Poetry is like cooking, a process of transforming things through one another, then of transforming ourselves in turn by their consumption.
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The world must be a cookery school.
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In his Philosophy of the Home, Emmanuele Coccia writes a beautiful chapter on the kitchen. He characterises it as a kind of materialist chapel; and the cooking that takes place inside, an exercise in material salvation.
Cooking, in Coccia’s vision, is the ultimate symbol of our endlessly interpenetrated existence in the world. When we cook, unrelated portions of the cosmos are called together in an act of creation which refigures everything involved. Ready to die, dozens of species arrive in the kitchen from all corners of the Earth, before their transformation is completed our bodies. How do our bodies do this? Using energy previously inherited from the sun, the land and other species.
Yet cooking produces something more for us: a redemption in the form of an experience of home. In the kitchen, we are forced to the admission that there is nothing human about us. Standing in the meeting place of lamb, cacao, pears and cashews as they prepare to enter our bodies, we encounter the reality that ‘we can be world and become world only by transforming it and by letting ourselves be transformed by it’. Home is an intimacy with the world; an acquiescence in the traversal of our bodies by others, and vice versa.
Cooking’s mandate, somewhere in the sputtering pan, says: only by our interventions can we continue to exist. There are no non-transformative connections between people and things, people and people, people and lands. Nor should we believe that there was some rawer, more perfect world that existed before. Everything has already been cooked, all that remains is to re-cook it. And as cooks of the world, we should remember: sometimes the more joyous, elaborate or unexpected the combination, the better.
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In the same way, poetry is also an avenue of intimacy with the world. Poetry is a gathering of language, sound, history, mountains, broken fingers, sex dreams and grief; and it’s the process of stewing them together by reticulation in lines; and then, of course, of re-cooking them through the reader’s ingestion, by which method, the world is never the same again.
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As far as poetry involves foraging for these elements, it’s also a mission for recapitulating the scraps of life which non-poetic thinking elides. Poetry is the work of the midnight foxes of our souls. They fetch up the offcuts, the pieces of life which don’t have a purpose in the functionary self. They are ‘use-less’. But, as a glass blower blows a big droopy alembic from millions of anonymous grains of sand, they are rendered into an exuberant gesture of being in the moment of their creation.
This programme of rescue, and the cooking-work of combination is also a life-saving intimacy with the world.
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Since Eisenstein and the early days of montage, the juxtapositions of film have always depended on cooking. The rapid sequencing of still images naturally invites a poetry of interpolation, of countermand, of internecine brewing. I’ve always been drawn to the particular power of a subtitle in this context and have wished that poets, or artists with a literary bent, would make more use of it. Or rather, that we might regard the filmic use of subtitles as much as a literary exercise as anything else. The subtitle is a seal for the incredible resonance of words: you literally can see the cooking happening, when a single word, set against an image, transforms it and is transformed in return. You are forced to ask: how do these little shapes yield so much?
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Inter Alia is about the way grief interpolates itself in all areas of life: in joy, adventure and laughter as much as sex, business and prayer. I am not saying that this is a bad thing: in life, everything is cross-contaminated. Grief is just a special example of this. It stands out as such an example because, in its nature, as a trace of loving, grieving embraces a whole life. If really to love is to love a person in totality, then grieving must embrace life entirely as well. Such is the bargain. A life has the power to brush against everything; the whole cosmos is cooked in a life and this is why the whole cosmos can be cooked in a poem, because of the being at the heart of it.
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A life is catholic also in its interchangeability as a unit. However long or short, grotesque or ordinary, I will always be able to say ‘His life’, ‘My life’. Everyone knows what I mean: this is the unit circumscribed by the birth and death of a person. Between these limits, a life is an otherwise undemarcated spasm of existence. Lives map onto lives because of the livingness that obtains inbetween. Miles map onto miles; yet every mile is different. If the boundaries of life universally define the unit, I wonder how we handle what is within it. How do we discern what has happened in a life and what it has meant? A mile contains 1760 yards in the abstract but how does it look in the knowable world. We can define a life but how do we read its impingement on everything we are part of?
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I have always been interested in how we can treat lives as narrative units. Lives have narrative qualities because they are part, in the end, of group life; of the grand group of human existence, and all the cultures that have formed it; they have common features and in some sense their own language.They are interpretable and imitable; so they must in the end be shareable and shared. How do we demarcate a life for the purposes of story, so that it can mean something, so that it can be distributed? How can the infinitely clouded, and contoured terrain of a life – a wild thing – be mediated into the legible?
How do we flambé and tenderise it? How do we digest it?
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When my dad died, I felt blessed that he had lived a life with such a clear ethic. His example was easy to discern, his life easy to parse. I wasn’t left with any questions; I knew what there was of him.
I wonder, what kind of strength does a message gain by endowment with livingness? I think of some of our most famous exemplars: Jesus, Buddha; how does a life become a message? What are the political uses of secreting instruction inside a life? What differences would it make if we thought about all history in units of lives, instead of the grand curves of the epochs?
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The interpenetration between selves means that selfhood is a tightly contained act of responsibility. I like to believe that the sharing of life also takes place in a deep historical view, and I think of the possibilities for exemplarity and combination that this creates, not just on a grand but also granular level. I think of how much I wanted to be other people when I was a child and feel certain that this has never gone away.
The self is a heritage, a category formerly bequeathed to us and which we will eventually discharge. As a famous public intellectual once said, ‘a technique of life is a question of knowing how to govern one’s own life in order to give it the most beautiful possible form (in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the future generations for which one might serve as an example.)’
The work of a single life is left on the world like a thin film. But surely it is there. And we are prompted to remember: all future selves are required to live through it.
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To be certain, the residue of a life one has loved touches everything; it is a shroud gathered around the soul like mist against a cliff. And as if watching through a slide of video tape, I witness everything else within the vagueness of that recollection.
I think about Anne Carson’s lines in The Glass Essay:
‘Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—’
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Carson is grieving a lover, but the grief is the same. This life running beneath my feet. It is not mine but it is me.
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I imagine myself in a glacial lagoon; I and all the people I love are icebergs; calved from the glacier, melting into the same pool, gradually relinquishing all we have held; one day, after many years we will have become meltwater, we will have filtered through the rocks, through the many tiny pores of the mountain and become the unknowable water of the world; in the sea, in the steam of a stew, in the stalwart cactus, in the gutter of a government building, gushing from the nozzle of a soda hose and at the bottom of a drunk man’s pint glass.
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Inter Alia (Among other things)
[Footnote: the quote about ‘techniques of life’ is Michel Foucault’s and comes from a 1984 interview with Francois Eward, titled ‘The Concern for Truth’]
beautiful isaac