A hunger dyad

1. Individual, as hostility to the corporeal self: the body shuts down when the spirit is heightened. In elation, the spirit is like a balloon about to fly away, we try to hold on to it with the tip of our fingers but it will soar leaving the body behind. In sorrow and trouble, it is the maddened kite that is wrenched from our hands, mouth and stomach recede until they are a blackened dot in faraway earth. Nourishment, and by extension, gastronomy are for those at peace. Banal contentment ought to be the first ingredient in a cook’s larder.

2. Communal, as hostility to the other/oppressor: Shakespeare captures it well in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock replies to Bassanio who has suggested he dines with him: “Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” Note how eating and praying are equated here. To break bread with the oppressor/other is to begin to forsake your identity and weaken your resistance.

The Lone Diner

I cannot remember when eating alone in a restaurant ceased to be a glamorous prospect for me. In my teens, captivated by the nebulous and incongruous promise of affluent bohemia, I pictured myself as a mature woman with the means to dine out alone just because. In my mind I’d be wearing smart unfussy clothes, good shoes, a silver cigarette case and a slim hardcover classic in my handbag. The restaurant would be high ceilinged and old fashioned: a veneer of wood polish on its mahogany chairs and tables covered in starched table clothes. I wanted to have a favourite cocktail and to unfailingly drink it as an aperitif. I wanted the maître d to know my full name but always address me as “Madame”. I wanted to take off a pair of gloves and smooth them on the table exuding a mysterious and elusive allure to other diners. I wanted to take notes on a little notebook resting by the side of my plate. In sum, I wanted to be a character in an Agatha Christie novel. More exactly, I wanted to be the heiress who becomes the main suspect of a heinous murder to the reader, but is quickly exonerated by Poirot over tea served in china cups because he can see past her faux cynicism and polished manners to finally vindicate her good heart and decency in front of her relatives in his closing revelatory soiree.

 In truth, my grand uncle –an intellectual and writer who managed to miraculously live off his wits in the Post Civil War years and went on to publish numerous books on art, history, and literature– was probably the closest source of my misguided view of solitary dining. My grandmother, speaking in hushed reverential tones, used to regale me with stories of his fondness for dinners for one in fine restaurants. A gifted polymath with wise and kindly eyes magnified by thick tortoise shell glasses, and an imperious disregard for uninformed or unrefined opinions, his pleasure in food was only second to his love of books.

He would come to my parents for dinner on Sundays and bring me a book and a bag of sweets: a bilingual copy of the Little Prince and a bag of bonbons would simultaneously land on my lap. He would ask a question or two to check that I was “growing in sharpness”, make a comment about my button nose not being able to take any glasses and leave me to enjoy my book and my sweets. They don’t make elderly relatives like him anymore. One day he left the house slamming the door in anger after a political argument with my father. Both men were hot headed and passionate debaters, convinced of the righteousness of their views and the scandalous disregard for logic of their opponent’s. I suppose my father should have deferred to him on account of his age, but he didn’t and my grand uncle exited our lives with a clatter that belied the gentleness of his dealings with me. A few weeks later, my parents set out to find him in one of the cafés he frequented when he was looking to listen to his intellectual superiors, spar with his peers or inspire his disciples. He was not there and nobody could direct them to his house. He lived in a boarding house and was very private about his arrangement and address. His fine collection of books was scattered between his two nephews’ houses. It must have pained him to part with the leather bound books bearing a delicately designed ex libris seal that he had left on my parents’ shelves but he was proud and quite capable of holding a grudge in the age old Iberian tradition. We never saw him again.

 From then on, my granny filled in the gaps that his growing acquaintance would have inevitably covered. She spoke highly of his mind of course but, being more sensual than intellectual and far from parsimonious when it came to food herself, she preferred to tell me of his exacting palate and great appetite and of his generosity to the waiters in the Hotel Nacional, his favourite dining spot, whom he would tip recklessly, disregarding the penny pinching antics required to keep body and soul together in Post War Madrid. My disinterest on accruing or maintaining wealth may very well stem from the same family line. I imagined him having outmoded starters like preserves in aspic or bouillabaisse served in round china bowls with a curlicued lid. He had a sweet tooth, my granny said, and he liked old-fashioned Spanish confectionaries, a dinner was not finished without a flan or some other traditional pudding. I imagined him drinking sherry and port, and having an informed but narrow taste for wines, with a weakness for the tart Albariño he had enjoyed as a teacher in Lugo. She painted him sitting upright, bearing his Patrician profile as he mulled his ideas for an article or book in the vast and half empty dining room of the Hotel Nacional.

 Like most intellectuals lacking in guile, in my grandmother’s accounts he came across as a brilliant eccentric, skirting the edges of madness perhaps, but madness built around a blatant and foolhardy disregard for the material rather than the more vehement troubled kind. He believed, she told me once, that rationing, which lasted for a long time after the War was over, should be proportional to the subjective Epicurean requirements of the individual rather than his or her objective needs. The same man who held such irrational ideas about food distribution was fluent in Italian, French, German and English, translated from Latin and Classical Greek, was well versed in Baroque Spanish Art and vividly wrote about Murillo, published a definitive account of the loss of the remnants of the Spanish empire in 1898 and countless books of literary and historical exegesis. He was first one of Ortega y Gasset’s favoured disciples and, according to a reliable account, the inspiration for the character of the impoverished intellectual Martín Marco in The Beehive by Camilo José Cela, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with whom he had more than a passing acquaintance. He never reached their levels of fame or comfort: unlike Ortega, he came of age too close to the turbulence of the War and he was incapable of the self-serving intrigue that sealed Cela’s prosperity. Yet he believed that his needs as a gourmet ought to be better served by rationing than those of struggling families. It just goes to show that sometimes the stomach is a stronger organ than the head, even a head as fine as his.

It was the picture of this sophisticated terrifically gifted yet earnest man sitting alone in an airy and lofty public dining room that sustained my naïve views of solitary eating as something beautiful and almost heroic. It now strikes me as an emblem of a lost and vanished world: a world of doggedly accrued knowledge and philosophies painfully carved against the tawdry realities of a depleted and demoralised country, a world in which my grand uncle carries all the tatters of decency and honesty and truth in his pocket.

Going up the larder

Food teases the palate, fills the stomach and fuels action and movement but it is also a social, cultural and class signifier as I attempt to demonstrate with most lines in this blog. In this passage from On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan exhaustively and elegantly proves that this is the case by showcasing his protagonist’s induction into the Oxford upper-middle class through food. I propose a game to travel down our personal and social memory: read the passage and try to remember the first time you tried each of the items here.

“During that summer he ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yoghurt –a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel. His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables –the aubergines, green and red peppers, courgettes and mangetouts –that came regularly before him. He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of under-cooked peas. He had to overcome an aversion, not to the taste so much as to the reputation of garlic. Ruth giggled for minutes on end, until she had to leave the room, when he called a baguette a croissant. (…) He encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. Many of these items tasted only faintly repellent, and similar to each other in some indefinable way, but he was determined not to appear unsophisticated. Sometimes, if he ate too fast, he came close to gagging.

 Some of the novelties he took to straight away: freshly ground and filtered coffee, orange juice at breakfast, confit of duck, fresh figs. He was in no position to know what an unusual situation the Pointings’ was, a don married to a successful businessman, and Violet, a sometime friend of Elizabeth David, managing a household in the vanguard of a culinary revolution while lecturing to students on monads and the categorical imperative…”

Our daily bread

The Hop House: Korean food; a pint of Guinness; a close friend, smart, loving and up for a challenge. Inspired by a fine anthology of Portuguese poems, we talk about translation, about poetry before and after the Carnation Revolution. And then of Spanish poetry before Franco’s death and of the great Basque-Spanish poet, Gabriel Celaya. Before we know it camaraderie and bravado push us to walk the tight-rope of bringing poetry alive in another language. And  blow-by-blow we try to revive the boxer so that he can bounce back onto the ring. This is the result:

Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future

When you no longer expect to be privately moved

But your heart beats on beyond consciousness.

Ferociously alive, blindly exalted

As if your pulse was beating against darkness.

 

When, about to fall, you look straight into the clear eyes of death.

You tell the truth: the wild, terrible, loving cruelties of truth.

You say these poems that open up the lungs of those who, suffocating,

Demand to be born, to be rhythm, to be the law of everything beyond themselves.

 

With the speed of instinct,

With the lightning of a miracle,

With palpable magic, in our hands

Reality turns into its twin.

 

Poetry for the poor, poetry that is as necessary

As our daily bread,

As the air we breathe thirteen times per minute

To be and, in our being, be a glorifying yes.

 

Because we live blow by blow, because they hardly

Let us utter our names,

Our songs cannot be pure ornament without sin.

We are getting to the heart of everything.

 

I curse poetry conceived as a cultural luxury

By the lukewarm

Who wash their hands, sit on the fence, do not commit.

I curse the poetry of those who do not take sides until they are stained.

 

I make mine all faults; I feel all suffering within me,

And I breathe in all songs.

I sing, and I sing and,

Singing beyond my private sorrows, I grow.

 

I would like to give you life, to provoke your actions,

And I measure carefully what I can do.

I feel I am an engineer of verse

And a workman who with others works the iron core of Spain.

 

Such is my poetry: instrumental poetry,

At one with the blind beating heart of oneness.

Such is my poetry: a weapon loaded with a growing future

That I am pointing at your chest.

 

It is not poetry conceived drop by drop:

It is not a beautiful product. It is not a perfect fruit.

It is like the air we all breathe,

Like the song that expands everything we carry inside.

 

Words that we all repeat

That we feel as ours until they fly: they are more than what we say.

They are what we need: nameless.

Screams in the sky and deeds on earth.

 

Gabriel Celaya

There is nothing in the press

I am hungry. My guests are hungry. I should be cooking something. They have been sitting by the fire empty handed for a while, chatting amiably at first, increasingly jittery with every minute spent on an empty stomach and no whiff of food. An hour ago I turned my back on them and left them on their own, slowly sinking in the quick sands of stale talk.

I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge: an out of date egg in its carton on the top shelf; three shrivelled cherry tomatoes in their plastic pail by a single can of tonic; half a bag of frozen peas in the freezer. I let a beat pass, hoping the presses will yield more but to no avail: they could be the shelves on a bunker weeks after a nuclear holocaust. On tiptoe I try to reach a half empty packet of easy cook rice; the tips of my fingers hit the bumpy edge of a battered tin of tuna; a yellowing clove of garlic falls off like the tooth of an old dog. I take a deep breath: I could go to the shop but it is dark, cold, and the wind howls outside. My guests are waiting now longer than an hour: they will stir in anger and leave but I cannot move.

There is nothing for me to cook. I cannot cook.

Steady diet of nothing

Although I believe restrictions can spur creativity, the richness and complexity of genre in all its forms being a point in case, I sometimes resent the self-imposed restriction of blogging about food or even writing a blog where food is an excuse to write about everything else. Some days I am not hungry and my mind is far from my stomach. Those days I think that writing can be hard enough without having to use food as a metaphor for the colourful debris that wafts in and out of my brain. Today is one of those days. This last week has been one of those weeks. As an example, here are some of the thoughts I had as I cycled home battling the wind this evening. None of these can be readily linked to food, damn it.

-We age physically but our character is set much earlier than our body. One day we realise that young bodies have drawn a line between them, and us; that we are seen as old, or older, even though relatively little of our intellectual/emotional self-image has changed. Another day, feeling particularly wearied, we realise the currency that is energy. We realise that we are not that far from the day when comfort will become our sole priority and that that day our spirit will be fully subdued by the limitations of our body; The day when the only wearable shoes will be a pair of slippers. That day we will feel as old as those who are still young see us.

-How can I use food to write about the jolt to the heart when my bike is pushed off course by a gust of wind? Or about the mundane exhilaration that follows when I regain my path and hold on to my cap about to fly off without accident or even mishap? How the hell do you write about these feelings via food?

-Why is politics so damn interesting in Spain right now and so dull in Ireland, in spite of the very necessary and well-attended marches and protests against water charges? My guess is that, like a family where its elders have avoided facing their traumas, Spain is now seeing its younger generations fearlessly question their compromises, and venality. Spain’s new party Podemos has the preternatural seriousness of adolescence, a time when we believe that, unlike everybody who came before us, we will never be weak or abject. Somehow the closer I come to explain this excitement about politics is the time I read the opening chapter of Cortázar’s Hopscotch ten times in a row, because the poetry of his prose seemed extra-terrestrial and also at some point achievable to rather limited scribes like me. That is as good a definition of youth as I can think of, the time when you still think that if you only tried/were interested/made an effort you could write like Cortázar, Yeats, or Emily Dickinson. There is no image of food that can allow me to follow this thread of thought.

-And then I thought that the challenges posed by this blog are attractive because for some reason I have the kind of brain that finds allusion, irony, symbolism, metaphor, and everything that is displacement and indirection profoundly compelling. I tire quickly of fact, of fitting the triangle in the triangle-shaped mould, and the square in the square-shaped mould, and the circle in the mould that is round. I teach and my intuition is that the hammering of facts and factoids that passes for education is linked to the perpetuation of capitalist ideology, with its utilitarian and cumulative thrust. That only the study of language, our first and most profound exercise in abstraction, can give us the critical detachment that we need to be full citizens.

-Following from this I find figurative art and realist literature far stranger than impressionist, expressionist, abstract art or poetry. The latter are close to magic, which we need, but how odd it is to try to create something so like its model.

-Somebody from Taiwan viewed this blog yesterday. I have no idea what they were looking for when they threw their little pebble to skim the surface of this virtual ocean or why it hit the bottle with the message I flung into that same sea more than a year ago. Sometimes it feels like the Internet is masterminded by Jorge Luis Borges.

-This is the point at which I get off my bike. Thanks for reading.

Expensive peas and the poet

Public personas can be extremely limiting for an artist, crippling even. They distort and bend the work out of shape to make it fit into a worn out mould. How useful is it to present Shakespeare as a peerless genius we must be in awe of no matter what? Some of my best conversations with students have sprung from questioning that assumption and in my quarrels with his plays I come to deeply enjoy them, like the testy challenging flawed but irresistible lover that pisses you off but makes you laugh and moves you like nobody else.

Amongst poets, Sylvia Plath has been particularly ill served by her posterity. Mention her name and you will be within a couple of minutes of an ill advised joke about ovens and heads or, worse still, some hackneyed platitude about her tragic end. But you know what? She was a fine poet in spite of, not because of, this tragedy: her best poems are brave, inquisitive, they can be dark, but they are also vibrant: buzzing with energy and wonder. She worked hard at her writing too, her poems are not the result of depressive trance but of a life long engagement with her craft which started when she was a young girl.

I am currently reading her only novel, The Bell Jar, considered to be autobiographical, and her voice is delighting me: it shows glimpses of the darkness and intensity of depression but it is also deeply intelligent, wry and filled with the observant curiosity of those who mine the minute for gold. It is simultaneously bold and tentative, self centred and yearning: a fine self portrait of a young woman taking her first steps into adulthood. It has aged very well, I think, proving that intelligence can resist the restrictions our culture imposes on female agency, even a culture on the surface as restrictive as that of the 1950s. We need more tales of young women’s rich inner lives: stories where they give shape to their experience and where art (or work, or nature, or the tapestry of day-to-day life) is as important or more important than romance.

Sylvia Plath was not a martyr. We should think twice before we glibly label her a suicide, and attribute her fame to the way she died. What I know of her work demonstrates that she was present and engaged with life. And she had an appetite. In The Bell Jar she writes:

My favourite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge, handwritten menus, where a tiny side-dish of peas costs fifty or sixty cents, until I picked the richest, most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them…

I correct myself: there’s one thing about limiting expectations when it comes to fine writers. When you actually engage with the work with an open mind, you will be pleasantly surprised.

A portrait of the artist as a food man

These last few days I’ve had Joyce in my mind. No great surprises here: after all he is never far from you if you live in Dublin. And I did write my Ph.D. thesis on Ulysses. And it was the centenary of the publication of Dubliners yesterday and it is Bloomsday today. But I want to write about him because sometimes he gets lost in the big theme park that is Dublin around the 16th of June. Amidst the boaters, the lace camisoles, and the ashplants of fake Edwardiana, we lose sight of the hardwork and dogged dedication of the man who conjured up the lowly, tedious, exhalting, onanistic, fetishistic, scatological, lyrical, intellectual and cod-intellectual, poisonously funny, orgiastic, combative, melancholic, phantasmagorical, exhausting, compassionate and exhilarating book that is Ulysses.

Ulysses is all of the above yet impossible to define or exhaust. It is hard to believe it came in the heels of Dubliners, a collection of lean short stories that kicks ass from here to kingdom come. Put them together and you have the Classic and the Baroque; “scrupulous meanness” and unending largesse; feast and famine. You may just say that with both books we have a universe spinning on the tip of Joyce’s slender elegant fingers.

And Joyce was a slender man. A lean body punctuated by languidly ironic eyes magnified by his spectacles. Joyce was partially sighted and maybe that explains why he seems to look through the viewer when you stand before one of his portraits. His short sightedness may account for the splendid arrangements of people and objects in his prose. His mastery of space and movement, of the relative position of objects and characters may very well be connected to his disability, to the need of the increasingly blind man to register everything and everyone, as Will Self has suggested. Like Self, I do believe that Joyce’s impaired sight played an important part in the fashioning of his talent, from the stunning mastery of space as remembered and re-arranged, to the nostalgia that fastened him to the Dublin of his youth, through to the increased musicality of his work and then on to the darkest night of the dream in Finnegans Wake. The last story in Dubliners,  “The Dead” offers the most precise arrangement of food on a table I have come across in my readings:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

Of course, given the slant of this blog, I wanted to pick food-centred passages to illustrate my observations but the above is exemplary of Joyce’s extraordinary control as a writer, even the unpublished writer in his twenties he was when he wrote this. There is nothing in the description of the Misses Morkans’ table that can be attributed to a desire to impress the reader with literary know how: there are no unnecessary metaphors or flights of expressive fancy. What there is, however, is an iron-willed commitment to transporting the reader to the table right before the momentous dinner commences. It seems appropriate that the effort should finish with military imagery to describe the arrangement of the bottles; in fact, Joyce, like a gifted strategist, displays military precision in his description of the food at the party.

All the details are here for us to be awash with the muificence and hospitality of Gabriel’s aunts; to be touched by a generosity that has been hard earned on their part; to feel a tinge of shame at Gabriel’s earlier (private and unvoiced) disparagement of his aunts and their guests as he mentally reviewed the notes for his after dinner speech. That is, Joyce, here as elsewhere in Dubliners, is giving us an “objective” account in which to contextualise Gabriel’s subjectivity, a technique he consistently exhibits throughout Dubliners to remind us that his characters are at once individual and exemplary.

But the Misses Morkans’ table is also a detailed cypher of a culture that Joyce sees as disappearing: the wonderful colourful and enticing foodstuff that will fall into the stomachs of those who are nearing their shadowlands. Life transitioning into death. An old Ireland in the throes of a shocking transformation, perhaps echoed in Gabriel’s own “epiphany” at the end of the story. To read the above passage is also to understand the laxity and tiredness that washes over Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, towards the end of the story and how the relaxed body may be awaken to its spiritual past in the lull of the afterdinner wind down.

In Ulysses, the material debris of life becomes the portal to Leopold Bloom’s consciousness, a sensualist that reflects Joyce’s own increasing immersion in living life bodily. Leopold Bloom, unlike his touchingly ponderous and pretentious counterpart, Stephen Dedalus, uses sensation as a springboard to meditation. Joyce chooses to present him engaged in his morning routine, getting his wife’s breakfast ready:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

Apart from being a strikingly euphonic phrase, characteristically couching lowly earthy life in music, “the fine tang of faintly scented urine” is an appropriate ticket to the journey the reader spends in Bloom’s company. There is much talk in our culture of mindfulness and authenticity, but if you want to see their artistic rendition, you should look no further than Bloom: his alertness to the world as it unfolds is all encompassing and unprejudiced. Remember that when you step out onto Georgian Dublin and somebody suggests you go for a Bloomsday breakfast. This is not a day for crumpets and tea sipped in Edwardian regalia: Joyce filtered his universe through the warm entrails of life.

Go on, it is time to take off the boater and open the book.