i love you. come in. stay a while. have you eaten?

bread is love among strangers.

“This sinking one’s teeth into the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the reality”
- Emmanuel Levinas
//
 "One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating."
-Luciano Pavarotti

dear little voice,

i love you. come in. stay a while. have you eaten?

there is rosemary, hunks off dense rye bread, thumb-sized coquina clams and the white napkins all laid out, salted leaves of rocket, the sugar, its glaze, whole pears cooked in wine, mulled with spices, roasting honey and cloves, there is a place for you at this table.

yes— stay a while; a while with warm-cheeks, belly-full, content; a while with a wilding of grins, with satisfaction, rosy-eyed with the fullness sleep; all rollick and verse. there is a place for you at this table.

again, now: I will ask you: “are you hungry?”

and you will say: “yes. nothing can cover this nakedness. here is my wound: I do not know it well, only that it is a large and empty space inside of me. that there is something needing to be filled.”

now it is my turn to laugh and say: good. now, there is a place for you at this table, and there are red onions and $4 wine, there is celery and eggs and dark chocolate, please sit down, and this is angel hair pasta and this is not spinach and this is not thyme, this is not a quail’s egg, this is not bread, this is not a clementine: it is sacrament, it is Love and it is Love and it is more love: ever-green and ample Love; an open space that was once empty, that has now been filled.

i have brought you this food, and you have eaten it. it is with that same sensitive organ that we taste, consume, speak, and Kiss. this is why I do this honest work: to move into this empty space, so that it may be filled.

now: may i offer you some potatoes?

A table for two under the rising moon

"Be worthy of the bread’s aroma
May the flowers of the pavement make you elegant
There’s still fire on your mother’s hearth
And the welcome is as warm as bread."
-Mahmoud Darwish, from ‘Mural’, Mural (trans. John Berger & Rema Hammami)

little voice, there is a thing about life and that is that it is not a safe investment.

— let me get you some salt- I will rub its thick crystals between two palms like my grandmother taught me- see, now, how it falls like snow—

to live at all is to get wrung out and broken in the heart. George Batailles said that a being that isn’t cracked isn’t possible- but that we do go from enduring the cracks (our decline) to glory (we seek out other cracks; new cracks). without cracks, you see, it stays quite dark. we learn this. slowly.

— would you like some more wine? let me fill your glass—

if you want to keep your heart intact and unbroken, the most logical thing to do is to give your heart to no one and nothing, not even a lover, not even an animal or a poem or an ideal, let alone the future. you will have to wrap it up very carefully in all kinds of numbing things- television and hobbies and little luxuries- the way you see some people do, because they make it look so easy. you will have to avoid all noble entanglements. you will have to nail it away in a little coffin or a box. yes, in that little box it will be safe and motionless and airless. but it will also be dark and cold; your heart will be changed, it will become something unbreakable but it will also become something untouchable.

— please, take off your shoes— this is your house too— shall we play some music?—

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Untitled (Eating Lobster), 1990, by Carrie Mae Weems

there is a thing about the people, little voice, and that is that we have cracks. we are not at peace.

— come here, now- let me show you how- take the pan, I will hold it here too, my hands over yours, and together we will toss the flatbread- yes, it’s nutmeg, zataar, juniper- smell that! can you smell it?—

we often have called peace breaking bread.

— no, don’t take that piece. take this one. the big one; the good one.—

to make and share a meal is to recognise the emptiness in another. to give another’s hunger permission to want what the body knows it needs but cannot ask for.

it is to say: there is a place for you at this table. you belong here, and you deserve to be fed. here we are served and here we serve others. here we give and receive sustenance.

we glug olive oil, we sift flower, we tear kale rough-woven from its stems, we halve peppers, a thumb of chilli cored and seeded tossed to bob in salty water, we toss the garlic to prevent bitterness, slowly golding in burnt butter, we simmer for a while, we say: take how I love you, and take it inside. carry it within you: to not only eat now, but to adore later, to pass between your hands in solitude, to love, and then have it to bite into its round loveliness when you become hungry again.

let my love live inside of you.

it is to pray with crackling eggs, pepper and cloves: to pray to what is empty. and then what is empty says: i am open.

Mandarins, Hafsa Qasim.

bring your Heart to the table and you will see, little voice, that kindness and service are very similar things to walking barefoot, aren’t they?

that gentle way of walking: naked, vulnerable to your surroundings; to warm, white, salt-washed sand, but also to stones, gravel, and the thick pull of mud.

coming to the table is a way of living that has the softest and most tender impact. it removes the barrier between you and the world.

— I am so, so glad to have you here.—

it is the heart in service.

—I am so, so glad—

The Orange, Wendy Cope.

i have a sense, little voice, that there is something that the dying have realised too late.

it is the same thing that the dead are speaking to us across the river:

it is that honey stirred in silence through scrambled eggs, a bowl of fresh-pulled blackberries still wet with rain passed and received between two hands, the thick hunks of bread lain upon a plate with butter and jam and then in a lap, is a kind of sacrament when we witness an aching heart and words do not suffice:

“We don’t go to a church and gather around The Table of New Life because that table alone is holy, nor because that exchange of life and love in the form of bread and wine can only happen there. We go to be reminded that all tables are holy if we pay attention and consecrate them with love and humanity and reverence. All the tables around which we gather with partners, families, friends, classmates, work colleagues, and strangers are potentially sacred meals if we are present and grateful and aware. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said “One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar.”

- The Touch of Love- It Is Everything- Daniel J Miller.

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk.

i am reminded, little voice, of Andre Dubus’ blackberry-soaked musings in On Charon’s Wharf:

because you, too, can do this, little voice. at an ordinary table with ordinary hands and an ordinary friend and ordinary celery, and eggs, zaftig tomatoes and honey; nutmeg and crushed ginger, garlic softened by the blade of a knife—

you are not simply eating together. you are resisting the great restlessness of the world, its marching orders, its great panic, to perform this subtle act together. you are refusing emptiness, you are creating a sacrament of touch, and the meal is sweet and it is offered and it is received and it says: I know you are empty. so I am sharing food with you. it is all I can do. it is everything. how extraordinary we are. how extraordinary we are, that we do this at all.

"And I don’t want to shape life since existence already exists. It exists like some ground over which we all advance. Without a word of love. Without a word. But your pleasure understands mine. We are strong and we eat. Bread is love among strangers."
- The Sharing of Loaves, Clarice Lispector.

because cooking makes love manifest:

“We tend a garden, head for the grocery store or the farmers’ market, receive a largesse of food gifts from family, friends, and neighbors. We set to work or perchance to play. Whenever food appears, it is the work of many people and the offering of other forms of life, a gift from Beyond, from sun, earth, sky, and water, from mystery. It is onion knowing how to onion, salmon fully infused with salmoning. It is blood, sweat, and tears; thoughts, emotions, and physical actions made visible, tasteable, edible. What we can put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, digest, absorb, and eliminate has been sorted out from what we can’t. It is offered, served forth. We go on living. Our bodies are nourished, and if we are fortunate, our spirits are lifted.

Lifted, light, and buoyant with the sights, smells, and tastes of what is being eaten, the body remembers that it is also spirit. The divide between body and mind is bridged —no, the two are simply no longer recognized or found. They have become indistinguishable from the present, magnificently vibrant and awash with well-being. Whether spoken or not, thank you choruses throughout the room: to Source, to God, to the Divine, to family and friends, to the chefs, the growers, the pickers and shippers, to our ancestors, to the Blessed Ones and to those not so blessed, to all beings giving their lives. We give thanks. We are grateful. We forget ourselves. We forgive ourselves, and others. We praise.

It’s in the cooking. It’s in the eating, in the air, the ground, the sunlight. You can tune to it. You can bring it forth.

It’s your good heart expressing itself, manifesting wherever you look. Loving what is. And using your body, mind, and heart to bring it to the table, ready to eat.”

-- Edward Esp Browne: No Recipe, Cooking as Spiritual Practice.

Franz Wright, from “Our Conversation”

it is simple, little voice. it it is all we can do:

I love you. I want you to eat well.

love,

ars poetica.

“You know these? he asks. La Biblia? They are made in Seville. He is holding up a biscuit, wrapped in blue and red and white tissue paper. La Biblia, he repeats, the Bible, because they are like the manna that fell from heaven on to the desert. A manna made from almonds, the sweetest biscuit on earth [...]

I unwrap one. Oval and the colour of baked bread. The size of a tongue. Yours or mine. Polvoro Arteseno de Almendra. A slight smell of cinnamon. Weight: 32gr. each. I take a small bite for both of us. The baked wheat flour and almond dust, sweet and a little greasy, lines the top of the palette, it sticks to the curved roof of the mouth, whilst below, on the floor, on our tongue lie tiny fragments of roasted nut to shift between the teeth and bite into.

Munching a Biblia is like pulling an almond blanket over our two heads to keep out sand, rain, the wind or the probing searchlight from the mirador.”

John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters