagination. Similarly, so is the reach into our past. A still or moving image might transport us back into the distant past, yet this too is fragmented and spoiled with falsehood, an illusion of the true events; an illusion of the full picture of everything encapsulated. We can never fully return to an earlier moment in our lives nor can we move into the future without speculation and unpredictability. There is no certainty, there is only the now, which will soon become the ‘then’ and perhaps could even be seen as the very present future. 

The palm reader and storyteller have been part of our histories for centuries, as has the want to know what the future holds. We were, and maybe we still are, captivated by this ability to dream into the future, to envision it. To write and read about it. Nevertheless, the future is always going to be uncertain both individually and collectively, even with a mark that cannot easily wash away.