The Infinite Conversation

The Wind Shows Us How Close to the Edge We Are

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

~Joan Didion

from “Los Angeles Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem ~ NY : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 / pg 220-21

An Emotion, like a Recipe, is Always Waiting to Become the Thing that it Already is

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INDEX

The realm of eros is always a bureaucracy. Bruce Pearson, a friend of mine who is a painter and a self-made gourmand, likes to buy books written by cooks whose restaurants he cannot afford to dine in. Over the past twenty-five years, he has bought dozens of books and perfectly repeated a number of dishes in them: Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Sweetbreads en Cocotte with Ginger and Licorice, Thomas Keller’s Bouillabaisse and Alice Waters’ Grilled Duck Livers & Mustard Herb Butter Pasta. The last time I dined Chez Bruce, he was wearing his painting uniform. This reminded me of Picasso and Braque who, after a long night of absinthe, would go to their studios at 8am wearing blue jumpsuits that workers in French gas stations wear. Bruce was wearing rubber sandals. When I went over last month, he served up Alain Ducasse’s Provençal Leg of Lamb with Fennel and Scallion, and a beaten Ginger Salad by Jean Georges, and I understood that it is not that recipes function as generalities, but that recipes are typologies for those feelings we have forgotten were inside us. An emotion, like a recipe, is always waiting to become the thing that it already is. The most general feelings are the most beautiful feelings because they are the only ones we know how to have. People who think they have their own emotions are incapable of empathy or cooking.

A recipe by a celebrity cook or the feelings that somebody else is having induce the most beautiful sensory hallucinations because they seem to be occurring inside of us, but they are actually only the patterns of things that somebody else has duplicated for us. The world is inconsolable. All of our emotions are obvious and the same as everybody else’s. The world is consolable. Eating Bruce’s version of Alice Waters’ Mango Salsa was like experiencing one’s own taste buds [1:1] as a form of internal emotional branding [haiku] where all extraneous details [non-haiku] exist in a permanent state of depletion. Roland Barthes said that. Recipes should be repeated just like poems. Although there were nine other people dining at Bruce’s house last night, I was actually eating alone. The human tongue has millions of taste buds deposited upon it, each designed to extract a particular flavor from a food. The most beautiful book would be a 1:1 scale model of itself and divided into

Front / Back

Like a Diary of Someone I Know

~Tan Lin

from ”INDEX” in Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking ~ Middletown, CT : Wesleyan UP, 2009 / pg 106

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This Body is Like that Dying Star

In the West I know that we are accustomed to thinking of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us. We leave the past behind as we walk forward into the future. And because I think we’re homo erectus, we see the horizon line. We have metaphors of life occurring to us at the rate of walking. We think we’re walking toward a horizon into the future.

In the East it’s very different, and I think this is an essential difference that might inform some of the subsequent questions. In the East our word for the day before yesterday is chin tien: it lies ahead of us. The day after tomorrow is ho tien. Ho literally means behind you. To a Chinese mind, the future is behind us, and the past is before us. To a Westerner you walk forward into the future, and you leave the past behind. To an Easterner we walk backward into the future and everything we see here is in the past.

Now if we think about that, it’s not only a difference in orientation, it’s a difference in what we assume about reality. When we go out at night and look up at the stars, some of those stars have been dead for millions of years. So when I come out and look at them I’m looking at some late report. I am literally looking at a picture of the past when I look up at the night sky. Now to a Chinese mind this is a picture of the past, constantly. As we walk backward into the future, which lies dark because it’s behind me, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. All of this is the past. The light coming from the ceiling, my voice, my coming into the room, the sips of water I took, it’s all going into the past. We constantly live inside the immediate past. Where is the present? That is one assumption I want to make. And it seems something I live with day-in and day-out.

The second assumption I’m making is that this body itself is already the past. This body itself is the late report of an earlier body. Everything that occurred here, everything occurring here, is the late report of an earlier event. Our being here, telephone calls, plane arrangements, whatever occurred already to make this possible. So we are constantly living in the late report of antecedent events. This is my assumption.

As a result, I always assume that poetry is the voice of an earlier body. It is not the voice of this body. So that’s the voice we’re hearing in poetry, being the voice of an earlier body, is the voice of a truer body. Because this body is not our true body, this body, the same way we look up at the stars and some of those stars are no longer there, but we see it, this body is like that dying star. We see it, but it is actually no longer here at a rate of about three million cells a minute. As we speak, three million cells a minute are dying in this body. We don’t always know that, but if we choose not to know that it would be like somebody choosing to think the sun goes around the earth — when we know the earth goes around the sun. So if we know the body dies at about three million cells a minute, it occurs to us at about the rate of falling.

Now can we realize that prime reality? That, number one, all of this is going away, fading away, this minute, as we speak. It is going irrevocably into the past as we see it. And we are falling backward into the future. When we go out we don’t know whether we’re going to find a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, whether we’re going to be hit by a car. The future is dark. All we see is the past. This is a long answer to the question about the visionary.

~Li-Young Lee

Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee {Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll} ~ Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, 2006 / pgs 86-7

The Sun is a Joke

New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become a part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

~Nathanael West

The Day of the Locust ~ NY : New Directions, 1969 {originally published 1939} / pgs 177-8

Its Enigmas, Its Glamour, and Its Illusions

Who is the “I” of the dream? Who is the person to whom one attributes this “I,” admitting that there is one? Between the one who sleeps and the one who is the subject of the dream’s plot, there is a fissure, the hint of an interval and a difference of structure; of course, it is not truly another, another person, but what is it? And if, upon awakening, we hastily and greedily take possession of the night’s adventures, as if they belonged to us, is it not with a certain feeling of usurpation {of gratitude as well}? Do we not preserve the memory of an irreducible distance, a distance of a peculiar sort, the distance between me and myself, but also the distance between each of the characters and the identities—even certain—that we lend them, a distance without distance, illuminating and fascinating, which is like the proximity of the remote or contact with the faraway? An intrigue and a questioning that refer us to an experience often described of late: the experience of the writer when, in a narrative, poetic, or dramatic work, they write “I,” not knowing who says it or what relation they maintain with themselves.

In this sense, the dream is perhaps close to literature, at least to its enigmas, its glamour, and its illusions.

~Maurice Blanchot

 “Dreaming, Writing” ~ Friendship ~ {tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg} ~ Stanford : Stanford UP, 1997 / pg 141-2

The Dream is a Second Life

The Dream is a second life. Never can I pass without a shudder through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are the counterpart of death: a kind of nebulous sluggishness paralyzes our thinking, and at some instant which we cannot precisely determine, the self, in another form, continues the work of our existence. This is a kind of subterranean realm which is gradually illumined, and where the pale, grave, immobile figures who inhabit the land of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the tableau takes form, and a new kind of light illuminates and sets in motion these bizarre apparitions; the world of the Spirits is opening to us.

~Gérard de Nerval 

Aurélia ~ {trans. Kendall Lappin} ~ Santa Maria, Ca. : Asylum Arts, 1991 / pg25

Our Culture is Our Cuisine

No more news and soul-searching hard words, soft words, bad words on Chinese America for me. And she asks me during a video seizure of situation comedies what it feels like. She’s been locked up all her life and never saw anything like me before. From way down in comfort I tell her being a Chinaman’s okay if you love having been outlaw-born and raised to eat and run in your mother country like a virus staying a step ahead of a cure and can live that way, fine. And that is us! Eat and run midnight people, outward bound. Chinaman from the Cantonese, yeah, I tell her, we were the badasses of China, the barbarians, far away from the high culture of the North where they look down on us southerners because we do not have the noble nose, because we are darker complected, because we live hunched over, up to our wrists in the dirt sending our fingers underground grubbing after eats. We were the dregs, the bandits, the killers, the get out of town eat and run folks, hungry all the time eating after looking for food. Murderers and sailors. Rebel yellers and hardcore cooks. Our culture is our cuisine. There are no cats in Chinatown. Up North they had time to wait for the mellowing of the wine. They cooked with a lot of wine, a lot of vinegar. Us, it is three-day quick whiskey and fast rice wine. We eat toejam, bugs, leaves, seeds, birds, bird nests, treebark, trunks, fungus, rot, roots and smut and are always on the move, fingering the ground, on the forage, embalming food in leaves and seeds, on the way, for the part of the trip when all we’ll have to eat on the way will be mummies, and all the time eating anything that can be torn apart and put in the mouth, looking for new food to make up enough to eat. Up North they used all kinds of grains and fancy goodies, while everything with us was the rice of long wars and bad ground. Rice. Rice. Rice. Rice flour, rice noodles, rice rice, rice paste, burnt rice boiled out of the pot for dessert and ricewater to wash it down. I’m proud to say my ancestors did not invent gunpowder but stole it. If they had invented gunpowder, they would have eaten it up sure, and never borne this hungry son of a Chinaman to run.

~Frank Chin

“The Eat and Run Midnight People” ~ The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. : Eight Short Stories ~ Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 1988 / pg 11

We are All Only Temporary Curators of Our Present Bodies

We are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so all the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do but will be just starting a new {and hopefully even better} adventure …

~Peter Christopherson

quoted in the obituary by The Guardian {Link}

R.I.P.

Like Anyone Else I Make My Inner Journeys That I Can Only Measure By My Emotions

But what do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy, that is, in the power of falsity, rather than in representing things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and truth? If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write.

~Gilles Deleuze

“Letter to a Harsh Critic” ~ Negotiations ~ {Tr. by Martin Joughlin} ~NY : Columbia UP, 1995 / pg 11

Academics’ Lives are Seldom Interesting

Academics’ lives are seldom interesting. They travel of course, but they travel by hot air, by taking part in things like conferences and discussions, by talking, endlessly talking. Intellectuals are wonderfully cultivated, they have views on everything. I’m not an intellectual, because I can’t supply views like that, I’ve got no stock of views to draw on. What I know, I know only from something I’m actually working on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I have to learn everything all over again. It’s really good not having any view or idea about this or that point. We don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say.

~Gilles Deleuze

“On Philosophy” ~ Negotiations ~ {Tr. by Martin Joughin} ~ NY : Columbia UP, 1995 / pg 137