I read recently that 7-Eleven Stores in Europe and Asia, and
a few in the United States, are featuring machines that dispense mashed
potatoes. The machine mixes instant
mashed potato powder with water and oozes it out steaming hot, complete with
gravy. Now, this is a market-based
theology before whose god I cannot genuflect.
It is a concept of mashed potatoes wholly different from mine—an order
of magnitude and tastitude different. To
me, machine-spurted mashed potatoes are not just a departure from the
aesthetics of food consumption, it is an excommunication of it, a refusal even
to grant it recognition. After all, how
can mechanically squirted mashed potatoes make any demand for one’s gustatory
attention? Simply calling them mashed
potatoes constitutes a linguistic felony.
I like mashed potatoes, made-from-scratch mashed potatoes, mashed
potatoes with textured particularity, mashed potatoes freighted with flavor and
savor—mashed potatoes, in other words, made the way my father-in-law Tom made
them.
At all family gatherings involving a main meal, Tom was
called upon to perform what we called “the ceremony,” that ritualistic, almost
shamanic process by which he turned a bowl of boiled and skinned potatoes into
a side-dish so unsurpassingly delectable that only waving pennants and the
blare of silver trumpets would have been fit to announce their arrival on the
table. Eating them was to enter and
stroll the midway of an endorphin carnival.
Tom was a talkative, good-natured man, but when he performed
the ceremony, he entered a cocoon of silence, his smile vanished, and
seriousness settled in his eyes. His every action was resolute, practiced, distilled
to its most precise and efficient motion.
Through his hands flowed an accumulated knowledge, the past and present
intersecting, colluding. He never said a
word, but he communicated, each gesture a testimony to the significance of
concentrated and patient effort, each action a small poem about the human
capacity for craft and being wholly held in its experience. And the result was mashed potatoes, but
something more, something additional and beyond potatoes, something no machine,
no matter how sophisticated, could possibly deliver.
Where, I wonder, did time go that instant mashed potatoes
were no longer fast or convenient enough?
What looking-glass world did I step into where what happens hastens with
barely a hiss of resistant air parting, then closing behind? When did a-fishing in the stream of time become
living in it? I am sometimes accused of
being anti-modern, but the truth is I am ambivalently modern. I have read that the University of Southern
California has received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts
to develop a video game based on Thoreau’s Walden—a
massive irony considering that Thoreau essentially flipped off the two
technological marvels of his time, the train and the telegraph.
I have read that the BBC has partnered with Legacy Games to
create a Facebook game based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the purpose being to reunite the separated
Darcy and Elizabeth while immersing players in scenes from Austen’s novels. Indeed, Austen has been thoroughly repurposed
and mashed up: Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and
Sea Monsters, a YouTube video “Jane Austen’s Fight Club,” even an action
figure. Tolstoy, Dickens, Louisa May
Alcott, Defoe, Kafka, Kerouac, and Charlotte Bronte have also gotten the mashup
treatment.
Should I jeer or cheer?
Feel saddened that, as the French poet Paul Valery says, we no longer
work “at what cannot be abbreviated,” or gladdened that it in some sense these
minor imaginations validate major ones?
Well, it is the way of things. Best
to muster oneself, I suppose, to be like Walt Whitman, large enough to be at
least on civil terms with the antonymed rhythm, the dialectic energies, of how
the world goes.
But even in this hither-and-thither world, this coiled and
convulsed rush of a world, among its glens and coves and hollows, small,
soft-cymballed revelations occur if we are attentive enough to recognize
them. Tom rendered one at every family
gathering. Working with potatoes, milk,
butter, salt, a few herbs and spices—elemental and unreverenced materials—Tom
performed a sleight of hand in plain sight, affirming the ordinary, conjuring a
small epiphany of the mundane. Tom transfigured lumps of tubers, humble members
of the nightshade family, into mashed potatoes that lingered in the mouth and
blessed the taste buds, mashed potatoes so good, so genuinely good, it approached
impiety to even consider topping them with gravy.
