From Word To Word

My friend, Alina Carere, died last night.

She lived in a town not far from mine, and she used to attend highschool very near to me, so we saw each other now and again in her town or in mine, but I knew her mostly from camp, where we have been leaders together over the past few years.

It was at camp that I saw her last, only a few weeks ago.  We were cleaning up the kitchen together after most people had gone home, and we were eating homemade asiago and artichoke dip as we worked.  She was shocked when I double dipped my pita, and she threatened to stop eating it altogether, but it was too good, so she ate it anyway.

This memory is not very remarkable, I know, except it is the last that I will have of her, the last of the many memories, most of them just as unremarkable, that nevertheless made a remarkable life, a life of gentleness and generosity and willingness to serve.  There will be no more such memories, and there are no words adequate to this loss.

There never are.

I went to the Guelph Farmers’ Market today, as I almost always do on Saturday.  One of the things that I love about the market is that it allows people to enter the local economy even if they do not have the capital or the inventory to open a store on a larger scale, and today I saw two examples that made me realize that this is an opportunity that the farmers’ market also offers to youth,

First, I was at my regular vegetable vendor, a very large and closely knit family, and I was served by the youngest child, a boy of maybe eight or nine years old.  He found the twenty-odd things that I wanted, wrote the prices by hand in a notepad, added the total correctly, took my money, and gave my correct change, all without the help of an adult or a calculator.  Most kids his age would simply not be capable of doing what he did, but then, most kids his age have never had the opportunity to try, because there are very few places where an eight-year old boy is allowed to do things in the real world.  The farmers’ market offers him an opportunity to enter into the economy in a way that is safe, that is meaningful to him, and that allows him to be a part of his family’s business.

Second, there was another vendor, a boy of twelve or thirteen, who was selling handmade wooden swords as toys or as decorations.  He has his own booth where he sits and carves and which he runs himself, though he is accompanied by his grandmother.  There is no other place where a boy that young would be able to own and run his own business.  It is only in the unique environment of the farmers’ market that he is able to participate in the economy in a way that is appropriate to his age and his ability.

If we really do want to encourage small and local businesses, as I think we should, then it seems to me that these kinds of opportunities are exactly those that we should be encouraging.  We need to be encouraging young people to learn as they go, to experiment with what it means to make and sell a product within their communities, to try their hand in the family business ar at running businesses of their own.  This, at least in my opinion, would be far more useful than all of the business schools and tax incentives put together.

I am a bit backlogged, I must confess.  I have finished reading several books over the past few months, and I would like to write about them, some of them more than once, but these are not the kinds of posts that I am able to write in a few minutes, and so I now have a small stack of books on my desk, all awaiting my attention.

At the top of the pile, a book that I finished more than two months ago now, is Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be.  It was given to me by Dave Humphrey, either this past Christmas or for my last birthday, I cannot now remember which, and it was a welcome gift, because I had heard a little about Kearney and was wanting to read him for myself.

The book begins with an admirable clarity.  “God neither is nor is not but may be,” Kearney says.  “That is my thesis.”  He argues for this thesis by making what he calls an eschatological reading of several biblical texts, a reading that opposes the onto-theological tradition that understands God in terms of existence or esse, as the God who either is or is not, with a reading that proposes an understanding of God as possibility or posse, as the God who may be.  Kearney articulates the substance of this position more concisely than I ever could, so I will quote him several times, and at length.

“God will be God at the eschaton, ” he says.  “That is what is promised.  But precisely because this promise is just that, a promise, and not an already accomplished possession, there is a free space gaping at the very core of divinity: the space of the possible.  It is this divine gap which renders all things possible which would be otherwise impossible to us – including the kingdom of justice and love.  But because God is posse rather than esse, the promise remains powerless until and unless we respond to it.  Transfiguring the possible into the actual, and thereby enabling the coming kingdom to come into being, is not just something God does for us but also something we do for God.”  In other words, God will come to be, but is not yet.  In the present time, God remains what God may be, remains possibility, and the transformation of this possibility into actuality requires us to respond to what is possible in God.

This response to God’s possibility, in Kearney’s view, becomes our primary responsibility to God.  Our duty is to decide the possibility that is God, again and again, in order that God will be transformed from possibility to actuality.  As he says himself, “It is the divine perhaps, hovering over every just decision or action, that ensures that history is never over and our duty never done.  The posse keeps us on our toes and reminds us that there is nowhere to lay our heads for long.  God depends on us to be.  Without us, no Word can be made flesh.”  Kearney’s claim here is radical.  It makes humanity responsible for the being of God, for the incarnation of God.  It makes God dependent on the decisions of God’s own creations.  It makes the future fundamentally undetermined.  It makes the nature of the coming kingdom of God rely on the decisions made by frail people here and now.

This radical reunderstanding of God and of humanity’s responsibility to God, says Kearney, is the condition of a hope for the future.  “The posse keeps us open to hope,” he says, “even if it is a hope against hope, in other words, the hope that in spite of injustice and despair the posse may become more and more incarnate in esse, transmuting being as it does so into a new heaven and a new earth.”  The hope here is that the God who may be will more and more come actually to be, as we respond to the possibility that God opens in us.  The hope is always that the possibility of love and justice and grace will become ever more the actuality of love and justice and grace.

There is much that I appreciate about Kearney’s argument.  I agree that the God of existence, the God of onto-theology, does not satisfactorily account for the God that is portrayed by the Bible or required by theology or encountered by experience.  I am attracted to the idea that God is a God of possibility rather than existence, and I am attracted even more to the idea that this possibility places an unending responsibility on me to make God be in the world what God desires to be.  I am moved by the hope that is in this possibility.

I am not convinced, however, that Kearney’s idea of God as possibility actually escapes onto-theological existence.  I will not go into the details of my reservations because I am aware that this question is not one that everyone finds compelling, but my main argument would be that Kearney’s understanding of God as possibility that is ideally coming more and more to be, really only defers existence into the future, to the time when it will become actual.  Such possibility escapes existence, perhaps, but only for a time.  It is constantly slipping into existence, moment by moment, and so is already under the sign of existence.  Far from escaping onto-theology, it finds its culmination there, precisely as it moves from possibility into actuality, precisely as humanity makes actual the possible God.

I would suggest that any God who is truly founded in possibility, any God who truly escapes onto-theological existence, is a God whose possibility never becomes actual, either because it remains always still to come, as in Jacques Derrida’s messianism without a messiah, or because it comes to being in such a way that being does not recognize it, as in Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon.  As soon as the possibility of God become actual, either now or in the future, either in this time or in some time to come, it becomes subject to onto-theology, to presence, to being, and becomes fraught with all of the problems that this entails.  This means that Kearney is suggesting, not an alternative to existence at all, but merely a teleology that defers the existence of God to a future and coming time, even if this time is only the end of time.

The problem here is not God as possibility.  The problem is that this possibility is being understood as always anticipating an actuality which then becomes the limit and completion of God, becomes the end of God as possibility.  This is why it is necessary, I would suggest, to begin seeing the possibility at the heart of God as a possibility that never require an actuality, at least not in any of the ways that would be available to human understanding, because the purpose of this possibility is not to make itself be at all, but to make us be in its place.  It does not require being.  It requires us to be as its possibility would make us to be.  It is neither what is, nor what is not, nor what may be.  It is what brings us to be as we respond to its possibility.  The responsibility that the possibility of God lays on us is not to make God come to be, which will never be possible in any case, but to bring ourselves to be in the ways that we can only be as we respond to the possibility at the heart of God.

Part of my fall ritual includes drying the herbs and spices that grow in my garden.  This year, for example, I have already dried wild carrot flowers and greens, lemon balm, camomile, purple clover, basil, oregano, chives, and I still have a fair amount to do, including rosemary, mint, and rosehips.  This past Saturday, as I was considering what still had to be done, I noticed the purple shiso, which grows wild in my garden and which I only just learned is edible this past summer.  I had heard that both the leaves and the seeds could be dried and kept as spices, and I was fairly confident that I could dry the leaves without much problem, I was not sure how to go about harvesting the seeds.  I had no idea when they were mature, no idea how they should be extracted from their husks, no idea whether they should be dried before or after they were extracted, no idea, in short, at all.

The internet told me nothing very useful, so I decided that some experimentation was in order.  I stripped the seed pods from a few stems and tried rubbing them between my palms to remove the husks.  This operation was somewhat less effective than I hoped.  The husks could eventually be removed, but the moisture made them cling to the seeds, and the seeds cling to each other.  I noticed, however, that the seeds from the pods at the very tip were white and soft, while those nearer the bottom were brown and harder and tasted quite strongly when bitten.  Whether or not these lower seeds were mature enough to be fertile, they were certainly mature enough for my purposes, so I cut the whole plant.  I stripped the leaves into one colander and the seed pods into another, rinsed them both, and left them to dry over night.  I then dried them as I dry everything else, turning my oven to its lowest heat, putting a large cookie pan on the lowest rack to block the direct heat from the element, placing the herbs in a second cookie sheet on a higher rack, and leaving the oven door ajar to allow the moisture to escape.

The leaves dried easily, as I expected they would.  Though they are larger than basil or mint leaves, they are of a similar thickness and texture, and they dry much the same.  The seeds also seemed to dry well, but they were still in their husks, and I was still faced with the question of whether I could extract them.  I rubbed a few between my palms again, and the husks broke up quite easily, but the seeds still clung together in their little clusters.  By rubbing more vigorously, I was able to separate the seeds, but I was left with a handful of chaff mixed with the seeds that I wanted.  I tried sifting this mixture through several sizes of colandar and sifter, but anything large enough to let the chaff through let the seeds through also.  I tried picking the seeds out of the chaf by hand, but gave this up as too tedious after a single seed.  In the end, I was reduced to putting the seeds and chaf together in a small mixing bowl and shaking it gently until the heavier seeds gathered on top of the lighter chaff.  I would then tap out the gathered seeds into a second bowl, repeating the process until I had removed as many of the seeds as my patience would allow.

There are probably more efficient ways to dry purple shiso seeds, and I would appreciate anyone who could offer advise on how to make the process simpler, but I am quite satisfied with the end product of my experiment. The seeds do seem well dried, and they have certainly retained their flavour.  Now I just need to learn how to cook with them.

We will still be holding our Dinner and a Doc screening this Saturday, October the 10th, despite the fact that it falls on Thanksgiving weekend, and we will be showing something a little different this month. We will begin with Syrinx, an Oscar nominated short animated film by Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animation pioneer. We will follow it with Ryan, an Oscar winning short animated film by Chris Landreth about the life of Ryan Larkin. We will then finish with Alter Egos, a documentary by Laurence Green about the lives of Ryan Larken and Chris Landreth and about the making of Ryan.

If you are interested in more information, you can preview the whole of Walking, or watch some of Ryan Larkins other films, Syrinx and Street Musique. You can also preview the whole of Ryan on the National Film Board of Canada’s site, as a part of its new and very welcome decision to make all of its films available to the public online.  Lastly, you can also watch a preview of Alter Egos, which begins with Syrinx and includes clips of Larkin’s other films.

Our soup for the night will be a curried squash soup, based loosely on a recipe graciously provided to me by my friend Lauren Anderson.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

It was my wife who introduced me to the genre of the food movie.  We were still in highschool, and the film she showed me was Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel.  I have now seen this film seven or eight times, and I am always moved by the final scene where the people of the village begin to recognize each other again as they eat the food Babette is serving them.  Before I had even begun to articulate the philosophical and theological importance of the table to me, I intuitively recognized something significant in this scene, and I would recommend the film without reservation to anyone who loves food and to anyone who loves a good and simple story.

Last night, my wife and I discovered a similar film in Ali Raffi’s The Fish Fall in Love.  It is set in Iran, and it relates the story of a woman who runs a restaurant in the house of her former fiance, who had disappeared many years earlier but has now returned.  Frightened that he will evict her from the house and from her means of providing for herself, she and the other women who work with her decide to cook for him as a way of convincing him to allow them to stay.  The film is beautifully simple.  The story does not try to say too much.  The acting is understated and intimate.  The music does not overwhelm, as it too often does now in Hollywood films.   The film is content, and rightly so, to be what it is.

The scenes that take place in the kitchen and around the table are accomplished beautifully.  There is a real sense of the unique combination of labour and community that characterizes the kitchen, and an attention to the interactions that take place around the table.  There are also several places where food is offered from one person to another, and these scenes are marked with a similar degree of significance.  In every case, the food takes on a symbolic role, a ritual role, becomes a carrier of meaning and value.  Because of this role, the food itself is also the subject of the film’s gaze on many occasions, as the camera follows the food from the market and the garden, to the cutting board and the simmering pot, and finally to the plate.  These images produce an almost physical pleasure in me.  They are beautiful aesthetically, and even more so, because they are also beautiful symbolically.

I am not sure how readily available the film is wherever you might happen to be, but it is well worth the effort to go and find it.

This is already my second post of the day, and there will likely be more, all food related. I normally try to spread these things around, but sometimes events impose themselves and leave me little choice. Today is such a day.

This morning, as I was preparing for our dinner tonight, something that I will likely post about later, I came across a list near the front of Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef. I was in the midst of scanning the tables of contents of several of my cookbooks, looking for ideas for colourful appetizers, which I will also likely post about later.  The list is entitled, “Suggested Basic List for Your Pantry”, and it instantly reminded me of the post that I wrote some time ago about the ingredients that are essential to my cooking. Granted, Jamie’s list is only for the pantry and does not include fresh vegetables, so it is very different from mine, but the idea is the same. These are the ingredients that he needs to have on hand, not for any recipe in particular, but just because they are the ingredients that he cannot do without.  They are the ingredients that reveal his personality as a cook.

So, I will post his list for you, and I will also highlight the ingredients on his list that I also happen to have in my own pantry at this moment, for my own entertainment if not for yours.

Suggested Basic List for Your Pantry

Mustards: Dijon, wholegrain, English
Oils: extra virgin olive, olive, sunflower
Vinegars: red wine, white wine, balsamic, rice wine
Flour: all-purpose, bread, cake, self-rising, cornmeal, durum semolina
Couscous
Baking powder, baking soda
Sugar: brown, white, confectioners’
Salt: sea, table, cooking
Dried pasta: spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle, penne, farfalle
Legumes: cranberry beans, cannellini beans, black-eyed peas, lima beans, yellow split peas, lentils, chickpeas
Canned tomatoes
Rice: basmati, Arborio, Carnaroli
Olives: black, green
Nuts: pine nuts, whole almonds, hazelnuts
Dried mushrooms: porcini
Sun-dried tomatoes
Chocolate: good-quality bittersweet
Unsweetened cocoa powder
Soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce
Anchovies in olive oil or salt
Capers: salted
Herbs and spices: Black peppercorns, dried chillies, nutmeg, cloves, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, caraway seeds

These kinds of lists interest me inordinately.

I often get requests to share recipes with people, but I can very seldom provide what people want. They expect precise ingredients and measurements, where I prefer to work in approximations. The difficulty is that the recipe book and the television cooking show have accustomed us to the idea that a dish must be reproducible time after time, that this kind of consistency is one of the signs of a good cook. Now, I should say that I do not entirely disagree with this assumption in certain situations. A professional kitchen, for example, needs to have this kind of consistency in order to be successful, and the ability to produce it is a skill that a good cook certainly requires. I would suggest, however, that most circumstances do not require a dish to be precisely the same time after time, and that a certain variety can also be a mark of a skillful cook, as a way of expressing creativity and personality.

So, though I will share the following recipe by popular demand, I am leaving it intentionally a little vague, not only because I did not actually measure anything as I was making it, but also because I hope you will find room in it to express your own culinary personality.

First, cube some potatoes, a little smaller than bite-sized, and boil them until just tender. A fork should go into them, but they should not be mushy. Drain them and run cold water over them to stop the cooking process. Reserve them for later.

Second, saute a chopped onion in butter until it sweats, and do use real butter if at all possible. Add a healthy amount of finely chopped garlic. Add some roughly cut red peppers. Add some roughly cut green, leafy vegetable: I used carrot leaves, but spinach or kale or something similar would work too. Add cubed ham, or you could use bacon as well, but make it something salty and smoked and flavourful, because boiled chicken breast is not going to cut it here. When everything is well cooked together, remove from the heat and add to the potatoes.

Third, make a bechamel sauce (melt butter; add flour and stir until it just begins to change colour; add milk, stirring constantly, until the sauce achieves the consistency that you want), but add a strong dose of mustard powder to the flour stage. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix the sauce into the potatoes.

Fourth, mix the potatoes well and put in a large shallow roasting pan. Grate a sharp cheddar cheese over the top, liberally. Cook at 350 degrees until the cheese looks good and bubbly. Eat it.

This will not win you any culinary awards, but it will make you friends and taste great and expand your waistline, all of which is more to the point.

Ivan Illich says this: “Knowledge without friendship that delights in the friend’s knowledge is deficient.”

This is a profound truth. Knowledge finds its sufficiency only when it is shared between friends. It finds its sufficiency only as the medium through which friendship is fostered and expressed, as the opportunity for friends to delight in one another. Knowledge certainly exists apart from such friendship, but it is a poor, sickly, deficient sort of knowledge, a mere pedantry, lacking in everything that makes knowledge a delight.

This kind of knowledge, and these kinds of friends, have been the great pleasures of my life. I will not try to name them all, because there have been many of them at many times and in many degrees, but those who have shared this pleasure with me will recognize what Illich is describing, and hopefully they will also accept my sincere gratitude for their friendship, for their knowledge, and for their delight. There is little that I value more.

I have written this poem for Dr. Kenneth Graham, my first university English professor and perhaps the only professor who actually taught me English Literature rather than Literary Theory or Literary Criticism.  He is now retired, but I see him at the market not infrequently, and he wrote me recently with a request that I attempt again one of the more formal sonnets that I used to write for his class.  So, though I have chosen a rhyme scheme that is, as far as I know, of my own devising, I have otherwise tried to keep the sonnet form as traditional as possible, without much enjambment and without punctuation in the lines, but with a clearly distinguished octave and sestet and with a mostly regular iambic line.  I hope he enjoys it.

The Prayers that All Things Pray

These moments drifting on the edge of day
Lose time itself and make its time delay,
Like dreams that see what only dreams can see
And let their seeing draw all dreams astray,
Or prayers that find no prayer to make them free
But pray that praying might yet come to be,
Or words that wait for words until they die
And fall unworded into memory.
Here mysteries in their mystery humbly lie,
And visions grant their vision to the eye,
And earthly things their earthly selves betray,
And suns reflecting suns wait in the sky.
Here silence says what silence comes to say,
And nothing speaks the prayers that all things pray.