a bewildering question

If you can hang with me, I have a stir-fry recipe waiting for you at the bottom of the page. But first I want to talk for a bit.

Here is one of my favorite poems by Marie Howe. The Billy in the poem is her brother, who died of complications from AIDS.

I ask a lot of questions of myself. Most of them are not as weighty as the ones Howe mentions. Sometimes I write my questions down. What follows are a few recent examples.

haiku + quick pickles

Early in Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, the main character Saleem Sinai explains that as he feels himself getting older, his desire to tell his own story grows more and more urgent. Identifying himself as a man who has "dedicated [his] latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments," he declares:

            Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney...
            And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my
            nocturnal scribblings--by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night
            within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of
            preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the
            corruption of the clocks.

Warming to his theme, Saleem lectures Padma, his long-suffering wife-to-be: "Things--even people--have a way of leaking into each other... like flavours when you cook... the past has dripped into me... so we can't ignore it..."

I always liked this metaphor. Rushdie uses it to suggest that we are all like pickles, each of us a separate piece of vegetal matter that can be distinguished from another piece. If we are born into the same family or country (or, in the case of the novel, if we are born during the same midnight hour of that country's day of independence), we might find ourselves pickled in a common brine. Over time our shared history, the liquid that surrounds and preserves us, may begin to give us all a similar flavor and color. Nevertheless, each of us is still our own completely distinct, separate chunk of cucumber, beetroot, or watermelon rind.

This also resonates with me because I have a refrigerator door literally crammed full of every kind of condiment and relish you can imagine.

sage + sausage gravy

Years ago, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and tested off-the-charts INFJ: introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging. It always felt like an apt description of me, both the good and the bad of the type. Some people think the MBTI, a personality indicator with sixteen possible types, is the equivalent of silly horoscopes or tarot readings, just a fun little parlor game, because it's based on a self-reported questionnaire and not a "scientifically objective" measure of personality. Still, I've found it useful over the years. Because it is non-judgmental - it describes a neutral set of preferences - it has helped me to better understand, anticipate, and accept what motivates others and even myself, and how we view and navigate the world differently. According to the seminal text Please Understand Me II, the sixteen personality types are evenly classified into four temperament groups, each of which has a completely different aspiration. SJs want to be Donald Trump. SPs want to be Jimi Hendrix. NTs want to be Albus Dumbledore.

According to this book, like the three other "Idealist" NF types, an INFJ like me aspires to be Confucius:

The Sage is the most revered role model for the Idealists—that man or woman who strives to overcome worldly, temporal concerns, and who aspires to the philosophic view of life. Plato, perhaps the greatest of all Idealist philosophers, characterized the sage by saying that the "true lover of wisdom" is on a metaphysical journey [...] To transcend the material world (and thus gain insight into the essence of things), to transcend the senses (and thus gain knowledge of the soul), to transcend the ego (and thus feel united with all creation), to transcend even time (and thus feel the force of past lives and prophecies): these are the lofty goals of the sage, and in their heart of hearts all Idealists honor this quest.  (145)

But what's funny about this description of the sage is how loftily abstract it is, with its language of rising above the earthly world to a place of transcendence—especially when you look up the word in the OED and read how pragmatically the grandaddy of dictionaries defines the quality of being sage: "Practically wise, rendered prudent or judicious by experience." And also: "Characterized by profound wisdom; based on sound judgment." According to the OED, any transcendence the sage has achieved comes, paradoxically, directly from having kept both feet on the ground, having lived through an experience, and having returned with practical wisdom to dispense humbly to those who solicit it. Sages are sage because they've been there.

the king of bikini island + the dream strata

Dreams are strange things. I think they come from some psychic version of an underground stream, and they deliver gloriously bizarre and circuitous messages from our unconscious. That's why I feel I'm under no obligation to make this post particularly rational or linear. But I do promise a recipe at the end. Not the best thing I've ever cooked—I'm still in the process of figuring it out—but undeniably interesting because it's a recipe I dreamed.

Over a decade ago, I began the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Georgia. Truth: it is an impressive program, where I got to study under a number of brilliant, quirky people whom I admire and write a book-length dissertation that I'm proud of, on a topic that I found challenging and intriguing.

Also and equally true: Rhea and I had secretly always wanted to live in Athens, Georgia, ever since I was in high school and read somewhere that one of the members of the B-52's said they'd gone to an Athens house party where they danced so much that the floor fell in. This may be totally apocryphal; I have no idea where I read or heard it. In all honesty, I may have dreamed it. But it stayed in the back of my mind for ten years, even and especially after Rhea died: I want to live where they dance so hard they break the floor.

(pain) perdu dans le labyrinthe

Last year on Ash Wednesday, D and I went to a service at a local Episcopal church. The rector had encouraged attendees to arrive early enough to allow plenty of time to walk the labyrinth that had been set up on the floor of the fellowship hall. The circular puzzle itself was painted in purple onto an enormous canvas drop cloth, and the path was just wide enough for one person at a time to walk, single file, through its serpentine loops. Silently, in the dimmed light, we slipped off our shoes, waited a couple of minutes for the person in front of us to gain a little distance, and then entered the maze ourselves. Because multiple people were traveling the labyrinth at the same time, occasionally I would brush by someone as he or she passed, going the opposite direction. It took longer than I thought it would. I admit, I lost my sense of reverence at a couple of points and felt anxious to just finish the thing.

I really hope there's not a minotaur

waiting in the middle of this.

In that labyrinth, there was only the one path. The point wasn't making the right choices. It was slowly and meditatively navigating a series of predetermined twists and turns. I might have been able to see where the next about-face would take me, but I couldn't see beyond that. I would only have been able to anticipate further if I could have viewed the entire thing from above. At ground level, where I was, all I could do was simply take the next few steps and trust that I would eventually make my way out of the maze.

the green flash

An early Happy St. Patrick's Day to all you lads and lassies. No, guacamole is not Irish, but it's green, and I love green food. You can skip to the recipe at the bottom now, if you just want the how-to. Grab a seat. I'll be there in a minute or two. 

For the past four years, D has attended an annual meeting in Pacific Beach, California, and I've tagged along, feeling lucky that I get to spend a few days gazing at the ocean, eating delicious sushi, wearing white jeans in February, and running on the boardwalk in the sunshine and the low humidity. Pacific Beach is also famous for its sunsets, which frequently feature something called the green flash. Residents of the town and of nearby La Jolla describe this phenomenon with varied attitudes. Some people are openly skeptical or derisive, while others avow that they've seen the green flash numerous times. D himself swore that he had glimpsed it, a couple of years ago, but I could never tell whether he was just teasing or not.

He's not the only one caught by the fascination of this odd natural phenomenon. In 1882, Jules Verne published a novel called The Green Ray, in which a young woman sets off on an adventure with two very different would-be suitors to find the elusive green flash, which according to Scottish legend "has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its appearance, all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and to read the thoughts of others." The opening paragraph in the second chapter of the novel gushes: "If there be green in Paradise, it cannot but be of this shade, which most surely is the green of Hope!"

little polished gold nugget poems + greek salad salsa

I often say that my cat is a bottomless pit of emotion: extreme highs and lows. In fact, D has said before that Esme has the same quality in her facial expression that my mom and Steve Spurrier have: even when they're happy, their smile looks kind of like a grimace. Esme is easily spooked, loyal to D and me to the point of insane hatred towards all other people, and often oscillates from vicious hissing to trilling and cooing (and back) in a matter of seconds. Her moods ebb and flow like the ocean. When Esme is upset, here is what she does:

My response to being upset is a bit different, but not much. When I am sad, angry, or otherwise angsty, instead of kneading biscuits like Esme, I chop things into little pieces. Hence the recipe at the end of this post.