otis and i do the cooking . . . lulu and oscar judge . . . once lulu's vegetarian standards are met (our tastiest meatballs start with turkey sausage otis buys at the farmer's market), a request for seconds from oscar means we have a keeper . . .
meatballs . . . like salad ... an amalgam of chopping, mincing and mixing . . . garlic, lemon, sea salt & olive oil ... radishes, carrots, green onions & celery ... cilantro, arugula, spinach, romaine & baby boston . . . merged into a delicate balance of instinct, experience and repetition ... like a mille feuilles, layer upon layer up to a thousand, perhaps more. . . of trust, patience & attention to detail as well as flour, butter, water & salt
. . . in this world of fast food, frozen entrees & gourmet markets . . . cooking - in the truest sense of the word - demands a willingness to still ourselves . . . pause long enough to build something from the bottom up & then stay still longer to add the finishing touches . . . to tend to the nutritious nuances of the meatball, refine the complementing intricacies of the salad . . .
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," advises Michael Pollan, (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
) in a New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Age of Nutritionism" (January 28, 2007) ... Pollan discusses the prevalence of super foods, supplements and medication, how they've led to the simplification of what we eat ... & a depletion of the intricate web of nutrients essential to sustaining health . . . in this fast-food world of convenience & quantity, what matters is speed & simplicity. . . elided are the qualities of cultivation & complexity . . .recently, i was in the midst of reading a draft of a student's term paper, penciling in the margin questions i might pose urging her to consider more completely the thesis or question further a resource, when i received an email . . .'read this one instead,' she wrote . . . a quick glance at this second version led me to believe the student had sought help from a second reader, one who granted her a more immediate fix . . . returning the draft, redundant phrases repaired, incomplete thoughts finished and polished . . . providing her a quick pick-up at the take-out window, rather than space in which to build her own mille feuilles . . .
& how human it is to opt for ease over effort . . .
which brings me to the poetry of john ashbery . . . an initial read of any one of his poems evokes a desire for something more soothing, less discordant to digest . . . the complexity of his work is inconvenient ... deciphering his apparent inconsistencies takes too long ... to examine the depth of this major voice of the New York School of Poets (1948-1966) [The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets
, David Lehman] . . . demands we stop . . . stay with the discomfort and uncertainty ... puzzle through what he writes . . . in order to hear what he has to say . . . . . . reflexively, we dismiss rather than engage . . . sink . . . rather than stretch . . . we don't have time for all this chopping, mincing and mixing right now . . . and so we close the book, declare that we don't care for ashbery ... until next time, when we note a curious juxtaposition ... observe a provocative omission of detail . . . something draws us to remain a moment longer . . . notice another layer, suspect a greater complexity, witness a wondrous tension between words offered and space allowed . . .
... this past week as the morning bikram class hesitated ... torso hinged forward to parallel, legs trembling, arms reaching, sweat dripping ... en masse into tuladandasana ... this 100th monkey called out: "kick, kick ... the more you kick, the more you stretch . . . the more you stretch, the more you feel . . . "
at the start of the session, he had offered this abiding thought: "we have a lot of work to do ... let's take our time ... and be patient . . ."
xoxo
cocoa
