It was a summer knot. Or maybe she did her hair like that all the time, during a Michigan winter or in Spring's seediness. I don't know the name of it—I want to call it a French knot, to imply feigned apathy, canal summers, an accentuation of the neck and the heart-considerate smell of the garlic cloves she peeled with the tips of her fingers. She said she was a vegan, and I believed it and saw a poem in the way she diced the cloves and cleaned the knife, with a grace in nourishment—the kind of motion you might associate with the nuanced brittleness of a violin's bow-pass, or the implication of every citrus thing in an orange brushstroke. I knew, then, what she tasted. How one might consider the the soapstone taste of a polyp of cauliflower, or the bitterness in a purple-veined lettuce leaf—mull it over, and place it beside the grief of a nut or celery's hollow. The textures and chromatics of food, and fresh, good food at that. The hands associated with vegetables, the shake to dislodge soil and mineral. I imagined what it might be like to be vegan then, as she pulsed sesame seeds. It would be peace with hunger and fullness, it would a fresh mind, a new mouth, a preciseness in chopping, and a love of smooth skins, be they apple or infant.
I knew I could never have any of that.
I don't feel hungry any more, except at 7 am, and even then it is a hunger that passes. I do not crave bell pepper straws or apple cider vinegar. I'm not sure I crave anything anymore but the feeling of something in my mouth, the sensation of oil, the transatlantic boredom of chocolate. My energy is devoted elsewhere, in writing and thinking and worrying and dying of heartbreak five times a day. I am fascinated by the motors and kinetics of the body, or how sheer whim can move ten fingers, but I am my being and not my throat, my scalp, my knees. At age fifteen, I dissected the slippery urn of a pig's heart in an American history class. The teacher gave an estimation of how many beats a heart is allowed, and anthropomorphisized the organ's labor, so that I left the class with the intention of exercising, avoiding bad cholesterol, considering the body a goddamn valiant attempt at immortality. But I soon forgot the number, and was grateful for it.
Of late, it has bothered me when someone refers to their body possessively—redistributing aches, pains, tremors to “my body”, as if they are somehow separate from it. It is an argument for the soul and an afterlife to disassociate oneself from the mane of nerves, the migraine's aura, the soreness of age, like sand between vertebrae, the vitrification of bones. If the mind and the body are separate, mutualistic entities, they can part like handmade lace in the end. My mother suffers from chronic pain, the catch-all diagnosis being fibromayalsia, and her body is her great nemesis—a bulky chintz thrift store luggage piece, a skin lugubrious as sealing wax, a cross and a burden and an inclination to pray. She can barely stay awake as she reads her scripture, numb as a shell to an ear, a sound that is not an ocean's but her own.
But I am no different. Most people aren't. There is a hover of distraction between body and soul. An inkling of interface. This is where the concept of the soul has come about—from this impression of finite, ossified boundary. To wish away hair color, complexion, a second toe larger than the big. I watched her juice limes, choose agave over honey for its less loping viscosity and I felt imbalanced, meat-based, unsunned in body and mind. I could not wait for the wraps which she called sandwiches, not to taste, but to consider and outwit. My sense of taste is dullest, and art is sensory, and what could be more meaningful than oral art, the nostalgia invoked in the taste of oregano and crushed tomatoes, the patriotism in mustard seed and watermelon, the red sea remembrances in flat, yeastless bread and pulse. There is art in shelter, art in war, and an incontrovertible art in nourishment. It is the art I found in the shredded violet cabbage, in the paired sweetness of raisins and carrots, in the loose, daylong knot of her hair.
Food brings people together. You can say nearly anything over food—a “happy anniversary”, or “one of you shall betray me, even he that eateth with me”. A passed platter of funeral potatoes or a glass of wine steeped in blood metaphor. While preparing this vegan picnic spread, I realized that I had only a shallow acquaintance with food, using it half the time in lazy mastication, to cultivate a yet shed oral fixation with fingernails, pencil ends, chewing gum. We ate cucumber slices as we prepared and I was sure to investigate every cell of taste, resurrect memories of lemon cucumbers grown in late July, jars with botulism, smoothness of legs, grass ticking up when you rise from it and I realized that a vegan who dices garlic with sensitivity, precision and heritage was daily ingesting the table bread of Rembrandt, the surreal squash Van Gogh, the outward seeds and flax of Seurat's pointillism. The reverence was exquisite. It made me forget every guacamole bacon burger I'd ever eaten, every carnival of chili cheese, the heavy billy club blow of buffet troughs, and chocolate milk. I was terrified that something fine was escaping me, a golden trout silt that I could wade through but never sift or pan.
It's possible that I can never have this because I am already an artist. To have learned art is to have devoted yourself to it. To have recognized art is to die in it, and either be reborn in it, or guide like Virgil through its rings and realms. To eat with her purity and honesty would be to forsake a kind of poetry for hers. Maybe when I have retired, and I have time to wash each potato with ceremony, and concentrate on the sliced slim-limbed sparseness between hunger and satisfaction, then I'll eat like her, with a bright face and a love of all religions, and a seasonal knot in my hair that could come undone at any moment. Maybe then my body and soul will claim no territories and I will disseminate seeds with no thought or garden in mind, and I will learn to treasure the heart and the hand.
Gender:
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