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.

Manifesto

I have a wish for New Year 2013.  It is a wish, which means it is a hope, which means it has the substance of things rarely seen.  It could be nothing more than a wish upon a star.  Perhaps it is a prayer without a prayer.  It is surely an ideal, but, then, why are we given to imagining ideals if we cannot at least begin to or at least partially fulfill them?  I believe it is in our nature not to hand-wring, but, rather, to make claims upon the world about how things ought to be.

My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives six definitions of “new.”  Here is the definition I do not wish for 2013: “beginning as the resumption or repetition of a previous act or thing (a “new” day).”  Such a definition leaves the before, the as-it-has-been, the yesterdayed, untroubled.  It denotes merely a new number, the tic of the annual odometer, while we continue to settle for too little, to yield ourselves to the embrace of the way-it-was, which, by habit, becomes the ever-shall-be.  Such a definition mocks the winged promise of newness; it contravenes the wished-for, the expectation-imbued.  Such a definition means we occupy time without being much occupied about it.

Here are the definitions I wish for the new year: “having existed or having been made but a short time: recent;” “recently manifested, recognized, or experienced: novel or unfamiliar;” “unaccustomed;” “refreshed, regenerated;” “different from one of the same that has existed previously.”  These definitions disturb the what-has-been, the erstwhile, with the otherwise, the fresh, the different.  They suggest that the prior can be made prismatic, the previous a preface, the antecedent an alchemy of moments.  Nothing is permanent, says Emerson, but life in transition, powered by “the energizing spirit.”

I wish for a new year of moments in which we are seized by such a spirit and taken beyond the profanation of languid and dreamless drift, beyond ossified discourse and strategic calculation and ironic detachment, taken beyond our sidewise indifference and default disdain, beyond our shadowed nooks and crannies, beyond the defensive perimeter we deploy to garrison enshrined ideas and manicured pieties and soothing ideologies. I wish for us to be taken by awe, by love, by compassion, by moral imagination, by anything real and adrenalizing and outward-reaching—and I wish for us to make our lives a narrative of that captivity.  I wish for a new year in which we engage the could-be, the there-is-more, the this-is-not-the-way-it-has-to-be.

I hope our new year deepens the familiar and pushes it to the verge of enchantment.  I hope our new year galvanizes our imagination, turbocharges it into spacious regard and makes each of us, as Henry James said, “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”  Let’s practice, until it becomes second nature, wondering and marveling that this improbable planet, just now beginning its improbable tilt toward spring, still whirls its improbable pilgrimage around the sun.  And what a planet it is!  Madly impenetrable?  Gladly inadvertent?  It demands, even if it does not always reward, our full-gazed regard. 

Best wishes for 2013: I hope it gives us nothing we think you want, and everything we know we need.

Tap

Shortly after I formally announced to the Human Resources and Academic Affairs offices my intention to retire at the end of the current academic year, or, more precisely, within an hour and a half—the rumors in the mill a small university churn with a velocity rivaling the speed of elementary particles in the Large Hadron Collider—folks began to drop by my office or stop me between classes to ask what I’d be doing once I had shuffled off this mortal coil of full-time teaching.  Wanting to be witty and avoid the usual responses—yard work, woodworking, some golf, travel, rereading  Middlemarch—I replied, “I’m going to take up tap dancing.”   I had never considered learning tap.  I simply wanted to be clever and get a reaction, and it just popped into my mind.   But here’s the thing: the more I said “I’m going to take up tap dancing,” the more I actually wanted to do it.

How tap dancing managed to buck and wing its way into my mind I don’t know.  Perhaps I had been subliminally conditioned by the animated film Happy Feet, which I had watched with my youngest granddaughter on DVD.  Perhaps a deeply-lodged memory pod burst to the surface, the one of me watching, spellbound, Bill Robinson and Gregory and Maurice Hines and Savion Glover make moves that outraged probability.   Perhaps it was nostalgia: over the years I have, for one reason or another, remembered when I was a kid purchasing taps, nailing them to the heels of my shoes, and taking great satisfaction in “that clinking, clanking sound” as I strode the sidewalks and school hallways.  Or maybe it was the Italian loafers I once purchased at a shoe discounter, shoes whose heels produced a resonant ring on hard surfaces and prodded me into my best version of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever strut.  Whatever the reason, and despite a periodically flaring case of sciatica in my right leg, the more I thought about learning to tap dance, the more it seemed a good thing to do, even a necessary thing to do.

At the very least, I found myself wanting to learn the basic moves--the brush and shuffles (side, back, straight) and  flap and wing and heel-step and step-heel—and how to combine them.  I wanted to transform motion to sound, to rhythmic patterns and precisely timed beats.  I wanted to do something that, as Hawthorne says in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” has no purpose but “purposes of grace.”  I wanted to make music with my feet.

Everything has its music, so why not such humble appendages as the feet?   Everything is entuned and melodied; everything has its pitch and timbre, its progression and harmony, its duration and anticipation.  Smiles, tragedies, sport, gardens, well-tuned engines, a well-chosen word, ritual, money, snowstorms, quantum mechanics, the blue endlessness of August afternoons, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the drumming fingers of a clerk as I write a check, the brush cymballed stir of conversing voices, coves and glades, the systole and diastole of the heart—everything has its music, everything allegro or adagio, everything the grandeur of a symphony or the intimacy of chamber music , everything the improvisational play of jazz, the jagged-edge of blues, the driving 4/4 beat of rock ‘n roll, the more languid ¾ meter of waltz.   And people—they have their music, too.  In his novel Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie mentions a guitar chord especially for Indians, a chord only they can play.  I think we all, every one of us, has a chord that, when strummed, announces us, sculpts us in sound, reveals us in a form far truer than the faces we keep in a jar by the door.

Tap dancing.  It seemed a good and necessary thing to do.   I wanted to yield myself to it; wanted to cast myself into the sheer exuberance of it; wanted the kinetic physicality of it; the enwinged corporeality of it; the unclamped, unthrottled, uncoiled experience of it.    I wanted its nerve-ending buzz, its blood-coursing jangle, its free-radical turbocharge, its seemingly frictionless movement, its disdain for the heavy weight of gravity.  I’m not sure why.  An age thing, likely, a beat I was not ready to dance to.  What I do know for certain is that, because tap dancing seems all dazzle and spontaneity, all syncopated and joyful noise, all pistoning feet and a radiant smile, all so happily immediate and inadvertent, so time-stoppingly beautifu, we forget the engineering involved, the close and calibrated planning, the hours of sweat-drenched practice, the cell-deep fatigue.  It is art hiding itself.   It is  cool.  And isn’t that, finally and ultimately, what all philosophy, from whatever age and culture, calls us to be?

 Cool.

 

Being Thankful

The other morning I watched the sunlight bayonet through the remaining leaves of the backyard elm, brilliant blades of light, whitely radiant, and somehow, for some reason, I remembered that old monastic phrase, “vacare deo,” emptying oneself for God.  I wanted to empty myself for that light.  I wanted it to pierce me.  I wanted to be a pane of glass through which it passed.  I was thankful for that light.

*     *     *

A student offered this evaluation of a literature class he had taken from me: “I did not like this class.  I had to work too hard.”  I was thankful for that student’s comment.

*     *     *

When the pain comes from the pinched sciatic nerve, when that tasering jolt of hurt spasms in my lumbar and travels, clamoring and saw-tooth-edged, down my right leg to gather around ankle and shin, I am pestled  into writhing, tears-in-the-eyes, moan-out-loud immobility.  Like Job, I am “smote,” want “to let the day perish wherein I was born,” feel the arrows of the Almighty within me,” “speak in anguish,” feel a “burden to myself.”

But when that moment comes when the pain, just a little, barely perceptibly, loosens its hold, when its tide ebbs, when the promise of its surcease, when the redemption from its blowtorching agony, begins, if I can steel myself and hold on, only hold on, I am thankful.

*     *     *

Like some confectionery conciliator, I bring together in sweet concord, in surgared harmony, in candied peace, the rival houses of Mars and Hershey.  No doubt Poe is right: ours “is a world of sweets and sours.” And given that the sours all too often outnumber the sweets, I am thankful, in equal measure, for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and for M&Ms, in all the original’s subsequent mouth-not-hands-melting incarnations, except coconut.

*     *     *

The kitchen faucet, which I installed about 10 years ago, was leaking from beneath the bonnet covering the hot water cartridge.  I had made this fix before—a simple matter of replacing the cartridge O-rings—and, in fact, not two weeks before, I had replaced a spring and rubber seat to stop a persistent drip.  I duly closed the shut-off valves under the sink, removed the bonnet and lock-down nut, and pulled out the cartridge.  I heard a gurgle and a rushing sound.  Suddenly, hot water geysered from the socket.  I rechecked the shut-off valve.  Closed.  I darted to the basement to close the water valve but could not budge it.  Back upstairs and a panicked call to a local plumber who, leaving his lunch behind, arrived ten minutes later, closed the water valve, reinstalled the spring and rubber seat, and replaced the worn O-rings.

To lessen my embarrassment, he assured me that the water valve was indeed very hard to turn, and that the hot water shut-off valve “was shot” and needed replacement.  The fault lay in the mechanism, not the mechanic.  Still, I was thankful for the humiliation.  We need to be abashed periodically, if only as an aileron to prevent ourselves from rolling into a self-regarding spin, if only to feel that abrading scrape of uncertainty that forces us inward, makes us take stock of our often impenetrable self-reflexivity, if only to nudge us away from being a loiterer in the order of things.  I am more thankful, however, for plumbers, especially ones willing to abridge their hard-earned lunch hour and still find the heart to attend to the fraying self-consciousness of a failed DIYer.

*     *     *

My dreams sometimes involve discovering hidden rooms in my house.  Such dreams are sometimes interpreted to mean the dreamer’s potential has yet to be realized, that the complacent, self-containing shell of the dreamer’s life needs to be breached, that some new direction needs to be travelled, some errand into the widlerness undertaken.  Such dreams symbolize our lives calling out for a greater share of us.  I am thankful for these dreams.  They tell me that, even six decades after my initial appearance on the planet, I am unfinished, unfinalized—maybe, even, unfinishable, unfinalizable.

*     *     *

I have a history, but I do not know, will probably never know, the conditions of my probability.  I am a small story, a subplot, perhaps, embedded in a much larger story whose denoeument stands veiled in mystery but whose plot is powered by the gifts of an existence and capacities I had no hand in creating.  They were bestowed.  How, or by whom, I do not know.  As David Bentley Hart notes, “What lies most deeply within us also comes from impossibly far beyond us.”  And though I do not know to whom, to what, for that I am profoundly thankful.

Leaves, and All

Looking out the kitchen window this morning,  I notice that the backyard is carpeted with leaves—carpet bombed, actually, leaf-assaulted, for it was clear the day before.  And I find myself feeling a pleasant anticipation.  I cannot wait to begin raking them up.

I’m not sure why, exactly. 

Sure, there’s the exercise of it, the simplicity of rake and arms, the technology of tool and muscle, briskly applied, haloed in the pale-gold light of an autumn afternoon.  And there is the sight of my shadow, now cast forward, now behind, always connected, and me wondering whimsically, who is the me.  And there is the coming, the unannounced, unaccountable coming, of thoughts, urged perhaps by the rhythm of repetitive motion, re-emerging from the deep recess into which they had silently slipped. And as much as I like watching the tumult of leaves falling, the abandon of it, the mad whirl and drift and tumble of it, the air-skidding intoxicated somersaultedness of it, I relish the neatening raking involves, the restoration, the feeling of satisfaction in looking back when done and seeing the visible change I have made.  But there’s more to it than that.

Each of those leaves is a tongue; my backyard speaks in tongues.  Each of those leaves is a calling card, a keyboard key, a communique of blades and petioles and veins and midribs and waxy cuticles and stipules.  Each of those leaves, scissoring itself at its axil, casting itself adrift, tells how long long enough is.  Each of those leaves is the tree’s self-wounding, an absence in the now making way for a presence to come, a leaving that makes way for an arrival.  Each of those leaves is a sign of transformation, the trees’ summery green chatter turned autumn’s red-yellow-bronze-brown solemn expression turned acrid-woody incense slipstreaming from the thurible of the fire pit.

But more than those things, even, is this: ceasing for a moment, standing still, I will imagine I can feel, slightly but perceptibly, the earth tilting away from the sun, and then I will resume, bending back into the work, lost in the sheer embodiment of it, the feltness of its physical motion, the being in the doing.

Raking the leaves.  It is, for reasons I can enumerate and rank but cannot definitively connect or comprehend, the very thing that, at this particular time, I find it necessary to do.  It is the customized piece for some jigsaw-puzzled need.  What that need is, I cannot with confidence say.  But, then, perhaps not to understand is to understand that which is necessary, that which is true.

 

The Wildflower

 

One morning it was just there.  It hadn’t been there the previous day, as far as I can recall.  But this morning, there it was, as if some nocturnal sorcerer had cast a spell.  A wildflower in my garden.  Bayoneted yellow petals, center-buttoned by a bronze, pixilated bud.   A Golden Ragwort, possibly, or a false sunflower; maybe a thin-leaved sunflower.  The name isn’t important.  Its presence is all that really mattered, the abrupt advent of this alien infiltrator within the landscape I had so mindfully, so vigilantly shaped and managed; this stranger in my familiar landscape; this rebellious bohemian scandalizing the well-mannered guests at my garden party;  this wild intruder, this invader and interloper, this trespasser and marauder, this uncultivated barbarian who breached the gate of my elaborately-planned, assiduously-tended garden. 

And I was perfectly OK with that.

I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shard of sun fixed on a spade-leafed stalk.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a doubloon of burnished gold strewn by some charitable hand.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shout of yellow in the green murmur of my late summer, soon-to-be autumn garden.  I was OK with it because that wildflower reminded me that though we are told a garden was the site of our fall, our loss of innocence, we gained an intellect, a knowledge of true things.  Lucifer fell from heaven.  Our fall was garden-level merely.

Were my garden a mind, that wildflower would be an edict recalling the imagination from parched exile.  Were my garden a heart, that wildflower would be an unsludging odd beat, an arrhymic swashbuckle to disrupt sclerotic drift.  Were my garden a soul, that wildflower would be a spindle entwined with golden yarn to darn its robes.  Were my garden a cathedral, that wildflower would be a steeple, a spired sign of human aspiring. Were my garden an alphabet, that wildflower would be the letter before “A” or after “Z;” were it a sentence, that wildflower would transform it from simple to unparsable compound-complex; were it a word, that wildflower would be an extra syllable, a prefix to undiscipline stale discourse.  But it is a garden after all, a hybrid place, a zone of indistinction, a fist bump between artifice and nature.   The wildflower stands resolutely on the side of nature, a warning of sorts against my becoming too big for my britches, lest in my frontal-cortexed pride I forget that I, too, am a biological being, a rooted creature.

I’d like to think that wildflower chose my garden, considered it a hospitable place, a sanctuary, maybe, to stop and stay a while.  But I know its arrival was purely random, a chance deposit blown by the wind.  Still, as with genetic mutations, randomness is sometimes a strategic procedure.  “There are some enterprises,” Ishmael tells us in Moby Dick, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”   A wayward seed, invisibly riding an invisible current of air, made its arcane way to my garden and took on another form, became a visible presence, an enigma made material, provoking wonder, deepening my familiar garden, reminding me to pay attention to the cryptic beauties that appear all about us, who knows why or how.  That wildflower—an ambassador from the far-off and elsewhere, from the kingdom of mystery, toward which we should travel, must travel, even though it is a kingdom in which, finally, we cannot dwell.

What Mysterious Covenant

 

Looking from the kitchen nook windows into the backyard garden one morning, I saw a cat, a tabby, familiar in the neighborhood, appear from around the trellised, purple-detonating clematis and make its nonchalant way up the flagstone path.  Suddenly, it froze, then slowly swiveled its head toward a corner, dense with ferns and hostas, where the breezeway abuts the garage.  It stared, intently, for perhaps ten seconds, then took several steps toward the corner, each paw deliberately, delicately, placed.  It stopped, raised its nose, and began sniffing.  The another couple of stalking, gingerly-placed steps forward.  More staring, more listening, more sniffing.  Slowly, its ears moved back, its tail lowered, and its body hunched.  And it stared, still, calculating, anticipating, pounce-ready, preparing tooth and claw to incise its red gashed calligraphy. 

And in that moment, all I could wonder was, what must it be like to have every sense, every heart pulse, every muscle fiber, every glandular secretion, every corpuscle in every capillary, every synaptic exchange, come to one compacted point of convergence, one massively dense moment in time, wholly present, wholly singular, wholly coincident with itself. 

And then, as did the poet Alexandre O’Neill, I wondered, of what “obscure force” was the cat “the dwelling place?”  To what wordless “law” was it an “accomplice?”  A William Blakean mood possessed me.  Did He, I wondered, who made whatever small, shivering creature hid amid the ferns and hostas, also make thee?

But obscure forces and laws and purposeful creation suggest the cat acted only within the carapace of instinct, a feline marionette stringed and tugged by its evolutionary past, its actions baked in and thoughtless, habitual and reflexive rather than calculated and purposefully imagined, without consciousness, without self-knowing, without concepts, without the symbols by which, according to Susanne Langer, thought escapes its cinctures “from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world.”

And that made me wonder if the cat really was devoid of an interior life, really was incapable of forethought, memory, emotion, awareness, symbolic imagination.  Namit Arora wonders, too, in her essay “The Inner Lives of Animals,” pointing out that many animal behaviors, in a human context, would suggest the sophistication of symbol use.  Squirrels gather nuts, which could indicate the conception of oncoming winter and the lack of food resources it brings.  Beaver patiently gather construction materials well before actual construction begins.  Magpies recognize themselves in a mirror. Crows create and use tools and make future plans. Elephants mourn their dead.  Prairie dogs use alarm calls that distinguish gun-toting humans from those unarmed. Vervet monkeys have three distinct calls to warn of the approach of eagles, leopards, and a snakes, each call arbitrary, in no way related to any sound made by the three predators. Various animals practice deception by playing dead.  Do animals form concepts, employ symbols, make plans, or are they mired in the shallows immediate sentience only?  How can we know, really?  I’d like to think they do experience themselves phenomenally, experience what it is like to be themselves, to have sensations with qualities that are mentally represented and spur action.  What’s the harm, other than to our pride? We humans dislike extras in our vanity production.

I wondered all this, was led to wonder all this, because I have had experiences of contracted, fully charged, thrumming attention that mirror the cat’s.  I, too, have been seized by experiences—in the classroom, while raking or mowing or woodworking, watching leaves ruffled by a breeze or children at play—where I have fallen deep inside myself, somehow liberated from the sealed circle of the clockface, lulled into a mental cadence that resonated with the rhythm of my actions, the outer and inner confluent, compressed, concentrated into a palpable point of being, of unthought thought, of displaced emplacement, of suffused and radiant aliveness. 

And I could only wonder what bandrity stole me from then and padlocked me in now, what dispossessed me into a mustered self-possession, what deep grammar spoke me.  I wondered, of what obscure force was I the dwelling place, to what unsayable law was I an accomplice, to what sorcerer was I apprenticed, to what intimate economy of exchange, to what inscrutable liturgy and mysterious covenant, to what more than literal truth, had I yielded myself to?