Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
The world is weird. The sun spills light as though it has all the colors to burn what is dead and empty into luminous greens and yellows, while a pool of water adds its aesthetic by reflecting and shimmering the madness of light and color. And all of this is made because the Netflix inside … Continue reading The World Is Weird.
You could read the words of Simone Veil from Gravity and Grace, Let the soul of the man take the whole universe for its body. Let its relation to the whole universe be like that of a collector to his collection, or one of the soldiers who died crying out “Long live the Emperor!” to … Continue reading “I/Thou” Walking Into The World As Such With Simone Weil, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry And Thales While Listening to Sviatoslav Richter, Jeremy Denk And Igneous Rocks.
Still a ring of water, a mirror for the sky amidst the ice, but more and more melts each day now and shadows have the sun to thank for shedding its grey veil. A shadow now has its rock. In reading W.S. Merwin’s “The Widow” from The Lice, the first lesson is humility. How easily … Continue reading W.S. Merwin And A Walk Into The Deep
Rock, shadow, hole in ice, ring of trees, sky. W.S. Merwin passed from this life into the further reaches of Hawaii last Saturday. Certainly one of the great poetic voices through the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, Merwin captivated readers with his consummate literary skill, knowledge of literary traditions ranging through … Continue reading What The Boys Said To Homer: W.S. Merwin’s The Lice And Our Fragile Place In The World.
Trees branch across land, sea and sky here in the northern fall as you walk leaves floating in front of your face and those already at your feet; all that crumples, all that pushes upward. Lakes rustle in northern light trying to stretch and warp; roots and trunks bending like a bow. Indefinite set theories … Continue reading A Walk Through Leaves Then Snow Then Vinglögg Or Seventeen Ways Of Looking At The Svecofennian Orogeny.
Ah, if only our bodies featured an ever-growing fruit basket a la Arcimboldo, then food distribution would be at our hands, from our faces. Exploring the metaphysics of food includes the portrayals of its production and distribution. The seed I hold in my hand has a real growth potential and biochemistry to its existence; just … Continue reading Metaphysics Of The Food Labyrinth.
In the early sixteenth century, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched many anatomical drawings and wrote many notes concerning the human heart. Nature has made the cords on the back side of the fleshy membrane of the three gates with which the gateway of the right ventricle is shut; and she has not made them on the … Continue reading Eating A Burning Heart Of Love.
Following the disastrous flood, Noah built an altar, sacrificed a number of animals who had survived the journey, and when the Lord “smelled the pleasing odor,” (one imagines a grilling here for the ages) he decided never to destroy humankind and the earth again. Joseph Anton Koch offers this 1803 view of the moment, entitled … Continue reading A Covenant With The Future
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Such a gorgeous, lush opening. A perfect pairing with a very serious Bloody Mary from Downhouse in the … Continue reading Your Food Is Brought To You By . . . .
“Energy,” said William Blake, “is Eternal Delight.” And the scientific prognosticators of our time have begun to speak of the eventual opening, for human use, of “infinite” sources of energy. In speaking of the use of energy, then, we are speaking of an issue of religion, whether we like it or not. For Wendell Berry, … Continue reading The Eternal Delight Of Decay
