Mashed Potatoes

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.