I - Thou

Let's invoke Shelley. In his "Defence of Poetry" he wrote that learning how to feel another's pain can aid the imagination to contribute to the greatest moral good (the highest political hope being the abolition of slavery).  
I, you, they, he writes, are mere grammatical markers essentially modifications of one mind, though the practise in seeing such connections is a practise, until it becomes a habit. It "tends to abolish the course of history" - it is timeless, rooted in the unchanging aspects of humanity, in case anyone has forgotten one of the paths to immortality. Time washes away even the imperfection of authors where they fail to reach the perfection of which they write - the failure to allow for such disparity is to lose sight of one's own faults (1921: 57). 
This ability to see beauty in something other, to see its relevance, is such a vital practise. I wrote about such 'relief' a long time ago, here. "Good" poetic writing restores order to the world, based on morals, Shelley writes - that kind of romantic imagining certainly seems distant today. But on the personal level, his sentiment has its relevance.
When one might feel like a carcass being devoured by so many thoughtless vultures, the mind can move away from those gory scenes of selfishness by seeking out other practises of healing, which may not be visible in the present scenes but that can be invoked, if one knows or remembers to call on them.
So the story goes. It has (obviously?) been a rough week in these parts, but I retain awe at the classical (not just Greek, also Chinese) rejuvenating and refreshing practise of returning to the font of literature: how is that not a treasure trove?

She descends from the soapbox, to write this week's

B/Logrolling

Other recipes I have made many times this summer:
Chipotle tahini sauce a great way to snack while avoiding processed foods
To make it from scratch, I make my own hot sauce (grilling tomatoes in the oven to avoid canned ones) - this is such a good hot sauce, it is hard to believe how simple it is to make
Nice and light eggplant parm (read: real eggplant parm, not breaded)

Why I am avoiding processed foods now: Have you ever heard of "cracking"? I hadn't either until I watched this (French) documentary. Wow. The process applies to foods now. The processed foods I ate most regularly were "bio" style. But now that I know about "cracking", and how the protein factor is obtained for those foods, I am making new efforts to home cook almost everything.

Another attack on the humanities. Yet again, a very educated person treats Plato as if Nietzsche had the last word. It is so tiring how trendy it is to submit the classics to reductionist gestures. I could write many pages on this but will make one point here. As if people don't understand what reading is. We are never finished reading the classics because the way we relate to them requires relating anew from the changing present. Yes, we do suspend our judgement to attempt to 'enter' the past, but what the past will mean to us and how we receive it will always be different - this is even true from within the limited scope of a single lifetime.

Speaking of history: Understanding religion in late imperial China from Columbia University's Asia for Educators

Apropos mention of acting (Brett) in last week's post: continued consideration of acting re. the individual vs. collective. To this end: a post on Hall, Fo, and Theatrics of Role and Story though I beg to differ on how method (Stanislavsky's approach to) acting is understood. It is very much an "I-thou" type acting and requires the actor to relate, in every 'beat' of dialogue, with their role. Similarly, through this very 'real' evocation (as the actor is calling up from their memory enough emotional vocabulary to make each 'beat' happen in real time - this is very taxing for the actor, who 'relives' the script every night), the audience is brought within a realm of introspection.
"Class wars" seem to efface this dimension of reality.

Two things I am thinking about how to include more thoughtfully in my classes: ethics and new practical skills (last year, it was a business proposal, this year, I am thinking about SEO...)

Ethics:
Daily ethical questions 
A Framework for Character Education in Schools
Ethical storytelling:
A more thorough primer
Another good link - active version of reference links: Concordia's toolbox; Ethics pdf; the Ethics Guidebook consent framework; resource for ethical practice in digital storytelling
Interested in this for so many reasons. One of which, an educational site with the declared purpose of promoting the "good" (ethical) in education, recently published a post in which backhanded, reductionist comments were made about not one but two cultures (in all of about six or seven words, at that). As always, it is the "circuitous route" that is most likely to include not what we want to hear or what is being said - but what we are not hearing. But once you hear, as Gadamer wrote, you cannot "hear away".

Blogger I'd love to meet at a dinner party (forgot this feature last week!): writes and produces the Canadian blog The Art of Doing Stuff - it was her well-written recent post on blogging that got me thinking about introducing SEO skills to my class this year. (I ought to practise her tips myself, but ... actually, there are advantages to being less visible and to amateurism that continue to suit me.)

Not Images Alone

I received a card featuring a rather realistic painting of a pickle with a tiny cartoon party hat clumsily appendixed to it. This was my congratulations card for getting a PhD. Apparently, the giver thinks I am "in a pickle". I prefer to consider the card a humourous gesture, though the card's insistance on "a bigger salary" gets no laughs when one would prefer for pickles to be in the refrigerator as actual food. But it is hilarious! Imagine the T-shirt: I earned a PhD and all I got was this lousy pickle. Pfwee. (Requisite sound of party horn.)
And maybe it isn't much of a party when there are so many academic expectations some of us brine ourselves in, great narratives of achievement, like the cry of the PB (personal best) in the running world. So many sites recommend a perfect draft before the defense, others expect that what happens is not always what is wished for. Yet this fixation of bests does not trouble everyone: some are content #rehashing.
Anyway, so one wakes up one morning, next to a card of a pary-hat-wearing pickle, and wonders how one got into a relationship where food has left the pantry for the portrait! One can't live on images alone. Apparently, It's So Hard to Leave Academe: for example, years and years of teaching likely mean a network shrunk to within the academy, making it hard to network for jobs beyond it. The alma mater now leaves students only partly nourished - but if nourishment is nurtured, she is not at fault, she herself had not been cared for.
As I write this post, it is as if I am willing myself to know the end to this story. But it has taken this long for me to write a more concrete post introducing the debacle.
Luckily, as I sat down to write, I also opened up Susannah Conway's December Reflections blog prompts, and today's is also about bests, as in a "best day". In the photo below was a rainbow I thought I was going to be able to run beneath on a long run, but which turned out to be an optical illusion: I was running alongside it. The elusive rainbow following the arch of the sun transports an elusive messenger who says that the arche is the idea that underlies images. It was a pretty good day when I saw that rainbow, memorable, sometimes perhaps what evades is closer than one might think; maybe this is the test of eidos, where action proves essence needn't be idea alone.

Brush: Misprinted type.

Sweet Delight

It is a strange moment to be writing about sweetness as thunder shakes the windows and lightning calls to the eyes. But maybe not, if it is nature that connotes it. My first association with sweetness is honey: and from there, my mind wanders to antiquity, the nectar of the gods. I found Horace in those thoughts, and will note some of what he writes on sweetness, specifically, where it is connected to figurative literary inspiration and/or described more literally in connection with food, but ultimately where it connotes absence from worry.
And about Horace. It is amazing to read some of his lines and relate to them so deeply that, all these centuries and cultures apart, one wishes to have written them oneself. In I. xxxiii, he writes that he hopes to write sweet calming work that will endure: "We are now called upon. If in idle amusement in the shade with you, we have placyed any thing that may live for this year and many, come on, assist me with alyric ode in Latin, my dear lyre, - first tuned in Greek by the Lesbian citizen Alcaeus … O thou ornament of Apollo, charming shell, agreeable even at the banquets of supreme Jupiter! O thou sweet alleviator of anxious toils, be propitious to me, whenever I duly invoke thee."
Similarly, in I. xxvi, which translator C. Smart introduces as, "That free from all care and anxiety, he celebrates the praise of Lamia", Horace writes: "O sweet  Muse, who art delighted with pure-fountains, weave together the sunny flowers, weave a chaplet for my  Lamia. Without thee my praises profit nothing." Note the flattery involved in his invocation! In IV.ii, he writes: "With lavish labor hiving thrifty sweets; Lowly, by Tibur's grove and dewy banks, I seek the honey that I store in song, Kneaded with labour."
Despite such depth of meaning in imagery, he also writes of food like a true gourmand, but in multiple registers. In satire II.iv, a man struggles to remember the lessons he got from a professor about food - containing such detail of how to dine well! Our sweetness here comes from the section of the professor's counsel that reads: "Some there are whose talent lies only in finding new sweets; 'tis by no means enough to spend all one's care on a single point — just as if someone were anxious only that his wines be good, but cared not what oil he poured upon his fish."

Though displaying knowledge of a good spread, Horace writes in favour of a more modest lifestyle, like in II.xvi, in which he writes of a nobelman who lives simply. I will be generous with how much I quote because I particularly like these lines about the needlessness of pursuing other shores when one has (sweets) enough before one: "Why crave new suns? What exile from his country Flies himself also? Diseased Care ascends the brazen galley,  And rides amidst the armed men to the battle, Fleeter than stag, and fleeter than, when driving Rain-clouds, the east wind. The mind, which now is glad, should hate to carry Its care beyond the Present; what is bitter With easy smile should sweeten: nought was ever Happy on all sides."
In those last few lines, he resolves the eternally-relevant philosophical problem of how to find happiness in difficulty, his words acting as the balsam he wrote of aspiring towards in I.xxxiii. We shall conclude on this soothing note with two more excerpts.
The beautifully sentimental "To Virgil" (IV.xii), which translators cannot agree upon (compare this translation), is a call to a feast (to a living/departed the/another Virgil). Let us imagine ourselves as Virgil invited in this way: "These, O my Virgil, are the days of thirst;  But if, O client of illustrious youths, Calenian juices tempt, bring thou the nard,  And with it earn my wine;...— Cask large enough to hold a world of hope, And drown a world of care. Quick! if such merriments delight thee, come With thine own contributions to the feast; Not like rich host in prodigal halls — my cups  Thou shalt not tinge scot-free. But put aside delays and care of gain, Wamed, while yet time, by the dark death-fires; mix  With thought brief thoughtlessness; to be unwise In time and place is sweet."
Reading those lines, one becomes imbibed by his song, it is so potent, affording the same effect as wine. In epode xiii he writes, "From thy bosom be lifled by wine and by song; Soothers they of a converse so sweet, it can charm All the cares which deform our existence away."
That is my definition, in response to today's prompt in the August Break, of sweet delight, particularly the part about song. But to emulate Horace's breadth and end this post on literal sweetness is the photo, depicting blender ice-cream of frozen banana and berries, sweetened with vanilla and honey. Perhaps I am that very 'professor' cited in the satire.

 

Brush: pfefferminzchen at DeviantART

Little Vines on Paper

I have finally found the books with which I want to spend the rest of my life. But there is not enough time in the day, for the moment, to draw wisdom from their pages. So I miss them because it's become apparent how necessary it is to revise good ideas: it is not enough to merely encounter them once. Yet the ideas are not only in those books, the point of the good idea is that it is timeless and can be found in that Stoic idea of how people live, easy to locate if one is looking to people.
So here are some vignettes of what I have been doing when not checking contextual vocabulary for the book I am supposedly copy editing, but let's say that any translation happening as fast as this book is being translated means that the translation needs to be checked and retranslated in places, too. Anecdote one: I would perhaps be frustrated by this, or the ever more arcane deadline (though not on my end), but I am working with people whose haste is making something come together in months, as opposed to the years it would take me. So I may be losing sleep these days checking all these things that will not be revised enough but at the same time, I have become part of something that is powered by a will that I have not encountered in ages.
And I encountered the Wizard of Oz-like project manager, who took me away from hours on the job for coffee with the author who never showed and ended up remarking offhandedly at some point, "It is better to work on solving the small problems if we want the larger ones to be resolved." That is just like the opening to Epictetus' Golden Sayings, which asks man to focus on the things that are in his control: "The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that which belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered." If something is beyond our control, we are taught to say to such, "You are but an appearance, and absolutely not the thing you appear to be" and say to such that it is nothing to us. The little things are far more accessible, like how I talk to the cleaning ladies at the university; what is not accessible is whether I will be hired again next year.
By talking to the cleaning lady after the exam I held, I gleaned this nugget from her, "It appears," she said, "that some people have forgot that they are people."
Indeed, people we are. Not numbers, not parties, but people who laugh and cry, eat and discard stems or bones. Messy material. Problematic.

So as I was walking through the farmer's market today, one of those quiet, overcast days when it seems that every vendor I know calls me over to exchange a few words—no matter which, I stood the longest at the fish stall, where the lady talked about her brush with politics, how by not getting involved, she became an outcast and lost her job, only to be hired soon afterwards, with two children to feed, at a newspaper. She had been some kind of IT worker in the early days of such...and today she plunges her hands in the ice to release the fish that become people's meals.
Her main comment was that the sooner people understand that fortune comes and goes, if they have the fortune to see this in their own family, they are better adjusted to the way of things. That those too focused on the material are quickly disappointed and have little to teach others (viz. the way of things). That if one lacks such teachers, one has books (says the fishmonger-if you understand my interjection): books, not just one book but many books because all one needs is never in a single book. She was talking about how it is never enough to live by worrying over material existence, but that it helps to do the useful or enjoyable. And she did not use the contemporary stock phrase positive energy as she spoke, but the phrase, to fill the soul.
So much of what annoys passes quickly: one may even reach old age and regard past experience with that grain of salt that may or may not be used to freeze things (to link to a marvelous blog I discovered today via languagehat).
Freezing is an interesting concept. It is most useful for its opposite, heat, as in, the hot months of summer. From these opposites, I take time from little time to reflect on these anecdotes that serve as substitutes for books for as long as the tome of history I am working on occupies me. But does not control me. Because I still have the little things, and if they are not books they are at least placeholders to the texts that await me: the itses in want of context.

Brush: Ewansim Grunge at DeviantART.

Bookstore:  Erato Books

Salmagundi or Solomon Grundy

The perfect recipe. So different from the myriad recipes tried once or twice for novelty but that languish on completely untarnished cookbook pages; the favoured sides inevitably greying from floured fingers. They are like the helpful principles to be exercised in life, practiced and consciously returned to until they become a matter of course. Life is so clear, in principle.
Complications arise in the conflict between fundamentals and stories. We can see such tension in this thoughtful review of passages from Hippolytus, which gathered together some of the thoughts I further here; we can also see this tension in the self-described struggle of psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Call of Stories, who claims to have been too much of a theorist as an early practitioner, reticent to give precedence to stories, lacking as they do the crisp, methodical ring of professional diagnosis. Except that we have seen that the better the recipe, the messier it may appear on the page.
One of the recipes I wish would become habit is Epictetus' Wait semblance, let me try you. In both his letters and discourses, he argues that we are to ask an appearance what it is, what it "represents." How could this last word not summon associations to literature? Life as book, as story. Useful lessons are dog-eared and handled because interpretation changes as the man grows: the same form may take on new meaning with experience. Such may be the experience of a postulate like love, for example.
As experience is gained, one has more to bring to the new experience: more tools and background information to fill in the blanks of what is not being said, what might not be apparent. In this respect, we may think of living well as a special kind of cook's temperance, described in part here, as having arisen: "from the Old English temperian, which meant to bring something to a required condition by mixing it with something else. In so doing, the temperer is in need of a modicum of moderation, skill, and foresight – which are all perfect qualities for a cook." (Emphasis added.) The author quoting that definition points out that cooks were often stereotyped as inebriated in Medieval times when that definition was concocted, indicating that associations of the word temperance with cooks during that period was sarcastic.
We may add that humanity as a whole may be viewed as drunk - on the ideas of the day, lacking the temperance to step out of the picture, to reference in previous meanings, and not just list them but reflect on them.

To reflect is to see one's own connection to the subject matter, to see one's own implications, where the word is loosely synonymous with incrimination - involvement, entanglement. If our interpretation of life changes with experience, it follows that our reading of it with less experience may frustrate us, where the word also means disappoint, deceive. But this does not have to be the end of the story, so long as one is alive. There is a famous passage about how deception can lead to the good. Similarly, it has often crossed my mind about how many good things can come into fruition from something that had a bad beginning. Just the other day, I watched the beginning of a film about this: a man saves a woman's honour by pretending to be her husband though they had just met, and she was expecting, and guarded by her jealous father. Talk about entanglement. Yet the man got out of the tangle and won the woman to boot: through conviction, hard work, and most of all the ever elusive love, which is represented in such an ersatz, saccharine and unrealistic way today that one almost hesitates to use the word.
There is no love without getting dirty. I appreciate so much a passage in Sir Arthur Helps' Cloister and Crowd where he writes, "charity requires the sternest labour and the most anxious thought ... it is one of the most difficult things in the world, and is not altogether a matter for leisure hours." Charity isn't just remedying material accounts, but something more. One is reminded of that old aphorism that begins, the road to hell... Indeed, one might know all the maxims, but without having tried them out, one can know nothing for, and this is a favoured theme on this blog, the application of the lesson is a lesson in itself.
With "no loss of psychological nuance and subtlety" we may immerse ourselves within the stories of this experience, we "can make our own guesses, indicate our sense of things, without succumbing to overwrought language and overwrought theory." Yet this advice (in Coles' Call of Stories) is given to one who already knows, intellectually, the lessons, and - at least theoretically - the problem of complexity.
The recipe for life might be just such awareness - and the rest of lived life, the revision of those principles, the attempt to exercise them in lived experience. To be more material about it, we might consider this Top-Ten Recipe for tart crust. To read through the comments is to see all of the various uses to which the recipe may be put. I used it, with a circle mold, to make mini pie shells for what is known in some parts of the world as Russian Salad, here made with légumes, gherkins, and a small granny apple. The recipe is the lesson of the assorted ideas presented here as salmigondis, possibly corrupted into Solomon Grundy, the poem of the life of a man.

Brush.

The Method

I was born in a stone house that belonged to a magnificently gracious one-time Broadway actress and her set-carpenter husband. Acting was one of my first loves, and one of the books my father gave to me as a present was All the World's a Stage. I couldn't agree more, though my theatre experience is far behind me, and my thespian society membership card is now yellowed, unrenewed.
My acting coach was, the story goes, shunned out of Hollywood for some kind of scandal; in any case, I was taught by someone directly connected to the dawn of Method Acting in the West: replete with the story of how the skittish Jimmy Dean dealt with his debut with Liz Taylor. He, ahem, released his bladder in front of the whole crew, which included Taylor herself: after embarrassing himself in that way, he was no longer afraid of his novice gaffes. 
This evening, I caught a few glimpses of a movie, Flesh and Blood, which reminded me of the Method - but it was something about the script, how the script itself was Method (one character describes seeing someone who was strange, strange to see a man whose two legs seemed tied together), and I remembered the acting coach saying, an actor can only be as good as the script.
In a flash, I recalled the instructions for how to pretend to look for something; one is to zero-in on certain points on the floor to signify intent. In this way, one registers, as one is 'looking,' the shadows, crevaces in the surface.
Beyond adolescence, when I got my first job at a real paper (i.e. not shipping news), I got teased for not knowing the names of actors and actresses. But the sensibility of acting that I had been given was so different from that which I started to see on screen that I'd lost interest. Their joshing only entrenched my feeling that I understood better the dying generation than the one at its zenith, not to mention my own. I still feel this way.

There is something very human about the Method. In fact, there is a passage in Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares where he distinguishes his goals from a ubiquitous mechanical style of acting. The script is broken down into emotional 'beats': each of which comes with its own choreography as dictated by one's own recall of memories that evoke memories of relevant emotions. There is no pretense in this acting.
It is acting of the guts (thanks Jimmy). And lest you think that I am being too profane or crude by writing that, my appology will lie in the haruspex of ancient times: the divination of the entrails of animals (entrails which are now back in fashion as foods to be consumed by adventurous gourmands). There is a beautiful post on the extent of the signs that the ancients read, including the insides of animals. There is also a paper (cited here) that explains that the entrails of birds, iynges, were once strung across a circle to create a tailsman for love. There is so much more to the saying you've got guts than we 'moderns' allow.
I was not necessarily a brilliant journalist; when I started out, my seniors would laugh at and change my headlines - the poetic kind we see more and more of today. But since I finished that school, I became old school, and have come to detest ambiguity in caps. And I will to my grave defend the wine that was served at the most prestigious of media giants I worked for. It takes so much strength to have guts and to keep one's job. That is the Method. To spill one's guts occasionally requires far more guts than to eat them when they are well prepared.

Brush. Magazine.

A Natural Art

I was struck by a phrase of Robery Fry's: that it is only artists who can access the aesthetics of a historical period, without being encumbered by the related "social emanations." Indeed, to look at the work of impressionists and post-impressionists is to wonder at the 'primitive' and 'foreign' transplanted influence, like the Chinese influence in Matisse or the Tahitian women and sculptures in Gauguin, or the African inspired abstractions of Brancusi. Fry writes that in the face of such art, the public may - perhaps rightly - feel that they are being submitted to an artist's caprice. It is too early, Fry said one hundred years ago, to tell whether art would be successful in its attempt to create a pure, abstract language.
As if drawing a parallel, Fry writes that ancient cave paintings are more like a language than they are paintings, due to their sytlised forms. I think he convincingly explains the modern fascination with these other ways of looking: it is the same thing we teach in class, that we are to break free from the cliche, to be able to see unencumbered by presupposition.
That said, the modern language of abstraction is only legitimate if we are more married to form than we are to content. Even stylised language is married to its form; Brancusi's form is married to lines. Neither are simplifications because one's brain has to know how to fill their forms out, to relate them back to familiar reality. This is called 'knowing how to read.' Abstract art is not a pure language of universals because it is a language, and no language is known at birth. So, many people do not speak this language.
The problem of art reveals the problems of culture. We may get so caught up in learned forms that we forget to perceive the essence - like through noein, through the senses. Herzog's subjects sense part of the meaning of Chauvet just as we may sense the meaning of our metal boxes. The computers and phones may be the stylised, abstract language to the future man.
I would argue that noein is close to creative thinking, where it is inspired (where muses, music, and the mind are combined in primordial dreams or memories of belief, seeking, and picking up the scent of understanding). Creative thinking does not have to follow the one path set out by habit or cultural practice. Is this not the essence sought by 19th century painters; was the Romantic dream not to return to an art of living naturally?

In a moment of serendipity that I admit was afforded me by an algorithm (I had bought a paperback and Amazon recommended "more by the same publisher"), I encountered the beautiful nyrb edition of Fukuoka's One-Straw Revolution, which reminds me a little of Rousseau's Emile: to prune a tree, the author writes, is like teaching children music: in our misguided pursuit of the nature that we all like but know so little about, we may degenerate our true appreciation of it. Scientists ruin their sight as they come up with a cure for short-sightedness, he continues. And while such ideas lean towards the defeatist regarding the human agency to create (which he allocates to poetry writing in winter), it brought to mind an article I read about the inventor of an alternate internet platform who committed suicide despite his genius - the reporter's comment being that mental illness is the malady of our time and often goes undetected.
"Before researchers become researchers," Fukuoka writes, "they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create." Isn't this what we expect of artists - who fall short of our expectations? Ruskin answered these questions by asking his own in The Ethics of Dust and Queen of the Air. He wonders about colours, the meaning of myths, and the nature of world, just like Fukuoka does, though with far more flourish.
Arguably, at the turn of the 20th century, there was deep, epistemological questioning, which later led to extreme answers: in postmodernist detached art, existential and self-denying philosophies (which includes some aspects even of Buddhism, now claimed by some Westerners), and a scramble towards the safety of materialism, which includes the bid to get rich as individuals.
Fukuoka considers science from the perspective of the little man and concludes that the results of scientific research are arranged for its own convenience, not for the convenience of people with ailing diets or the farmers. I recall the tragedy among Indian farmers, forced to buy expensive GMOs, who took their lives - a point all the more excruciating when one reads in his 1970's book One-Straw that the natural way in farming had been feasible in India. "So that is how it is. You study the function of the plant's metabolism and its ability to absorb nutrients from the soil, write a book, and get a doctorate in agricultural science. But do not ask if your theory of assimilation is going to be relevant to the yield." Or quality of life.

Man, as we know well, becomes lulled by instant gratification. Who doesn't enjoy the reserve of canned chickpeas for a quick meal, summer or winter? Instincts become bewildered by caprice. Diet is changed in order to delight; the palate is the circus ring of yesteryear. "This is false," Fukuoka writes. "A fear of nature and a general sense of insecurity are often the unfortunate results." Well yes, I'd feel insecure without my chickpeas: it has become too expensive to make my own winter store. And as for a fear of nature, luckily, I am a child of Kurt Hahn, but as a city dweller, it takes me three uncomfortable days of acclimatisation when I return to nature (oh, the mosquitoes!). So we aren't free, but enslaved to something else.
The path of science endlessly divides phenomena, according to Fukuoka. "Seen as complex, the world becomes frighteningly abstract and distant." I do  not have a problem with abstraction, my livelihood and imagination depend on it. But I do have a problem if abstraction becomes the new hegemony. Fukuoka notes that science creates conditions in which it becomes necessary. Thence the "single-minded" economic model of industrial development, wherein science, self-gratifyingly, proves through its own methods the necessity of, say, scientific chemicals. He urges we consider what it means to "improve technique".
It's a fact that there are chickens with genes that allow them to get so fat that they cannot walk. To my imagination, that is worlds away from the also perverse Kobe cow, fed beer and massaged all day. An Asian sensibility is missing from the bigger, better, faster, more model of greed. When I read Fukuoka, aside from marvelling at how well he applied Lao Tzu's principle of doing nothing, I am reminded of the Chinese scholar-official (士大夫) of yesteryear, who also enjoyed "the satisfaction of living close to the source of things". There is a tradition in China of appreciating nature: describing it was part of the Imperial Examination in some dynasties. Also characteristic of this respect of nature is the long process of observing it, beautifully illustrated by watercolour scrolls: the scene cannot be observed in one glance.
A lot of 'background knowledge' is needed to see properly whatever is represented, in life, or in art. But life will always belong more to those who are living, than those who think about it. "Life is song and poetry," Fukuoka writes. The artist can take shortcuts that scholars must then - try to - explain.

Cloud Element. Magazine.

One Degree

It only takes a difference of 1C in temperature to determine whether or not coral will thrive. I would take that as a measure of sensitivity in the human soul.
In the NYT excerpt of Moss' new book, we learn that some do not "have the luxury to be moral". It's a difference of one degree centigrade. In an age when the finer things are commonly taught as not being worth money and as being irrelevant, little parts of the earth that we only discovered yesterday, like through Cousteau's exploration, are already being lost - being blasted from view (as described by this video, which I could not watch to the end).
The word I am dwelling on is fragile. In one degree, it is the difference between waking up already harried and waking up marvelling at the miracle of the new day (here's a video on the new sun and the Inuit). To feel awe at a new day informs one's actions and thoughts - but such subtlety often goes unmeasured.
And we are happy to measure the taste of wine: as I was, particularly as a child; I remember the cold caves and developing vocabulaire de l'oenologie. Those notes and textures were connected to geography, the terre, the personality of the vineyard: there was something sacral to that context, so the wine, to my mind, never became a product to be consumed, but something to be held with awe. Perhaps because of the stern eyes of the patrons as I swooshed before tasting.
I associate taste with the hard work of origins. It is an ethical category in my imagination. And as for degrees: food, if it is respected, will either bear the category of the right amount of heat, or the right amount of time - I have swopped the former for the latter, and make stews.
It was my father who took me to the vineyards, and my father who decided we would eat like the locals. My favourite meals are so far away from me now, for their ingredients: winter melon and barley soup, mango chicken... That food is a song, associated with the cooks and other memories, like the amah secretly bringing me spicy tamarind candies. The bitter sweet time.
And suddenly I find these sacred ties have been slashed. When I watch those videos (above), I remember my own experience with boat people, and I cannot watch without understanding their desperation. The word "education" which ostensibly offers new modes of survival, takes on a sinister hue. Already when I was a child, when we visited the hill tribes, they were beginning to leave for the cities: though those remaining had never seen fair hair before our visit. You might want to ask me why I care about the "marginal", which doesn't make the laws. But in my imagination, that is where the one degree of life is most visible. That one degree that determines so much.

Element. Though the flowers have bloomed, the branches turned to ice. Photograph courtesy of R.J.

雲吞

A popular way of writing "wonton" in Cantonese is above in the title-line, meaning "swallowing clouds". Another way of writing it can refer to its irregular shape.
What is it like to swallow the clouds? Sometimes I feel that that is my life, also irregularly shaped. And I was thinking this morning about shapes, and about food, as I read that honey-comb shaped plaster walls were used in 19th century France to optimise the growth of peaches. I wondered about structures that may be large but impermanent, experimental structures to see how much of the earth, in this case human resources, can be sapped at a given time. All kinds of attempts are made, it is for us to discern what is responsible and realistic.
An example, to my mind, of unrealistic measures is protesting that cows destined for dinner should not be those one enjoys watching on the landscape, how perverse. If one wants livestock to come from an invisible source, one is clearly wishing to escape reality: Root calls this the sign of a "cannibal culture".
To have one's head in the clouds is one thing, but this spiritual potential is supposed to be used in emergency situations only: we are not meant to levitate our whole lives. A dear soul, the kind my family used to call a "lotus flower", which to us meant a fragile person though the joke was on us as we were each other's "lotus flowers", wrote to me yesterday to say that a bird "(sick, dying, blind?)" unfortunately ended up on her window, and to her mind, this was the sign of love on this planet. She also wrote that trust and love are not the same thing.
This is also an example of floating above the world. The "trust" factor is where we are planted in the ground, for better or worse. How can we love without it? For example, I would have to be a masochist to love something that I did not admire, at least in the smallest way. So, when someone is gruff, and I still love them, this is because I trust that deep down inside, they have a kernel of goodness. It might not be fun when they are insensitive - but who here is perfect?
So to return to food - I would go so far as to say that our strange understanding of trust and sacrifice is interrupting our relationship to food. Some people want to detach themselves from the very uncomfortable process of sacrifice. We do not sacrifice animals in the temple anymore, but isn't it strange that we are now uncomfortable at the animal butchery of sustenance? Not just out of sight, but out of mind.
My friend, in her horror, was unable herself to clean her windowpane. But this is life, and just because we are afraid of our ends does not mean that we can make that end go away. Also, if we don't take the risk of sacrifice, I will go so far as to there is no life, in its full sense. We are left with being pawned horsemeat instead of beef because we gave up our agency when we wanted it to be invisible. The presence of sacrifice is uncomfortable, but brings back our agency. This is my post about irregular-shaped cloud swallowing.

Element. Photo: my wise, proverb-speaking friend's.

Late Summer Honey

The title is from fragments of an Alkman poem, Alkman, the slave and choirmaster. I was thinking earlier this evening about new kinds of slavery, and frustrated by how so many Victorian writers foresaw it, but time and again, I keep coming back to a theme of bees, which saves me. Again, the comforting honeypot of yesteryear's Winnie-the-Pooh ("Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them").
We are told that it was Ruskin who saw behind the dark and bestially violent labyrinth Daedalus' other construction, the honeycomb (made of gold). Apparently, even when made of gold, bees still accept such a construction as their own. I wish to focus on the transformative aspect of the bee; Ruskin's interpretation of the other side of the labyrinth. How something so small could be the source of an antidote.
The scale regarding bees can be seen in Vergil's description of bees "all afire... their wings clash... they swarm in throngs... challenge their foe" - yet Vergil also shows how such "storms of passion" are quelled through "the tossing of a little dust". Beautiful commentary of this passage points out how we are not unlike those bees: the scale of our charging worries is but dust in the universe.
But the bee, and not always man, constructs the honeycomb: passageways that, through industry, lead to the production of a nectar that never expires. Ah, to overcome all that seeks to snuff out our Romantic storms, brewed from that (relatively) slight wind that plays music through our hearts, urging us to creation.
I came back this evening to Davenport's phrase (on Joyce): "The original labyrinth was political, the final one, the honeycomb, a gift to Aphrodite." Politics ultimately has to do with relating to/relations with citizens. And I was thinking tonight about that kind of relational experience I have mostly when I read, but sometimes when I am lucky with my students, when we are all on the same page, despite differences in time, place, age, etc. It can be inspiring to encounter one's thoughts beyond oneself. And oddly like sharing a good meal.
How nice it would be if we could go beyond mere words and meals to build together, like the bees. And remember that politics can also be an art, not just a science. If we were to address art in times of difficulty, times that prove our mortality through our battles and wont... "My hearth is cold but the day will come When a rich pot of red bean soup Is on the table, the kind Alkman loves, Good peasant cooking, nothing fine. The first day of Autumn, you shall be my guest. Served bean soup, parched wheat, And late summer honey." What a simple, idyllic landscape. Everything is in its place (hierarchy reigns the honeycomb, tyranny, the labyrinthine halls). The soup is peasant's soup - but is that not the hearty meal the modern man craves? And to anyone who speaks "politics", I think I will answer, "peasant soup". And honey.

Lace.

Making Home

Economy should mean the upkeep of the household - οἰκονομία, household management. This is why I was quite intrigued by a post on Apartment Therapy by a certain DianneS.: "I'm interested in the angle of homemaking as an act of rebellion ...The quiet rebellion ... was the act of individuals who chose their own experience and histories over the government's insistence that there nothing of value existed before the Revolution. 

"So how does the concept of rebellious homemaking play now in this era, scattered as we are among so many disparate but joined cultures? ... I think homemaking is practically perfect as a statement for modern rebellion against a whole host of imposed constraints."

Many times I think about how if there is no one to "make" the home, the places where we live are but abodes - not homes. I would be intrigued by such things, having lived in over twenty places on several continents in under four decades. 

          The things that can never come back, are several -

          Childhood - some forms of Hope - the Dead -

          Though Joys - like Men - may sometimes make a Journey -

          And still abide...

This is a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem, written on the back of a coconut cake recipe. Our recluse Dickinson sent food to her neighbours - and like Rapunzel, let down, not her hair, but basketfulls of bounty. 

Such are the gestures of the home, at least in my mind, but then, I do tend to abstractions and daydreams more than is my due. This evening, I found a recipe for Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake, and made it with the following ingredients (adapted from the recipe at the link): 1 cup whole grain flour; 1 cup white flour; 1.5 tsp baking powder; 1 cup brown sugar; a bit of vanilla sugar; 0.25 cup butter, 0.25 cup virgin coconut oil; 2 eggs; a tad over 0.5 cup milk; 1 cup coconut "flour" with enough fruit tea to make it moist. What a success.

I was thrilled by allowing my ingredient constraints and tastes to alter a recipe once used by an author who kept me company when I was a child. I felt that in some small way, I was entering history in a way I doubt my writing ever will. Cooking is an act - so much more literal, direct than writing... For, to my mind, the whole point of writing was to make a home for myself where circumstantial constraints disallowed one.

We can make a journey and still abide, but to my imagination, the home is far superior. Yet since I have never really had one, this is but conjecture. 

Watercolour dots. Bread suspended over image from Marie Claire Idees.

Dance with the market

My trip to the market today began as if a fairy-tale book popped-up to life: as I wrote my grocery list, the sun formed a prism on the wall. I planned to buy flowers, and wrote a quick note to my friend in Moscow as if those words would summon her.
As I greeted the butcher, I noticed something new, his tan, the incongruity of the red baseball cap he wore. Only just now did I remember the gossip that he'd got his teeth done: I am frappé by what a good pair of teeth can do - frappé to keep in line with the subject of food, which is where I am going with all this.
Though not in a straight line. And anyway, who walks in a straight line when the market is overflowing with people and all the different stalls one wants to visit. Like my favourite younger farmer with her beaming face, which I almost asked to photograph today. But every time I reach for my phone/ camera, as I did today, watching the sun wash down at such oblique angles, highlighting this fruit or those red peppers, I feel like a traitor. Even though I often marvel at the art of certain photographs, I feel that no single picture could ever bring the right focus to the market experience. It cannot be stared at in that way: if one took the objective gaze to the market, it would fall apart immediately and lose its charm.
Nor do birds like to be stared in the eye for too long. Their proximity is very real - so long as one does not seek to capture. This is called the dance of experience.
So there I was, talking to the young farmer, who had no potatoes due to the scorching weather. As I stood there, listening to the sparrows tweeting overhead, because there are several levels to the market, and above the birds, is the sky, I thought how misleading the weather is: today with its expressive blue sky filled with the glory of bird song is actually hiding the reality that such nice days deny the needs of crops. But is that not what we are doing? The contempt for the farmer; the policy that saves corporations while small farmers are left to fold.
And yet, since it is the job of the farmer to bring out to the stalls what they have to sell, again one is deceived - there is such an abundance of food. Only when one asks the price does one understand: those potatoes were the few potatoes to survive the drought, and like the loved child that survives a Victorian malady, it is lavished with expense.
Soon, it will be the end of eggplant season, and time for stews. I realised today that I will be revisiting my best-of recipes that I posted here, so since I know that at least one person uses those recipes (me) I will share the two recipes I made most often this summer: this baba ganoush recipe (very forgiving, even if you bake those little, lean eggplants and keep the skins on), and a meat rub of salt, pepper, red pepper, garlic powder and cumin. I only eat meat about a third of the year, but when I prepare it, I like to treat it well.

Tape.

Swizzle This!

The swizzle sticks that my family had were shot through with a touch of colour, in the Venetian way. In fact, I think they were from Venice. It is funny when such memories emerge from the deep recesses of the storage of the mind - along with the bulky wooden games we had shipped from magical Parisian toy stores. What a distant world. Yet perhaps as we grow, we regain part of the world we knew as children.
All this thinking began when I finally decided to use the Ramazzotti that has been sulking in the larder. My brother and I were mostly raised on wine, a statement which is as low on political correctness today as is the level of Ramazzotti after I came upon a stellar cocktail recipe. Je plaisante.
The only proper cocktail I really ever enjoyed was the sidecar. The last time I had one was in Burma, in what I suppose was one of those life-changing experiences. I was a freshman, the books I had with me were Nietzsche's Ubermench and Hesse's Siddhartha, the former I abandoned: too much on top of the challenging scenes surrounding the hotel. Inside, colonial fans spun slowly from ornate ceilings, cocktails being mixed in hand-held shakers occasionally breaking the refined silence; outside, people improvised seating with boxes and bricks, the streets more like broad, dusty paths.
Thus the memory of the sour drink. If you share an affinity for the sour, know that you can mix Ramazzotti with freshly squeezed lemon juice and a simple syrup made of one cup sugar, one cup water, and thyme - brought to a boil, and herb allowed to steep between 10 to 20 minutes. This discovery caused me to long, momentarily, for those swizzle sticks.
Food is also memory, though I am reluctant to sound like I am jumping on the latest epicurean bandwagon. I mean it in a more Proustian sense, as hackneyed as that may sound. Everyone's madeleine is their own personal favourite...
The other day, I went to market and bought some okra. The farmer gave me a sheet of paper prepared by his wife, in the local script, with two recipes. It begins, "Okra was once found in abundance at this market, but today it is a rarity. In the summer, the okra is a pleasant vegetable, preferred by some over all others. Many readers will recognize it: it is a long, green, ridged pod..." And the recipe? To blanche the okra, saute onion, add seeded, chopped tomato, a little garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, and the blanched okra: over a low heat for 20 minutes. Divine!
But what makes it divine is also the shared aspect, the personal contact involved in the recipe. It awakens that primordial custom of breaking bread together - that once the bread has been broken, one will not be attacked by one's fellow diner.
To share more, one must be prepared to make more sacrifices. Sometimes, I feel friction between my idealisms and what I am comfortable giving up. And yet all the while, I feel convinced that the ridges in the swizzle stick and even in the okra should eventually combine the ingredients most pleasantly.

Border.

Emptying out

In other words, being on vacation. To be free from obligations means being "idle, empty; to abandon, give out."
This is the first summer that I can attest to experiencing the meaning of those words, actively. Actively empty and idle. We all know Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness, or Robert Louis Stevenson's "An apology for Idlers." We know, intuitively, or rationally if we have studied some philosophy, the importance of play. But I continue to find it strange and uncomfortable to face such emptiness.
It is a discipline to be able to relax into nothingness, letting the hours have their way, becoming attuned to the quietest inner voice that can only be heard when there is no structure. Discerning which kinds of emptiness bring nourishment as opposed to the fast food of nothingness.
The quickly-grown chicken of the mind, so fat and boneless that it cannot walk, occurs where idleness degenerates into sloth. It is not enough to fill the hours with TV-viewing or consistent cocktail hour, or whatever else deters from the listening, from the patience one is wise to lend oneself. On the other side of the void is something of better quality. To wait in faith, fishing in that emptiness, one will find fish.
There are different phases of emptiness. To empty oneself out - one first drains out all that one wanted but that didn't happen, and it is sad to come to such realisations; one fails at a few projects while learning is happening, and it is so hard to fail; one is subject to all the turbulence that happens before one accepts the nothingness for what it is.
There may be no long-distance bus rides, oh such jewelled diversions from self!, but instead, the world shrinks to much smaller turns of the hand, in one's little home. Where there are but flowers to be placed on tables, skies to be watched. Mornings to be listened to. Attention brought to where we live. Attention brought to how we live. Then, a slipping back into the knots of knitting, listening to their progress while watching travel programs on TV, dreaming the travel - in my dreams twice now I have gone abroad: once to Spain where I saw magical haystacks in vallied fields - haystacks from paintings I imagined were real, paintings I imagined in my dream...
The subconscious brings forth what the soul calls out for. When we possess nothing, we have more of a reason to grab hold of the tiniest of things, like the impression in one single dream. It is the world in inverse; one watches the world come out of oneself, and recognizes the symbols one is longing for, recognizes the destination one is moving towards. Only in emptiness do we truly see our τέλος - that end to which our lives are pointed. In Timaeus, Plato describes the actual cause of things as that which makes a thing good. What makes my life good? The answer to this question comes from the hunger during the fast.
I often say I would never choose emptiness or "making do" without something. Emptiness is so uncomfortable. But it is precisely the emptying out that makes space for something better.

Dots and monkey.

On cooking shows...

I really like the idea behind Mythologies, by Roland Barthes. The book attempts to identify "signs of the times," like the fad for astrology or wrestling, and tries to interpret them.
Barthes, despite being an "academic," seems to have cultivated, above all, a longing to be a novelist. It seems at the end of his life, he was looking to write a story that would tie together all the stories of his life, despite any discrepancies of his earlier work. I like the idea of weaving together the mythologies of an age into a final novel.
Well, along the lines of Mythologies, we might ask ourselves today: what of cooking shows? Are they popular for their edification, or because they're the latest spectator sport - and if so, how did they usurp football?
I think that cooking is appealing for its metaphorical value. "Locally grown." "Process." "Alchemy."
Are we not looking to make our life sweeter, even at the most minute level? If we don't eat the chocolate parfait, we want to at least observe it.
How fascinating, too, that in this age of post-excess, so many are discovering the beauty in "poor people food": stews made of basic ingredients, prepared with love, and with time. In our busy lives, we all secretly long for someone to prepare a home-cooked meal for us, every day.
Even if a person doesn't cook, or can't afford to eat the meals shown on television, there is a theoretical appreciation for these "finer" aspects of life, which must be a good thing, even if it remains at the level of abstraction.
The metaphorical value of the cooking show works right down through the roots, literally. We learn that local is best, the freshly picked, tastiest. Process is important: it's not only about the ingredients, but how they are treated. The same goes for life. We see on those cooking shows that something prepared with love can sometimes outshine the technically correct. We learn that complicating things just for the sake of it does not necessarily lead to the best results. 
We learn there are basic activities we still cannot do without, no matter how machine-dependent we've become, poised before our computer screens. We still need to eat. And as we watch what goes into making the simplest of meals, we are reminded that patience and love and a little creativity can make magic happen. A cooking show is life in miniature: choices are made, there is a beginning, middle, and end - when the meal is cooked. Something is created, and there is something triumphant in that. Isn't the idea nourishing? Even if we are not at a family table, part of us is relieved just knowing that - at least in theory - such comforting things are still possible.
If the cooking show was a mythological theme in my novel of the modern age, it would be the echo of distant memories, calling out at the modern man, in the midst of his plight, to take a break, and consider: how much is too much? My protagonist, a woman, would shed a sentimental tear when, after taking eggs from beneath a chicken, and flour from a river mill, honey from bees, and butter from a grandma who just churned it, the chef on the tv show pulls the finished cake out of the oven - with wisps of smoke coming off it. Just that simple. Transformation from the animals, to the table. My protagonist, in this suspenseful moment of saccharine melodrama, would suddenly repeat, I never knew fresh egg yolks were golden! Her mind would wander, and she'd think of the Japanese Tanuki, the racoon dog said to gather gold leaves in autumn to try to pawn them off as real gold in exchange for sake. Golden, golden, so that's where the gold is... And she'd reconsider her life.

Elements.

live first, then use the machine

Lewis Mumford once wrote: "For mark this: only those who live first and who keep alive have earned the right to use the machine. Those who use machinery because they are incapable of facing the stream of life and directing it [become] mere attachments to a mechanical contrivance."
To be responsible, we are supposed to know how to live the good life. That was the point of ancient philosophy. The good life is the quality life. Remember the catch phrase, quality time? I wonder what happened to that. What about quality writing? Yes, we all know about quality shoes and frocks: perhaps because of its woven qualities, the internet has become a web for all things fashion, especially appearance. But what of other forms of quality?
I think about quality when I look at my rss feed, and wonder how many modern images I need to see, and how many is too many. I consider trendy things to be relevant - for there is something crucially social about trend - but too much trend can ruin one's thinking.
The word quality, in its English genesis, comes from "how much" (qua) - but also "who" and "what". The word itself is not only based on inherent characteristics, but quantities thereof. If something is that much better than something else, its quality is superior.
But we know from Aristotle that too much of a good thing can spoil the broth. That if it exaggerates goodness, it becomes the opposite of good. For example, doing too many good deeds can make one bitter. So, quality is that which is just right. But if it is just right, then it will be relative: different people will see quality in different places. Oh dear!

There is a joke here that speaks to this. A child asks his father: what is the difference between 'free' and 'for nothing'? The father says: school is free, but you go there for nothing. Of course, as an educator, I disagree, after laughing, and claim that an education can improve the quality of life; perhaps not materially, especially not today, but certainly in terms of access to the good life, whereby one learns to cope with oneself (and material loss!), and gains holistic social tools that open up alternatives.
But some people would define a quality education as that which leads to certain employment. As if every job was a good job. Similarly, some define quality food as that satiates at a low cost. The latter topic is easier to deal with, because there is a lot of public discourse about it. We now know that not all food is good food, and that unprocessed food is quality food. When I read this Wendell Berry lecture on food awareness, I thought to myself, some writing is so much more meaningful than other writing. Some writing is quality writing: it is a guide to better action, and living.
Quality writing to my mind is the kind that can only be produced by one who has walked the walk, as I touched on in my post on learning. And there are no short cuts to living well; the paradox is, too, that living well often involves making a lot of sacrifices.
So, to return to the father who said that school is free, but you go there for nothing - such a father would probably not consider sacrifices in connection with quality, simply because making a sacrifice is a leap of good faith: it means embarking on something that looks doomed from the start.
The motivation behind the sacrifice comes from the heart, for the mind is overcome with doom, but the heart can still be filled with passion. I don't know how much currency this idea has these days. I know that once upon a time, examples such as the life of Ben Franklin were taught to inspire children with the thought that it is possible to achieve great dreams while living as model citizens, but I get the feeling that most people feel like they have lost their agency in life. Regardless, it is edifying to consider the lives of great people, for one can better envision a way forward. After all, this used to be how history was understood: historia magistra vitae est.
Lewis Mumford wrote that the only person who should use machines is he who has learned how to live well, if he is not to become but an extension of the machine. His commentary should remind us to consider what it means to live a quality life. Some may argue, "Who needs quality when all there millions of trendy photos for free on the net?" But a picture is only worth a thousand words if we speak a language to begin with. It's not for nothing that we say, if you pay in peanuts, you get monkeys! Words are to put things in their place. No, words aren't exactly free, because they require work, but they lead to a quality life, not a heavy dependence on technology.

Elements: Animus.

going natural

One of the sciences involving trees is called dendrochronology. It is the study of the cross section of a tree, where all those rings, or circles, are. Like Rilke's I live my life in widening circles... I had not known of that poem - even though I have read so much of Rilke's poetry, until I'd heard that radio programme the link will take you to. But I had written something that had tree rings in the title, which was my way of closing off a series of rings that constituted my beginning of where I live now.
What one of my work's reviewers failed to understand is that by analysing the rings of a tree, one can understand the climactic conditions of the entire region in which the tree grew. If we honuor the local, sometimes we give ourselves over to it, to be consumed by it, until we have made it our own. At which point, true creativity begins. But never without that nascent period. It must batter you (I quote the radio show), it must make you stretch a little more before the song can be sung through you (ditto), before you are a tree that can be played by the wind. The place I live is at a crossroads of many winds which rattle the windows all day long, as they are today, urging us to strengthen our cores!
But when, and if, we let such storms pass over us, we have a ring to show for it. It isn't easy, but isn't it necessary? It remains to be asked: How much do we let our surroundings into our lives (or do we fear pain, and say things like: I am always at the top of my game)? How much do we notice what's around us as we go about our daily chores (or does our fear blind us, making us the prefect pawn for global politics)? Do we notice the expression in the cashier's eyes, the old woman's Tower of Pisa gait, as she shuffles down the sidewalk?
Those are the qualities of the wood: it is exposed to the elements. It does not hide. And though we are not wood, and have souls, doesn't the soul come out of first accepting our very materiality? That we live somewhere, have certain memories, loved some places, were shaped by certain people?
The organic, the natural comes from first accepting the constellation of who we are, where we are, where we live. It is painful to look all those things in the eye, sometimes. But how else can we find out what we most deeply need? What balsam to use to attend to our surroundings?
Sometimes, the answer is in the simplest things. Like quality nourishment, eating local. I've been inspired by Ashley's recent food posts. Without frying the life out of food, but giving it gentle, warm baths... It is a time of cleaning, anyway, for many Christians. In the Orthodox Church, this is the first week of the Great Fast, which means no oil (except that in bread).
Today, I made a cauliflower soup by first dry cooking onion (in a pot, with no water, until it browns), then adding potato, carrot and later cauliflower - adding bit by bit of water. I used the herbs I had on hand, and two kinds of chillies. I made fresh wheat buns, using my pizza stone (lugged all the way from the US by a friend!). The buns call for 1 kg what flour, a little over half a litre of soda water, a packet of organic dry yeast, 3 tsp salt, 4 tbsp sugar, 9 tbsp oil. The ingredients are mixed, allowed to rise, cut into smaller portions, when a tiny bit more oil is added, allowed to rise shortly, then baked.
There is a special joy to eating simply. And it definitely helps direct the mind to questions like: what is really important? How can I learn to treat my body better? How can I learn to think better?

Elements: needlework: minitoko; starburst: pugly pixel.

winter recipes on rotation

I'm a fan of word of mouth recipe recommendation, and was wondering, do you want to do a recipe swap? Because I cook everyday, I look for simple  but delicious dishes, and have quickly jotted down some of the recipes I use frequently in the middle of winter. I hope this will be of use. Bon apetit!

♥  Kale chips: wash and dry kale, cut into smaller pieces about 4 inches long, massage in olive oil, place on paper-lined baking sheet and cook in oven until crisp
♥  Perfect roasted potatoes they are cooked for five minutes, which means when they are roasted, they get a wonderful crispness to the edges. You will see that even non-potato eaters will ask for seconds
♥  Oven roasted beets (a stainless, faster method!)
♥  I love roasting all my vegetables: parsnips, carrots (which I cut into sticks, rub with olive oil and lightly salt); cauliflower (which works wonderfully with the sauce below). I often wrap some fish with fresh herbs and garlic in foil, and cook it alongside the veg, all on a paper-lined baking sheet, and take the fish out first
♥  Miso-glazed flank steak
♥  A Poppytalk sauce that works wonders with couscous and veg
♥  Polenta first stove cooked: while it is cooking, preheat oven and add a pan with enough olive oil to cover (as in perfect potato recipe). When polenta is done, add in at least half a cup of freshly grated Parmesan, salt a little pepper, and red pepper flakes if desired, add it to pan; it should sizzle on being added. Sprinkle more freshly grated Parmesan on top. Bake until top is golden
♥  Cleaned squash or any gourd-like squash, placed in dish with a little bit of water, and it's hollow part filled with a bit of cream or similar, salt, pepper, sage and topped with brie. This should be roast in the oven. Here is a similar recipe. And here is a recipe with the same ingredients that could be modified to be even quicker, but to result in a similar taste. (If you want the exact recipe, I will copy it out in the comments)

Such recipes should keep one warm and nourished until summer!

Elements: star paper, macarons: pugly pixel.

put some punch in it

It can be really hard to have to take in information that one does not empathise with.
But if we are learning, whatever it is that we are learning - such as how to interact with folks of different strokes or how to be happy without being in denial - we are bound to face information which, at first glance, is not pretty.
Take for instance historical name dropping. I don't like it. Those isolated names that are attributed with the status of divinity: Da Vinci, Copernicus, etc. Never mind that Copernicus had his predecessor in Pythagoras, or that da Vinci is often attributed more importance than he deserves. We are told history through pictures of the chosen few, when in actuality, the story is more complicated than that, and the name-dropping skews our view of life, giving us the impression that life is formed entirely through individuals, and not through, for example, the spirit of the age, as Bakhtin so beautifully explains. Bakhtin's famous example is how Charles Dickens was like a sponge to his age, and that the strength of his writing lies in his ability to re-present the multiple dialects and class realities of his day.
The truth is always somewhere in the middle - of the often one-sided information.
And while it can seem frustrating to go up against all those narratives that inspire anxiety and not beauty in one's mind, we just need to try to hold out, calm down, and wait for inspiration to come in and sew the information together into a prettier picture. It might not come immediately, in fact it cannot come immediately, when we are taking in the information. It comes when we are putting the information away in our minds. Inspiration is the delightful housekeeper of the mind.
But not everyone wants to sort life out. Many people just pile up information, which means the information can't actually be used. This is exactly like those annoying pictures in home decorating magazines which feature a "decorative" tower-of-Pisa of books - which clearly aren't being read, imagine pulling one out from the bottom!
So, what does one do while one is waiting for the information to settle, before one puts it away, if this is what they want to do in life, to learn life? While I wait, I like to cook.
Yesterday, I made my first caramel sauce. I had been so put off by the two sets of caramel instructions, so I just tried the recipe, given that I know how to melt sugar until it is dark copper in colour. If you know how to do that, too, I don't see why the recipe wouldn't work.
All is well if we remember to look for the sugar and spice - which, incidentally, pretty much sums up the ingredients in punch! So, I propose that instead of "put a bird on it" we put some punch in it!

Elements: retro woman: velma's; vintage photo: farhill;

medallions: pugly pixel.