Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus

Some weeks you just have to face that there are interplanetary forces beyond your control at play. You have no choice but to accept that the fucking Moon is on Uranus and move on or, more likely, move sideways, like a hobbling crab on a rocky beach looking for shelter in a crevice.

This last week has been one of those weeks for me: I am liberally using the term week to cover the last ten days and counting. The shit fest may last a fortnight or longer, who knows.

There have been shootings indirectly, but worryingly and freakishly, connected to my future, I kid you not. There have been misunderstandings; acute pains; a sense of foreboding and dread; darkness.

On a political level, the UK chose to leave Europe for the stinkiest reasons possible, unleashing a tide of ill feeling and queasy regret that is wafting across the Irish Sea; making these last few days as depressing and unpredictable as the I-am-taking-a-dump-on-your-head-Seven-Plagues-of-Egypt weather that has put the kibosh on the brief summer spell we had at the end of May.

To top it all up, I went to bed last night having learnt that Partido Popular (a de facto criminal organisation mired in corruption and malfeasance) has won the election in Spain, getting more seats in Parliament in this second round than they did at the end of December. Their “ideology”, and I am using the term very loosely, revolving around the worst tenets of greedy free market policy and intrusive narrow-minded social conservatism, has garnered around eight million votes. I realise once more that Franco’s ghost is still haunting Spain: a mediocre, vindictive, choke-the-air-out-of-the-country spectre that will not be rid off until we perform the collective exorcism that we are too pusillanimous to face.

There just aren’t words to describe the ill feeling that has taken over me. Well, there are, in English they mostly start with “f”; in Spanish they include some highly scatological takes on the holy host. I will spare you the details.

I tend to make minor corrections to these rotten spells through food and drink but fate has not finished slapping me around just yet. This afternoon I stood at the cash register of my local supermarket with a bottle of bubbly and some coffee cake, amongst other treats, hoping they would provide an antidote to the poison of the week. As I am about to pay, the cashier informs me that they are not taking Bank of Ireland cards as the servers are down. I have no cash. I leave everything behind and I go home with my tail between my legs.

There is some cheddar cheese and the dregs of some take away salad in the fridge.

Face it: the fucking Moon is on Uranus.

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: disappointment

This was the freshest batch of bread, then you took a slice and saw a green dot and you thought of its minute finger burrowing through to its heel.

This was a red and juicy strawberry, scarlet red and shiny, but it turned to mush in your mouth and left the sour taste of gone off wine.

This cheese held such promise: once firm now crumbling like the ancient marble of a Roman ruin. How can it taste of nothing?

But we keep going back, endlessly hungry, we keep going back.

 

The time of the ant. The time of the wolf

Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.

The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.

They are days without smell.

Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.

This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.

There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.

Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.

And then I remembered.

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: seduction

3. You are sitting a few feet away from the stove: the steady waft of a simmering stew caresses your nostrils. Red wine, tomato, beef, and herbs conspire to pull you out of your reverie with their heady aroma: a bitter saltiness that will bring flesh and soil to the tip of your tongue. Before that you heard the sizzle of the onions on the pan, imagined their silky skin browning under the coat of olive gold. And this moment of imagined pleasure is more intense than the savouring of it: a finger lingering over the key that will sound the last note of a symphony; a bird of prey about to clutch the skin of its victim; a perfectly ripe orange dangling from its branch for one last second.

Photograph by Eliseo de Brétema

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: uncertainty

2: Uncertainty: Seconds, minutes, hours, buzz like uninterrupted static leaving the taste of copper in your mouth. Here food is like punctuation: time is a long paragraph that needs to be chiseled. A bite of a carrot becomes a comma; a square of chocolate, a semi-colon; a glass of wine, a colon. Of course, you are waiting for the full stop, but you know that the full stop is never food. The full stop is someone’s face, someone’s voice.

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.

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: heartbreak

1. Heartbreak: the pit of the oesophagus contracts to the size of a small weather beaten Roman coin; the head of a blind worm; a slit on dried up muddy earth. Food is an invading army that cannot break through the gates of your fortress. From the top of your tower you watch it advance knowing it will be repelled, your senses cannot be ravaged.